Will America Break Up?

[Ryan Ruck]

What You’ll See In The Rebellion: A Nation Of Sarajevos

January 5, 2013

When I wrote What you’ll seen in the rebellion, I had no idea how widely read an article warning of the dangers of second Revolutionary War could become. It has been “shared” thousands of times in social media, and new readers and comments are pouring in constantly.

Since the time it was written, state legislators in Illinois and New York have formally pressed for crushing gun control measures that would outlaw standard-capacity magazines, all semi-automatic handguns, rifles, and pistols, and even pump shotguns. There would be no grandfathering in these proposals, and no inheritance rights. A complete confiscation of these arms, “liberty’s teeth” as other have termed them, are the goal of these totalitarian governments. Legislators in other states are plotting similar measures.

In Washington, DC, federal Democrats—goaded by figures in the poli-media calling for the murders of gun owners and politicians that would oppose their “common sense” statism—have pushed for a similar raft of legislation, supporting the criminalization and confiscation of the most common firearms in the United States and various accessories. The Vice President of the United States has signaled to the mayor of Boston (how historically apt) that the White House itself may attempt to circumvent Congress and attempt to outlaw these common firearms with an executive order.

The people have responded to these threats by not merely buying up the firearms, magazines, and ammunition that might be affected by these proposed bans as they did in 1993/94 before the Clinton-era ban was pushed through, but by purchasing nearly every firearm of military utility of the past 100+ years. Ruger 10/22s and other common .22LR rifles have doubled in price when they can be found at all. Inexpensive Mosin-Nagants, originally designed in 1891 and typically found by the dozen in your average neighborhood gun shops, are nowhere to be found, and their ammunition is gone as well. U.S. citizens are preparing for war against their government by the millions. Americans aren’t “going Galt” in response to the push by would-be elites to surging statism. We’re on the cusp of going Häyhä.

I’ve done a lot more research (and considerable praying that I’ll turn out to be wrong) in recent days, based upon both history and evolving current realities.

The situation isn’t as bad as we’ve feared it might be. It’s far, far worse.

If the statists push through with their plan, we’re possibly looking into a nation of a thousand Sarajevos and Groznys where a war will rip this nation to shreds and cause a horror from which we may never recover.

If you aren’t familiar with these analogies, allow me a moment to explain.

Once one of the most tolerant and ethnically-integrated cities in the world before the break-up of Yugoslavia, Sarajevo suffered the longest siege in modern military history, lasting 3 years, 10 months, 3 weeks and 3 days. The long and short of it is that the Serbs attacked Sarajevo with modern military weapons that included artillery, anti-aircraft guns, tanks, mortars, rockets, and the other nasty toys of a modern military in the possession of their 18,000 man army. Opposing them were roughly 70,000 poorly-armed Bosnian soldiers and militiamen armed with a hodgepodge of small arms including World War-era rifles, AK-47s, and hunting and formal target rifles.

The Siege of Sarajevo was a conflict of a heavily-armed but numerically inferior Serbian force against a lightly-armed but numerically superior Bosnian force. It became a sniper’s war, where innocent civilians bore the brunt of the brutality, terrorism, starvation, and death.

As noted in John West’s Fry The Brain: The Art of Urban Sniping and its Role in Modern Guerrilla Warfare, while the Serbians inflicted a significant number of casualties with a constant shelling of the city, a concerted effort was made by both sides to use relatively untrained snipers to shape the urban battlefield. Uniformed Serbian snipers didn’t just shoot Bosnian defenders of the city, but made a concerted effort to murder every man, woman and child in the city that crossed their path in an effort to terrorize Sarajevans into surrender. The Bosnians sniped back in a war that had former neighbors and friends killing one another.

Grozny was subjected to three much shorter, arguably more brutal battles, in 1994-95, in 1996, and again in 1999-2000, that saw brutal fighting and war crimes committed by both sides.

There is nothing so deadly and desperate as cornered tyrants, as the battered people of Syria would tell you right now if they weren’t trapped between Bashir Assad’s government forces and the al Qaeda-aligned militants supplied by Barack Obama’s Administration and the late ambassador Chris Stevens.

If you think that couldn’t or wouldn’t happen here, I direct you to the complaints department led by the ghost of Vickie Weaver and the children that burned to death in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco under the last Democrat President, who was far less radical and divisive that the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A government that can find no fault in the deaths of Jose Guerena or hundreds of Mexicans and several federal agents in Operation Fast and Furious has proven it has no regard for human life in the pursuit of radical political philosophies. They will kill you if they think they can get away with it, and they will not blink.

A nation with just 800,000 law enforcement officers and 3 million active and reserve military personal cannot easily defeat and enslave a free people armed with 300 million firearms, even if large numbers of the police and military didn’t walk away or switch sides to follow their oath to the Constitution instead of any given leader, as many assuredly will.

Retribution against those who would be responsible for such a conflict by attempting to undermine the Constitution is assured. They will face extra-judicial justice walking across the street with their families, or in a formal war crimes trial. Either way, their attempt at tyranny ends in death or prison… hardly what these would-be elites imagined for themselves as they planned to loot the remains of a once-powerful economic engine.

I have two words of advice for those that imagine they can subjugate the arsenal of freedom with the stoke of an autopen.

Tread carefully.

[Ryan Ruck]

Kentucky Sheriff To Defy Any Obama Gun Grab

January 10, 2013

Jackson County Sheriff Denny Peyman has some advice for federal officials attempting to confiscate legal guns held by citizens in his jurisdiction: “go ahead, make my day.”

Sheriff Peyman says he is very concerned about proposed federal legislation that could result in massive gun ownership bans and orders of confiscation.
“My office will not comply with any federal action which violates the United States Constitution or the Kentucky Constitution which I swore to uphold,” Peyman said. “Let them pull that stuff in other places if they want, but not in Jackson County, Kentucky.”

Peyman hopes his strong stand in support of the Second Amendment encourages law enforcement officers around Kentucky and elsewhere to reassure citizens of their protection from overzealous federal action on gun control.

“Just a few of us have to be willing to stand up to political opposition putting our people at risk,” Peyman said. “The other side will back down.”

[Ryan Ruck]

Dangerous Old Men

January 13, 2013

Everybody knows a Walt Kowalski. He is the grizzled Korean War veteran Clint Eastwood played in the movie Gran Torino. A man who spends his days sitting on the porch, keeping his house and yard immaculate, satisfied to drink his cheap beer while watching his neighborhood and country go to hell around him. He is an anachronism, a dinosaur -- part of the old America where you worked hard, took pride in your work and where you lived, and fought for your country and what it stood for when called upon. Armed with his M1 Garand rifle and 1911 .45 pistol he brought back from the war, he put new meaning in "Get off my lawn."

(Warning: spoilers follow.)

As anyone who has seen the movie knows, Kowalski is recently widowed and terminally ill. He does not have much to live for until he befriends his young Hmong neighbors. After teaching them what honor and self-reliance are, he eventually gives his life for them.

Fewer have heard of Ben Mitchell, who features in the book Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Mitchell is a former Vietnam-era Green Beret operative who paralyzes Washington, D.C. by crippling the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. (Again, spoilers follow.) Though not terminally ill -- yet -- Mitchell does not see much of a future ahead of him and is angered about his friend being set up by the federal government during an unconstitutional gun-grab passed in the heat of the moment by legislators after a tragedy. Before losing his life, however, he manages to take out most of the federal law enforcement team sent against him.

Both of these men are fictional characters, but is it just fantasy? Let us look back at Samuel Whittemore. Samuel was an old man -- seventy-eight years old, to be exact -- on April 19, 1775. After many years of service bearing arms for the British Crown, surely he was too old to fight, and his wife even told him so. On that fateful morning, though, he gathered up his musket, two pistols, and a cavalry saber that he acquired from a French officer who "died suddenly" and took his place to meet the British Regulars in Menotomy. When it was over, the British thought they were fired upon by a whole company and sent the same to subdue him. After dispatching some British Regulars by emptying his musket and pistols and drawing his sword, he had half his face shot off and was bayoneted thirteen times and left for dead. Samuel did indeed die -- ten years later.

There is also David Lamson, a mulatto voted by his peers to take charge of a group of gray-haired old men. On that same morning, they surprised one of General Percy's supply columns, asking them to surrender. Seeing just a few old men, the British refused, leading to Lamson's men shooting the officer, the sergeant, and the horses in their traces. The remaining grenadiers fled, finally surrendering to old Mother Batherick after throwing their arms away. Hearing about this, a British paper printed, "If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers, how many soldiers will it require to conquer America?"

There are over twenty-five million veterans in the United States -- among them many Walt Kowalskis -- and most of them are gun owners. Some of them remember the horrors of the concentration camps and of communism. Others are from the Vietnam era and remember what awaited them when they came home. They see John Kerry, the same man who threw his medals over the White House fence and was photographed with Jane Fonda and the North Vietnamese, nominated as secretary of state. They remember. ObamaCare, where you get painkillers instead of treatment because you are old? They have heard this. They have been spat at and vilified before, and now, with time running out for them, and the America that they knew seemingly fading away, many will say, "At one time, I was asked to write a check to my country for up to and including my life. Do I need to do it again?"

You would be surprised at what you can overhear at the VFW, or even the "early bird dinner," for that matter. Thanks to the "War on Terror," there are also many younger combat veterans, many from a lineage of soldiers. They know that old people can be stubborn, and "the government threw grandpa in jail because he didn't turn in his guns" will not go over well. As an older friend of mine whom I see at Denny's on occasion tells me, "I'm just sayin'."

[Ryan Ruck]

In relation to the "What You'll See In The Rebellion" piece I posted...

Police Departments Facing Ammo Shortage Nationwide

The spike in civilians buying guns and ammo has departments scrambling for a solution to the shortage

January 11, 2013

Police departments nationwide are facing ammunition shortages and backorders with unknown delivery dates.

"It's never easy to get ammo, but since the tragedy in Connecticut, it's become even more difficult," Sgt. Chris Forrester of the Greer Police Department in South Carolina told WSPA -7.

The shortage is making Forrester rethink their qualifications and training for dozens of officers within the department.

"We’re having to be more conservative," he said.

Tens of thousands of rounds have been backordered for departments in Georgia as well, according to WSB-TV.

"It affects our ability to be prepared,” said Police Chief Terry Sult of the Sandy Springs Police Department.

"It affects the potential safety of the officers, because they're not as proficient as they should be."

WSB-TV reports that the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office of Georgia was forced to reschedule training exercises as they scramble to restock ammunition.

An ammo supplier for Georgia police departments, Jay Wallace, said the shortage is a result of the huge spike in ammo and gun sales to civilians in recent weeks.

“There’s been more demand for ammunition than there’s ever been," Wallace said.

Sult stated that they are prepared to handle short-term shortages, but not long-term.

"We're going be starting to get very concerned at the six-month level if that's all we have in stock, because then we have to start planning and rationing," he said.

[Ryan Ruck]

I can't remember if this was posted already...

NY Mayor Warns Of "Waco-Style Standoff" Over Gun Control Laws

January 17, 2013

"Most people are law-abiding citizens and may go ahead and sell those or turn those over, but you're going to have a fraction of people that are going to take a stand, and I can just predict a Waco-style standoff in some rural area and it's not going to end well," Gloversville, New York Mayor Dayton King (I) said about New York state's new gun control laws that Gov. Cuomo recently signed into law. (source: WXXA-TV)

Video at the link.

[Ryan Ruck]

Obama Playing Chicken with American Men

January 18, 2013

The Obama administration's current warpath against so-called "gun violence" -- which is Newspeak for non-violence committed by non-criminals with their non-illegal private property -- is a brazen challenge to America's manhood. The progressives have apparently decided that this is the moment when they can play their ultimate authoritarian hand, and let the chips fall where they may. They believe, in other words, that this is the moment when they may be able to break America at last, one way or another.

Through Obama's forceful, smug insistence on taking action in defiance of Congress, along with the aggressive urging to do so from his sycophants in the progressive elite -- from the vice president and the senate majority leader on down -- the leftists are engaging in a game of chicken with the American spirit that is disturbing both for its immediate intentions and for its revelation of their thought process and game plan.

In light of the well-known fact that their proposals and trial balloons will be judged by millions of Americans to be an outright violation of constitutionally protected liberties -- and liberties of the most emotionally trenchant nature, namely those related to the very foundations of limited government -- the progressives' deliberate projection of haste and intransigence on gun control must not merely be taken at face value, and judged on its "merits." It must also be interpreted -- in other words, one must ask precisely what they are hoping to achieve by attacking the most deeply held principles of so many Americans in such a heavy-handed fashion.

It seems to me that there are two plausible interpretations of their open chastisement of "all this debate" over Second Amendment concerns, i.e., their boisterous spitting upon the U.S. Constitution.

The first option is that they believe the citizenry of the once-freest nation on earth will ultimately be first to flinch in this game of chicken, and back down. This is the simplest explanation. Having tested the waters on so many fronts, and prepared the population with generations of propaganda about the evils of guns (and so little clarity about the meaning of limited government) from the educational establishment and the media, the left may have determined that, for all the tough talk, American gun owners will not, in the end, have the nerve to stand firm against a federal order to produce their weapons for registration, to submit their guns and themselves to a federal tracking system, or even, eventually, to relinquish legally-purchased property that has newly been ruled illegal.

The second possibility is that they know the public has not been sufficiently softened up to begin the "peaceful" disarming of America suggested by option one, and are therefore hoping to precipitate the kind of "serious crisis" the Obama administration has vowed never to let go to waste. This second possibility is appearing more likely to be the administration's real intention each day.

Consider the extent to which the federal government has gone, during the past four years, to brand conservatives, Christians, defenders of the Constitution, gun owners, and in general believers in property rights, as not merely racist and stupid (the usual mantra), but rather as angry, "bitter," and positively unhinged. These are not mere insinuations; government representatives, spokesmen, and apologists have been saying such things with increasing directness and frequency since 2008. A "study" funded by DHS expressly lists people who are "reverent of individual liberty" or "suspicious of centralized federal authority," among the common potential terror threats (p. 9). Obama himself, during his 2008 campaign, suggested in no uncertain terms that "clinging" to a Bible and/or a gun -- i.e., believing in God or the right to bear arms -- is a clear symptom of serious psychological problems, and equivalent to racism. And of course almost every mass killing over the past couple of years has been blamed on the Tea Party by someone in the media (see here) -- until, inevitably, the facts prove otherwise -- thereby creating the general impression that the Tea Party is a natural repository of "people on the edge," regardless of whether they turn out to have committed any crimes.

The Obama team knows full well that its words and actions are causing fear, anger, and heightened vigilance among conservatives. The spikes in gun sales, NRA memberships, and harsh anti-government talk all over the internet are an unmistakable sign of a population preparing for -- for something ugly. And yet they push forward, threatening specific action and escalating the anti-gun rhetoric with each passing day.

And the prodding is clever. Prior to this direct assault on the right to bear arms, the single Obama program most hated by constitutionalists was the Affordable Care Act. Now, ingeniously, the left has found a way to bring these two great affronts to individual liberty together under one umbrella. A major focus of Obama's executive actions on gun violence is the promotion of ObamaCare's mental health provisions as a suitable mechanism for dealing with preemptive psychiatry, i.e., drugging wayward children, labeling people in their federal government records as mentally ill, and using doctors as informants to track guns in private homes.

In sum, they could not be stoking pre-revolutionary fever any more effectively among that minority of America's citizenry that still stands by the nation as an idea, rather than merely as a piece of geography, if they had planned to stoke it. The only question remaining, it seems, is where all of this will lead.

Consider the following possibility -- common sense dictates that the progressives have already considered it. Someday, federal officers are going to visit the home of a man who owns a so-called "assault-style weapon." He has a family and a job. He pays his taxes. He has no criminal record. Not even a parking ticket. He purchased his gun legally. He uses it for target shooting. He thinks of it as an investment in the protection of his family and his nation, and his personal stand for constitutional liberty.

The federal officers are going to tell him that his weapon has been banned, that the deadline has passed for him to turn it in at the local police station, and that he must turn it over immediately. He is going to refuse, on the reasonable principle that a man is not obliged to obey a law that fundamentally violates his constitutionally protected rights. The officers, who will have been trained to regard such "resisters" as hostile and as mentally unstable, will call in for back-up and then give this law-abiding patriot an ultimatum: produce your banned weapon peacefully at once, or be taken into custody on charges of illegal possession of a firearm, and possibly subjected to psychiatric assessment.

If this man gives in and hands the officers his weapon, he will feel for the rest of his life that he has been broken -- that when push came to shove, he did not have the courage to stand up for his children's future. This, in short, is how the federal officials who sent the officers to his door want him to feel, and how they want everyone to feel: weak, ineffectual, emasculated, and submissive. It is how they want you to feel when federal agents molest your wife at the airport, and photograph your pubescent daughter in a naked scanner. It is how they want you to feel about your "private" health records being permanently on file with a half dozen federal agencies, to be opened at their discretion. It is how they want you to feel about the thousand bank-breaking regulations you are obliged to comb through and comply with in the names of "sustainability," "social justice," "anti-discrimination," and a dozen other fronts in the war on self-governance.

These indignities are meant to ease you through the process of acceptance, of acquiescence, of relinquishing all pretences of inviolable principle in the name of getting along.

This scenario -- this Conrad-style moment of reckoning for a man, before himself, his wife, and his children -- will in fact likely be played out in many variations. Those officers might be coming for high-capacity magazines, for guns reported by a child's playmate as unsafely stored, guns reported as unregistered, guns owned by people with relatives who have been diagnosed as "depressed" by a doctor, and so on. Most of the property owners in question will likely give in to the government's demands, and many of them will do so willingly, believing it their duty to obey the law above all else.

Those who do not comply, on the other hand, will be a test case, at the very least. When the government is challenging a proud man's dignity, his natural rights, and his courage in the face of a tyrannical demand, they are daring him to become a martyr to his cause. (See Mark Alexander's declaration at The Patriot Post.) In the authoritarian's mind, government wins either way. If the man gives in, subservience is reinforced. If he does not, then he can be made an example of, to serve as a stern warning to others.

This is not a moment to be taken lightly. Nor is it one to be welcomed with excessive "bring it on" bravado. America, which is emulating the rest of the West's decline, but at double-speed in these final stages, has reached the saddest impasse. Unlike other nations, which have passively sold off their freedom for the false security of a smiling, cradle to grave despotism, America has seen it coming, has resisted it with force, and is now about to be dragged off the cliff kicking and screaming.

The challenge facing the men of America -- not the mere "males," but the men -- is becoming clearer, starker, and more essential every day. That minority of us in the rest of the world who still care about freedom and modern civilization can only watch, with concern, sadness and hope, as the U.S. federal government, having reached its moment of final metamorphosis -- its "fundamental transformation" -- stares its patriotic citizens in the eye and says, "I dare you."

From the land of rebellious individualism of intellect - the land of Madison, Jefferson, Emerson and Melville; to the land of an almost careless abandonment to joy -- the land of Astaire, Ellington, Gershwin and Singin' In the Rain; to the brink of sorrow and downtroddenness, in such a short time, historically speaking. Surely it's too soon for this glorious run to end.

[American Patriot]

I think I posted most of those (except the "Old Men" one. I had read it but was busy and didn't have time to post).

We are looking at a "history node". The Gov is pushing for gun control and eventual bans. The people are pushing back. In my mind a "node" is a tipping point in history where SOMETHING has to give and it corrects the path history (and the future) is taking.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor was one. 9-11 was another. Archduke Ferdinand was another. Concord and Lexington was another. Each time tyranny has pushed - the people pushed back. Each time, tyranny eventually lost.

Obama spent his speech on useless "collectivism" - and if people have not yet grasped that we were right all along, he's a Marxist then they aren't going to get it. The time is now to do something about this. What it is, I just don't know and the answers I have aren't going to be printed or posted under MY name. Fermentation eventually reaches a massive, roiling and boiling point when making beer. If you don't have a way to relieve the pressure the container would explode. The final outcome of making beer is... well beer.

The final outcome of "fermenting revolution" (not fomenting) is an explosion which results in the destruction of the existing tyrannical structure.

There are men and women in this country that are ready to go to war. The Administration doesn't understand this at all. They are starting to get it, and starting to realize the danger - but they are keeping things bottled by ignoring the gun owners and the rights of the Second Amendment. It's going to blow up in their faces.

(By the way, one of the funny things about that "movie" - taking down the Wilson Bridge, also made an appearance in another book, I'm sure you remember which one Ryan, and those too were a bunch of "old men").

[American Patriot]

[American Patriot]

THE GHOST FROM VALLEY FORGE (author unknown)

I had a dream the other night I didn't understand,
A figure walking through the mist, with flintlock in his hand.
His clothes were torn and dirty, as he stood there by my bed,
He took off his three-cornered hat, and speaking low he said:

We fought a revolution to secure our liberty,
We wrote the Constitution, as a shield from tyranny.
For future generations, this legacy we gave,
In this, the land of the free and home of the brave.

The freedom we secured for you, we hoped you'd always keep,
But tyrants labored endlessly while your parents were asleep.
Your freedom gone - your courage lost - you're no more than a slave,
In this, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

You buy permits to travel, and permits to own a gun,
Permits to start a business, or to build a place for one.
On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent,
Although you have no voice in choosing how the money's spent.

Your children must attend a school that doesn't educate,
Your moral values can't be taught, according to the state.
You read about the current "news" in a very biased press,
You pay a tax you do not owe, to please the IRS.

Your money is no longer made of silver or of gold,
You trade your wealth for paper, so life can be controlled.
You pay for crimes that make our Nation turn from God to shame,
You've taken Satin's number, as you've traded in your name.

You've given government control to those who do you harm,
So they can padlock churches, and steal the family farm.
And keep our country deep in debt, put men of God in jail,
Harass your fellow countryman while corrupted courts prevail.

Your public servants don't uphold the solemn oath they're sworn,
Your daughters visit doctors so children won't be born.
Your leaders ship artillery and guns to foreign shores,
And send your sons to slaughter, fighting other people's wars.

Can you regain your Freedom for which we fought and died?
Or don't you have the courage, or the faith to stand with pride?
Are there no more values for which you'll fight to save?
Or do you wish your children live in fear and be a slave?

Sons of the Republic, arise and take a stand!
Defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land!
Preserve our Republic, and each God-given right!
And pray to God to keep the torch of freedom burning bright!

As I awoke he vanished, in the mist from whence he came,
His words were true, we are not free, and we have ourselves to blame.
For even now as tyrants trample each God-given right,
We only watch and tremble -- too afraid to stand and fight.

If he stood by your bedside in a dream while you're asleep,
And wonder what remains of your right he fought to keep.
What would be your answer if he called out from the grave?
Is this still the land of the free and home of the brave?

[American Patriot]

There are only two choices Henry Bowman or John Galt.

One is surgical strikes and one is letting the system collapse. We will have one or the other.

[Malsua]

There's a third choice. Slouch into chains which ultimately fall off due to neglect of the failed system.

[Phil Fiord]

Regarding the ammo shortage. The government bought massive stocks of ammo and certainly arms. This was a drain on supplies of certain ammo types. In accordance with the possibility this was a created situation of an attempt to take the guns, this buy was to put a draw on ammo and embolden federal forces with more firepower. Then the Newtown shootings. Ammo was low in stock already and the threat to arms pushed many to stock up and now we have little left for anyone to buy. At least for now.

My sincere hope is the free citizens who bought have plenty to use if need be. I am NOT ever going to suggest an attack, but do advocate for a defense as we do anyway.

[vector7]

Oklahoma Threatens Five Years Imprisonment for Federal Gun Grabbers



by AWR Hawkins 17 Jan 2013 post a comment

The "Oklahoma 2nd Amendment Preservation Act" is now working its way through the Oklahoma legislature.

Introduced by state senator Nathan Dahm, this legislation puts Oklahoma shoulder-to-shoulder with Wyoming and Texas by putting federal gun-grabbers in check.

The language of the legislation is clear: "Federal acts, laws, orders, rules, regulations, bans or registration requirements regarding firearms constitute an infringement on the individual right [to keep and bear arms] in the Constitution of the United States...and are hereby declared to be invalid in the State of Oklahoma."

The legislation mentions the "intent" of America's "Founders" and the Constitution's "ratifiers," and sets forth the punishment for trying to enforce new gun control measures:

Any official, agent, or employee of the United States government or any employee of a corporation providing services to the United States government that enforces or attempts to enforce an act, order, law, statute, rule or regulation of the government of the United States in violation of this act shall be guilty of a felony and upon conviction...shall be punished by imprisonment in the custody of the Department of Corrections not to exceed five (5) years.

After reading this legislation, only one word comes to mind--FREEDOM.

[American Patriot]

America WILL break up. I've come to that conclusion:

Monday, January 21, 2013

Dear Cop

The battlespace is starting to firm up. Yes, I hear the law enforcement personnel who say that they might be 10% of their comrades who will stand. I hear Oathkeepers staying true to their sentiments about the Assault Weapons Ban. Maybe 10% of the Oathkeepers will keep their oath. There are two things that need to happen: 1) Good Cops Need To Declare Themselves Now, as a recent post suggested; 2) we need to start forming connections to each other, the gun community and those willing to stand for their oaths and defend them.

I know law enforcement is used to standing alone, relying on brothers in arms for their defense and the defense of the laws. Forget it, that day is over. Today, right now, there are only two different individuals in the nation: those who will support the Constitution and those who will try to destroy it. Pick a side already and start forming up with those in the militia, those in the gun community who will be reliable to you when you have to face the other 90% of your precinct.

Here is the other side to that, so be ready: we intend to restore the entire Constitution, which is to say that all of those little caveats that let cops violate the other amendments to the United States Constitution have to go along with all laws associated with restricting gun use. I know that sounds radical, but hear me out.

They took domestic violence and used it to restrict our rights to own weapons; they took prohibition, an amendment so stupid it could not stand the test of a few years before being repealed, to restrict weapons; I know you want to believe there is a law that will stop the murdering, but there is none. Murderers will use hammers, drugs, plastic bags and garrotes to get what they want. The only protection from murderers are weapons used to put them in the ground before they can do the damage they foresee.

As police, you know all the ways one person can kill another. The restriction of weapons does not stop murder. You, the law enforcement officer, comes into the picture after there is a cold, dead person lying on the floor that you could not protect. That is a bit too late for me, sorry.

I heartily support the Sheriff's Association in Utah. It is time to get serious, to see through the media hype about destroying the Second Amendment to somehow protect people. Anyone with half a brain can see who Barack Obama is, all they have to do is look at a picture of Joeseph Stalin.

The problem is, law enforcement can no longer just count on law enforcement to protect them and their children. They are going to have to broaden their view. The Patriot Community will protect you if you let us, if you take your hackles down and start looking at people who carry weapons on their shoulders as bad, dangerous things and start looking at them as you would have them look at you, as defenders of your rights, as defenders of your person. Reveal yourself to us, accept us and we will wade through the fires of hell for you.

Despite rhetoric, the Patriot Community wants nothing more than to bond with "real" law enforcement, who defend and protect us against violations of the Constitution and are willing and able to stand with them when the chips are down.

Here are a few numbers for those in law enforcement to consider: 1) depending on the source, there are roughly a million law enforcement personnel in the nation; 2) there are over 60 million deer hunters alone, not counting the strong Second Amendment advocates who do nothing other than own weapons, respect their use and rely on them to protect their families. My suggestion is that you should start looking around. These are serious times. They are dangerous times. You do not want to put yourself in cahoots with those willing to enslave the people and destroy the Constitution knowing that while you feel invincible now, the truth is you are painting a target on your chest and some of these boys have spectacular optics.

The last part of that paragraph was not a threat it was a threat assessment. Consider it. Have you ever been sent on a call to a dangerous part of town and just had that gnawing in the back of your mind that it might be a set up? Get on the wrong side of this and you might have to worry about that in the nice neighborhoods.

I know these sound like threats. I apologize for that, I am trying to make you see where your loyalties always should have remained: with the people, the law-abiders, the do-gooders who believe in America and believe in it so stridently that the dynamics I have described are in play.

We want you with us, but only if you understand that the games are over. The games with the Constitution which you have played in order to get promoted, to support your government employers and make everyone happy cannot continue. That sort of thinking is exactly why we are in this situation. If you had ever stood up for us against your bosses, we would not need to have this conflict at all. Had you stood strong for the Second Amendment and refused to enforce the stupid laws of government, we would not be here.

There is a greater obligation here, more than to your job, or your pride, but to your families, because if you get this wrong any good you might want to do later will get you killed outright, like some low-level mobster who steps out of line. You might be interrogated later why you have cooperated with the domestic terrorists. The trouble is, there is a Rubicon to be crossed here. You need to know it and do the right thing, not because of some previous perceived threat, but because the nation is counting on you more than any other time in history. You, like the firefighters during 9/11, are the heroes we need to maintain this nation as a guiding light of freedom shining out to the world to emulate. If you are past this sort of persuasion, you are probably one of the enemy.

Take heart, your brethren are falling into line. They understand the consequences of their abdication of responsibility in the past. It is time to own up. The nation relies on your response to this crisis of rights. You need to be the heroes you have always been considered.

I will make one serious request. If there is only one law being violated and that law is possession of a firearm, I don't care who owns it, walk away. That is the only way to validate your oath. Obviously, if a secondary crime has been threatened, or committed, it should be heartily prosecuted. We are not pro-criminal, we are pro law enforcement, but if you read the Constitution, it doesn't make exceptions for the right which "shall not be infringed."

[American Patriot]

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Put Not Your Trust In Federalized Sheriffs

He sold his soul at a steep discount: Richard Rich (l.) displays the badge he earned through collaboration.

“You look depressed.”


“I was lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence.”


“You lost that some time ago. If you've only just noticed, it can't have been very important to you.”


Exchange between Thomas Cromwell -- the Machiavellian Lord Chancellor of England -- and Richard Rich, an ambitious functionary who had sold his soul in a buyer’s market, from A Man for All Seasons.




“I will not enforce an unconstitutional law against any citizen of Smith County,” insisted Sheriff Larry Smith. The sheriff wants his constituents to believe that he would refuse to participate in a federally mandated gun grab, or permit one to be carried out by federal officials within his jurisdiction. Yet ten days before Smith offered that assurance, his office had taken part in an early-morning SWAT rampage throughout East Texas in which 73 warrants were served as part of the federal government’s patently unconstitutional war on drugs.

During a December 2011 campaign debate, Smith said that he wanted to “invest more resources” – that is, redirect wealth plundered from the productive – into a “Drug Task Force,” and insisted that under his administration the Sheriff’s Office would embrace a “Task Force mentality” in dealing with law enforcement issues.


The problem with the mindset Sheriff Smith was extoling should become obvious once it’s understood that the German term for “task force” is einsatzgruppe. By their actions many multi-jurisdictional task forces in contemporary America are increasingly faithful to their historic pedigree.


Smith’s devotion to narcotics task forces might be the residue of his early law enforcement career, which included two years as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration – an agency that could be considered the mentally deficient stepchild of the CIA, which is the world’s largest narcotics syndicate.

Twenty years ago, an ATF einsatzgruppe launched a murderous raid against an isolated religious group at Mt. Carmel outside Waco. The warrant they were enforcing was clotted with falsehoods. The investigation that produced it was haphazard. Its target, Vernon Howell -- aka David Koresh -- was suspected of trivial violations of federal firearms regulations, and had indicated his eagerness to cooperate with ATF investigators to clear the record.


If an arrest were to be carried out – and one was neither necessary, nor justified – it could have been performed during one of Koresh’s frequent solitary jogging expeditions, or one of his routine visits to town. Instead, the ATF – seeking a dramatic, high-profile enforcement action to generate headlines for the scandal-plagued agency – staged a paramilitary assault on the religious sanctuary. They did so even though the raiders had lost the element of surprise, and when they arrived at Mt. Carmel they opened fire on the building despite the fact that an unarmed Koresh had confronted the stormtroopers with his hands up, pleading for them not to shoot.


Four ATF agents were killed during that Sunday morning raid. Their deaths were utterly unnecessary, and entirely well-deserved: They were attempting to murder innocent people, and the would-be victims acted within their rights in using deadly force to defend their homes against that assault. The criminal clique that had sent the ATF to attack the Davidians sent a larger contingent to lay siege to their residence, and eventually arranged for the holocaust that annihilated 76 people, including seventeen small children.

Like most gun owners in Eastern Texas, Smith can remember where he was the morning of April 19, 1993, when the Mt. Carmel refuge went up in flames. He was on the scene as an agent of the ATF, which he had joined in 1989. Smith believes that the initial ATF raid on the Davidians was justified, and that the entire operation was at least a partial success. It’s doubtful that his assessment is shared by many gun owners in his jurisdiction.


Larry Smith is among dozens of sheriffs who have gone on record in opposition to the Obama administration’s impending firearms restrictions. All of them have promised to intervene to protect their counties from federal tyranny. And all of them are active collaborators in the same.

Kieran Donahue was sworn in as the new Sheriff of Canyon County, Idaho on January 14. Three days later he joined the ranks of “refusenik sheriffs” by promising not to implement any federal gun policy at odds with his responsibility to “uphold the Constitution.”


Unfortunately, that resolute statement of principled defiance was fatally undermined when Donahue – in the same press conference -- expressed his willingness to continue his office’s collaboration in the federal “war on drugs” and displayed his indecent eagerness to accept new federal subsidies to deploy deputies to guard public schools as soon as the funds are available.


Wendy Olson, the official assigned by the regime to act as the federal regime’s legal sub-commissarina for Idaho, has said that her office will fully comply with new federal firearms mandates. She pointedly noted that the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office – like most others in the country – has officers who are cross-deputized to serve on federal einsatzgruppen. During last year’s campaign the future sheriff proudly boasted of his work as an “undercover officer” with the FBI-supervised METRO Violent Crime and Gang Task Force.


“In these changing and difficult economic times it is a great benefit to have all law enforcement agencies working together in order to share costs and resources,” insisted Donahue. Those words will almost certainly come back to haunt Canyon County gun owners when – not “if” – the Feds make it clear that they are willing to “share resources” only with sheriff’s offices who are on board with the gun grab.

Donahue insisted on playing coy about the fact that he’s for sale. Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims was shameless. She told the local ABC affiliate that while she will not enforce unconstitutional gun laws, she also “backs the added funding for local law enforcement, especially in schools.”

Her office has a huge budget, a small but significant portion of which is derived from proceeds seized through a federally supervised “asset forfeiture” program.


In 2009, Mims was the “local” face that was pasted onto the Obama administration’s “Operation Save Our Sierra” marijuana crack-down, which was personally supervised by federal Drug War Commissar Gil Kerlikowske. This campaign involved 300 personnel from local, state, and federal agencies – including military pilots that flew Black Hawk helicopters over targeted areas. The manpower and hardware were deployed in a mission best described as militarized horticulture. It’s quite easy to see how the personnel and assets used against “illegal” plants could be employed to confiscate “illegal” firearms in the future.

Sheriff Mims heroically subdues a violent plant.

A few years ago, when Mims and her department faced a $4 million budget deficit, the Fresno County commission had to scrounge up $10.6 million in plundered funds to prevent layoffs in the Sheriff’s Office. That money most likely won’t be available next time Sheriff Mims wants to avoid handing pink slips to her deputies. It’s quite easy to imagine a scenario in which her federal supervisors will introduce her to a new variety of alchemy -- converting confiscated “illegal” firearms into federal subsidies.


Four sheriffs in Oregon have announced their opposition to the renewed campaign to disarm citizens. Among them is Sheriff Brian Wolfe of Malheur County (who, in the interests of full disclosure, is a childhood friend). In a letter to Vice President Biden, Sheriff Wolfe declared: “I believe that the Constitution stands above all laws and executive orders of this Country. I want to be very clear that no one employed on our team at the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office will enforce or support any laws or executive orders that are not consistent with the Constitution of this great land.”

If only those inspiring words were consonant with Sheriff Wolfe’s actions. Like every other sheriff in the country, Brian Wolfe violates the Constitution on a routine basis.


Last August, the Malheur County Sheriff’s Department casually announced that it had found several small marijuana gardens during a two-week aerial surveillance operation conducted with the help of the National Guard.

Acting as the department’s official stenographer, the Argus Observer newspaper reported that Sheriff Brian Wolfe will now “contact property owners and acquire search warrants if needed.” Warrants would not be necessary, Wolfe observed, if the property owners consented to the searches. The Sheriff pointed out that the plants may be part of legal medicinal marijuana operations, or could have been planted without the owner’s knowledge or consent.

At this point an actual journalist would have asked Wolfe why his office was conducting warrantless aerial searches of private property without probable cause. After all, the Sheriff has admitted that none of the property owners was a criminal suspect.

The Malheur County Sheriff’s Department spends part of each summer arresting marijuana plants – that is, dispatching its SWAT team to barren locations in rural Oregon to clear out patches of marijuana.

Sheriff Wolfe insists this is necessary to “protect the public,” which is more acutely threatened by the unconstitutional, paramilitary operations of his own department. Wolfe’s department spends a great deal of time seizing contraband and prosecuting people who possess it. That experience will prove quite useful when – once again, not “if” – the Feds decide to treat legally owned firearms as illicit contraband.

There isn’t a single county sheriff’s office in the country that hasn’t compromised itself by accepting federal funds, and collaborating in unconstitutional federal enforcement operations. They’ve long since lost their innocence, but are pretending that they’ve just noticed that fact.

Nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizes the Feds to prohibit the consumption of narcotics or any other substance. Indeed, last time the Feds undertook a campaign of national prohibition, they had to change the Constitution in order to do so. Unless they’re investigating charges of treason or counterfeiting, sheriffs should not collaborate with the Feds – and in such circumstances the Feds themselves should be treated as the primary suspects.

If you take the nickel, you take the noose. If a sheriff’s office receives so much as a farthing of federal funding, it will be subject to federal mandates. That principle was underscored about seven years ago in the case of Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old video blogger imprisoned for refusing to turn over a portion of footage he shot of tumultuous street protests during the G-8 summit in San Francisco.

The Feds claim that Wolf, who spent two-thirds of a year in prison on civil contempt charges, possessed footage of a police car being set on fire. Wolf maintained that he didn’t have the material the Feds were after, and that under California's very liberal journalist shield law, he wasn’t required to turn over his confidential, unpublished material. A Federal District Court Judge ignored Wolf's argument and incarcerated him in a detention center in Dublin, California for contempt.

The alleged assault on a San Francisco police car would be a municipal matter, and the California shield law is obviously a question of state law. Why was this dealt with in a federal court?

As Time magazine pointed out: "The Feds say they have jurisdiction over the case because the police car is partly U.S. government property since the SFPD receives federal anti-terrorism money."

Note well that the Feds didn’t claim that the regime paid for the specific cars that were reportedly destroyed, only that the police department had been subsumed into the federal law enforcement apparatus because it had received some quantity of Homeland Security funding.

What this means, in principle, is that any police agency that receives a dime of federal Homeland Security money is effectively an appendage of the Department of Homeland Security (or, to use the appropriate German expression, the Heimatsicherheitsdienst).

This is obviously true of municipal police departments, which are innately illegitimate paramilitary bodies in no way accountable to the public they supposedly serve. We’re invited to believe that local elected sheriffs are different – at least where the incipient gun grab is concerned.

The ranks of the refuseniks will continue to expand, and they will feed gun owners a steady diet of bold talk about their willingness to interpose on behalf of their constituents if the Feds come for their guns. Some of them may be sincerely committed to do so. But until they stop actively collaborating in existing federal abuses, why should we assume they would be willing to take the side of the public against the Feds when the Regime decides to come for our guns?

(My thanks to reader Chris Sullivan, who caught the original error in the epigram at the beginning of this essay.)

By way of illustration...

... we see the following act of felonious assault and kidnapping by Citrus County, Florida Deputy Sheriff Andy Cox, who threatens to murder innocent, law-abiding gun owner. It took less than two seconds for this this cretinous, foul-mouthed tax-feeder to drop the pose of superficial geniality. His first instinct, on learning that this harmless man was armed, was to threaten to murder him, because he had been indoctrinated in the belief that Mundanes simply cannot be permitted to bear arms.

When assessing the credibility of "constitutional sheriffs" as protectors of the right to bear arms, bear in mind that sheriffs are politicians and administrators; the patrol officers in their departments are people like Andy Cox.

Dear friends: I'm often asked, "Are you working?"
"I'm working all the time," is my reply, "but it's the earning part of the equation I find elusive."
Our bank account is running dry, and I'm desperately trying to find some way to replenish it. If you can help out, we would be deeply grateful. Thank you so much!

[American Patriot]

Refusing to Disarm: Lexington and Concord

Mises Daily: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 by Murray N. Rothbard


[This article, discussing the Battles of Lexington and Concord of April 19, 1775, which started the American War for Independence, is excerpted from Conceived in Liberty, volume 3, part 69, "The Shot Heard Round the World: The Final Conflice Begins." An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Floy Lilley, is available for download.]



Despite the mounting tension in the South, the main focus of potential revolutionary conflict was still Massachusetts. The British authorities, ever more attracted to a hard line, were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the timorousness and caution of General Gage, who had actually asked for heavy reinforcements when everyone knew that the scurvy Americans could be routed by a mere show of force from the superb British army. Four hundred Royal Marines and several new regiments were sent to Gage, but the king, one of the leaders of coercion sentiment, seriously considered removing Gage from command.


There were a few voices of reason in the British government, but they were not listened to. The Whiggish secretary of war, Lord Barrington, urged reliance on the cheap and efficient method of naval blockade rather than on a land war in the large expanse and forests of America. And General Edward Harvey warned of any attempt to conquer America by a land army. But the cabinet was convinced that ten thousand British regulars, assisted by American Tories, could crush any conceivable American resistance.

Underlying this conviction—and consequent British eagerness to wield armed force—was a chauvinist and quasi-racist contempt for the Americans. Thus, General James Grant sneered at the “skulking peasants” who dared to resist the Crown. Major John Pitcairn, stationed at Boston, was sure that “if he drew his sword but half out of the scabbard, the whole banditti of Massachusetts Bay would flee before him.” Particularly important was the speech in Parliament of the powerful Bedfordite, the Earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, who sneeringly asked: “Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify? They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men. I wish instead of... fifty thousand of these brave fellows, they would produce in the field at least two hundred thousand; the more the better; the easier would be the conquest... the very sound of a cannon would carry them off... as fast as their feet could carry them.”


There was another reason, it should be noted, for Sandwich’s reluctance to use the fleet rather than the army against the enemy. While the army was to dispatch the Americans, Sandwich wished to use the fleet against France, with which he hoped and expected to be soon at war.


Accordingly, the Crown sent secret orders to Gage, reaching him on April 14. The Earl of Dartmouth rebuked Gage for being too moderate. The decision had been made; since the people of New England were clearly committed to “open rebellion” and independence of Britain, maximum and decisive force must be slammed down hard upon the Americans—immediately. While reinforcements were under way, it was important for the British troops to launch a preventive strike, by moving hard before an American revolution could be organized. Therefore, Gage decided to arrest the leaders of the Massachusetts provincial congress, especially Hancock and Sam Adams. As in so many other “preventive” first strikes in history, Great Britain itself precipitated the one thing it wished most to avoid: a successful revolution. Interestingly enough, the Massachusetts radicals were at the same time rejecting hotheaded plans for a first strike by rebel forces, who would thus be throwing away the hard-forged unity of the American colonists.


Adams and Hancock were out of town and out of reach, near Concord; so Gage decided to kill two birds with one stone by sending a military expedition to Concord to seize the large stores of rebel military supplies and to arrest the radical leaders. Gage determined to send out the force secretly, to catch the Americans by surprise; that way if armed conflict broke out, the onus for initiating the fray could be laid on the Americans. Gage also used a traitor high up in radical ranks. Dr. Benjamin Church, of Boston, whom the British supplied with funds to maintain an expensive mistress, informed on the location of the supplies and the rebel leaders. (Church’s perfidy remained undetected for many more months.) Gage learned from Church, furthermore, that the provincial congress, under the prodding of the frightened Joseph Hawley, had resolved on March 30 not to fight any armed British expedition unless it should also bring artillery. By not sending out artillery, Gage figured that the Americans would not resist the expedition.^[1]


Gage, however, immediately encountered what would prove a major difficulty in fighting a counterinsurgency war by a minority ruling army against insurgent forces backed by the vast majority of the people. He found that, surrounded by a sullen and hostile people, he could not keep any of his troop or fleet movements hidden. The rebels would quickly discover these movements and spread the news.


On April 15, the day after receiving his orders, Gage relieved his best troops of duty, gathered his boats, and on the night of April 18 shipped 700 under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to the mainland, from which they began to march northwest to Lexington and Concord. But the Americans quickly discovered what was happening. Someone, perhaps Dr. Joseph Warren, sent Paul Revere to Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock. Hancock, emotional, wanted to join the minutemen, springing to arms; but the sober intelligence of Sam Adams reminded Hancock of his revolutionary duty as a top leader of the American forces, and they both fled to safety. Revere was soon captured, but Dr. Samuel Prescott was able to speed to Concord and bring the news that the British were coming.


As news of the British march reached the Americans, the Lexington minutemen gathered under the command of Captain John Parker. Rather absurdly, Parker drew up his handful of seventy men in open formation across the British path. When Major Pitcairn, in charge of six companies of the British advance guard, came up to confront the militia, Pitcairn brusquely ordered the Americans to lay down their arms and disperse. Parker, seeing his error, was more than willing to disperse but not to disarm. In the midst of this tense confrontation, shots rang out. No one knows who fired first; the important thing is that the British, despite Pitcairn’s orders to stop, fired far longer and more heavily than necessary, mercilessly shooting at the fleeing Americans so long as they remained within range. Eight Americans were killed in the massacre (including the brave but foolish Parker who refused to flee), and eight wounded, whereas only one British soldier was slightly wounded. The exuberant and trigger-happy British troops cheered their victory; but the victory at Lexington would prove Pyrrhic indeed. The blood shed at Lexington made the restraining resolution of Joseph Hawley obsolete. The Revolutionary War had begun! Sam Adams, upon hearing the shooting from some distance away, at once realized that the fact of the open clash was more significant than who would win the skirmish. Aware that the showdown had at last arrived, Adams exclaimed, “Oh! What a glorious morning is this!”


The British troops marched happily on to Concord. This time the Americans did not try any foolhardy open confrontation with the British forces. Instead, an infinitely wiser strategy was employed. In the first place, part of the military stores were carried off by the Americans. Second, no resistance was offered to the British entry into Concord, thus lulling the troops into a further sense of security. While the British were destroying the remaining stores, three to four hundred militiamen gathered at the bridge into Concord and advanced upon the British rear guard. The British shot first, but were forced to retreat across the bridge, having suffered three killed and nine wounded. The despised Americans were beginning to make up for the massacre at Lexington.


Heedless of the ominous signs of the gathering storm, Colonel Smith, commanding the expedition, kept his men around Concord for hours before beginning to march back to Boston. That march was to become one of the most famous in the annals of America. Along the way, beginning a mile out of Concord, at Meriam’s Corner, the embattled and neighboring farmers and militiamen employed the tactics of guerrilla warfare to devastating effect. Knowing their home terrain intimately, these undisciplined and individualistic Americans subjected the proud British troops to a continuous withering and overpowering fire from behind trees, walls, and houses. The march back soon became a nightmare of destruction for the buoyant British; their intended victory march, a headlong flight through a gauntlet. Colonel Smith was wounded and Pitcairn unhorsed. The British were saved from decimation only by a relief brigade of twelve hundred men under Earl Percy that reached them at Lexington. Still, Americans continued to join the fray and fire at the troops, despite heavy losses imposed by British flanking parties.


Despite the British reinforcements, the Americans might have slaughtered and conquered the British force if (a) they had not suffered from shortages of ammunition, (b) the British had not swerved into Charlestown and embarked for Boston under the protecting guns of the British fleet, and (c) excessive caution had not held the Americans back from a final blow at the troops on the road to Charlestown. Even so, the deadly march back to Boston was a glorious victory, physically and psychologically, for the Americans. Of some fifteen to eighteen hundred redcoats, ninety-nine were killed and missing, and 174 wounded. The exultant Americans, who numbered about four thousand irregular individuals that day, suffered ninety-three casualties. Insofar as these individuals were led that day, it was by Dr. Joseph Warren and William Heath, appointed a general by the Massachusetts provincial congress.


Events could not have gone better for the American cause: initial aggression and massacre by the arrogant redcoats, then turned to utter rout by the aroused and angry people of Massachusetts. It was truly a tale for song and story. As Willard Wallace writes, “Even now, the significance of Lexington and Concord awakens a response in Americans that goes far beyond the details of the day or the identity of the foe. An unmilitary people, at first overrun by trained might, had eventually risen in their wrath and won a hard but splendid triumph.”^[2]



Above all, as Sam Adams was quick to realize, the stirring events of April 19, 1775, touched off a general armed conflict: the American Revolution. In the immortal lines of Emerson, penned for the fiftieth anniversary of that day:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

[vector7]

Ted Nugent Suggests He's Ready For Armed Revolt Against 'Evil, Dangerous' Obama (VIDEO)

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing

Posted: 01/22/2013 2:29 pm EST | Updated: 01/22/2013 2:36 pm EST

Rocker-turned-gun rights provocateur Ted Nugent is willing to say just about anything to attack President Barack Obama and his administration for what he believes is an imminent effort by the government to snatch up guns. During a recent interview, Nugent again raised the bar, invoking a Revolutionary war milestone to suggest that he and his "buddies" were prepared to fight such an effort at all costs.

"I'm part of a very great experiment in self-government where we the people determine our own pursuit of happiness and our own individual freedom and liberty, not to be confused with the Barack Obama gang who believes in we the sheeple and actually is attempting to re-implement the tyranny of King George that we escaped from in 1776," Nugent said in a recent interview with Guns.com at the NBC-sponsored Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show.

"And if you want another Concord Bridge, I got some buddies."

Nugent appears to be referring to the beginning of the Revolutionary war, when colonial and British troops assembled at the North Bridge in Concord, Mass. in 1775 broke a standoff when one soldier opened fire. While it's still unclear which side fired the first shot, it was later immortalized by poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who suggested that "the shot heard 'round the world" was fired by an American.

In his interview, Nugent went on to accuse Obama of having communist ties, suggesting that gun-owning Americans needed to do something to "fix" the fact that he was president.

"The president of the United States goes to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and pretends to honor 58,000 American heroes who died fighting communism and then he hires, appoints and associates with communists," Nugent said. "He pretends to pay honor to men who died fighting communism, and then he hangs out with, hires and appoints communists. He is an evil, dangerous man who hates America and hates freedom. And we need to fix this as soon as possible."



Nugent has been one of the most fiery voices in the pro-gun movement in the wake of the December mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in which 26 people, including 20 young children, were killed.

Earlier this month he called Obama's proposals to combat gun violence "psychotic" and "dangerously anti-American." He'd earlier predicted that gun owners would have a "Rosa Parks" moment in an effort to resist gun restrictions.

While Nugent's inflammatory rhetoric is indicative of a segment of gun owners who appear convinced that any gun control efforts are simply a precursor to a larger government gun-grab, such a tone has also been adopted by more mainstream Republican lawmakers.

Over the weekend, the campaign of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blasted out a frenzied fundraising email, telling supporters that they were "literally surrounded" by "gun-grabbers in the Senate" who were "coming for" their guns.

[American Patriot]

The Conflict, Reduced To Simplest Terms

Posted on December 22, 2012 | 1 Comment

All white people are going to hell…

Tossed over the transom by MidlanticProducer:
America is sliding backwards into tribalism, defined as “me and my people are gonna get ours, at the expense of you and yours.”



The democrats have done a masterful job of pitting black versus white, rich versus poor, employed versus unemployed, producer versus moocher, now anti-gun versus pro-gun. Now nobody trusts anybody anymore, especially the government because the government has been breaking the law left and right (Fast & Furious, screwing the bondholders in the auto bailouts, etc.).



And the saddest part is that it has happened at a time when white Americans were at their most tolerant and accepting of black Americans.



Just because bullets are not flying does not mean we are not in a civil war already. We are in a Cold Civil War, in which the enemy uses information operations to delay, influence, dissuade, disrupt, etc. The Republicans suck at playing that game. The Tea Party is too late to the game and has no real influence on Washington DC as long as they keep falling for the line of “you better work for change within the Republican Party or your third-party efforts will just get Obama re-elected!!” This Cold Civil War has the mass media, the White House, the Democrats, the Republicans, the statist bureaucrats, and the FSA pitted against the productive class, using disinformation and guilt as their primary weapon delivery systems (see Army doctrine on Information Operations used to delay, deny, disrupt, influence, etc.).



Methinks the productive class has caught on to this game, and a significant amount of them are preparing for when this cold war goes hot (hence the mad rush on guns, ammo, magazines since 2008). Who is going to be the target of the lynch mob if, say, the 1st-of-the-month funds to the welfare class are delayed for a week (for tactical/strategic political reasons arising out of the White House)? That particular brigade of the FSA will feel emboldened enough to try to take what they want from Whitey by force.



More important than the lynch mob itself is the invisible hand behind the lynch mob. There are those who would profit from FSA-on-producer violence, who would (with the help of the accomplice MSM) use it as an excuse to crack down on the producers by blaming them: “How dare they be selfish and unfair by protecting that which they have worked to accumulate!”



Be prepared, be vigilant.



Build your tribes now.
Resist.

[Ryan Ruck]

Sectionalism, Then and Now

John Derbyshire
January 10, 2013

Some years ago, before I attained wisdom, I got a bit closer than I should have to some problems a friend was having with his wife. After one sensational dust-up that left my pal literally crying in his beer, I urged him to tell me what the casus belli was. Not a very articulate guy, he struggled to explain: “This row we had…it wasn’t really about what it was about. Know what I mean?”

I think we all know. Rather a lot of human conflict, with all its yelling and breaking, its blood and tears, isn’t about what it’s about.

The current brouhaha over gun control strikes me that way. Listening to the opinionators, I started to think I could do a near-simultaneous translation—a translation, I mean, from the surface chatter about constitutional rights, kid safety, self-defense, and 30-round magazines (not “clips,” for crying out loud) to the underlying ideas in the speakers’ heads. Something like:

Blue guy: “Why does anyone need a 30-round magazine? What use is that, except to commit mayhem?”

[Translation: You dumb ignorant unwashed cracker, you can’t wait to let loose on some harmless crowd of African Americans, can you? Get back to your cabin and jar of corn liquor and relatives with six fingers. You shouldn’t be playing any part in the life of the nation, with your crazy religion and your reactionary social ideas.]

Red guy: “The Second Amendment is the people’s safeguard against tyranny.”

[Translation: You think I don’t know what’ll happen to me and mine if you sissified, overeducated elite hypocrites ever get total power over us? Leave us alone, dammit!]

I’m not being loftily impartial here. I belong to one of those sections. (Take a guess.) I’m just making the point that what this is really about is good old American sectionalism—two big groups of white people who can’t stand the sight of each other. We are eternally re-fighting the Civil War.

(Yes, white people. Blacks are hors de combat here, as they mostly were in the Civil War, neither side of which liked or trusted them. Sherman would not let colored troops march armed in the Grand Parade. Some black pioneer units marched with picks and shovels, but they were regarded as comic relief by the spectators and newspapers. Nobody cares what the generality of blacks think, no more now than in 1865. This war, like that one, is an intra-white affair.)

Gary Gallagher, in his excellent lecture series on the Civil War, mulls the question of whether there was a civilizational difference between antebellum North and South—whether their temper and social arrangements were so different as to make them already, in effect, two nations:

Most Americans in my view by the mid-1850s at the latest believed that there were major differences.…Many in the North looked South and saw a section that they believed was holding the nation back. They saw a land of lazy, cruel, violent people who did not subscribe to the ideas that would make the United States great.…Many white Southerners looked to the North as a region of cold, grasping people who cared little about family and subordinated everything to the process of making money. Perceptions on each side had reached a point by the mid-1850s that scarcely allowed many Northerners and Southerners to view the other section in anything like sympathetic or even realistic terms. Each side expected the worst from the other.

Similarly, Shelby Foote quotes James M. Mason of Virginia on the war:

I look upon it then, Sir, as a war of sentiment and opinion by one form of society against another form of society.

It’s hard not to hear echoes here. Of course, our sectionalism differs from the antebellum version. For one thing, it is nowhere near as clearly geographical. There were Northern sympathizers in the South and Southern sympathizers in the North (enough of the latter to earn a nickname from their political enemies) but not very many in either case.

Nowadays every town, every street, has its reds and blues. We are interwoven. Those you’ve heard recently talking about secession seem oblivious to this. Less oblivious is Michael Hart, who has worked out a scheme for secession by county, leading to two noncontiguous nations. The general opinion, at the two meetings where I have seen Prof. Hart describe his plan, is that it’s a stretch. Think of the border-control issues! Sure, pre-modern Germany got along OK; but that was many independent aristocratic states, not two democratic nations in many pieces.

What it’s about, what most of our politics is about, is the seething hatred between our two white tribes, with such issues as gun control, gay rights, and posture towards blacks as tribal markers. (Posture is all it is; as the late Joe Sobran observed, liberals in their mating and migratory habits are indistinguishable from members of the Klan.) Michael Bloomberg has an armed security detail; Barack Obama’s daughters attend a school with armed guards in addition to the girls’ Secret Service detail. These inconsistencies don’t matter. The Bloombergs and Obamas know what tribe they are, and the tribal identifiers are mainly just verbal and content-free, like war chants—like their expressions of concern for the urban poor, whom they strive mightily to keep at a distance. It’s really paleolithic stuff: shouting insults and banging spears on shields across a jungle clearing.

It’s not likely that our current sectionalism will come to open war. There isn’t the geographical solidarity, and absent unthinkably massive population transfers, there couldn’t be. I and my conservative friends locally are not going to war against our neighbors, nor shall we emigrate en masse to Mississippi.

America’s two sections are stuck with each other, like partners in an unhappy marriage…which is where I started. My friend and his marital problems? The last time I was in touch, seven or eight years after the tears-in-beer event, they were still together.

I disagree with Mr. Derbyshire's thoughts on difficulty in geographic separation. Sure there are a lot of red counties in a number of blue states (California is a good example) and there are deeply blue counties in otherwise red states but when one draws the line at the state level and look at states as individual nation-states, as the Founders originally considered them to be akin to, then the lines are much easier to draw.

[American Patriot]

Hey, I just wanted to say