Wargaming the opening blows of civil war in Connecticut. The lessons of Waco and the phrase that the smartest state cops in CT are most afraid of.

Dan Zimmerman at The Truth About Guns asks Could Connecticut Gun Laws Spark Another Waco?

There’s been a lot of discussion among members of the Armed Intelligentsia lately about how Connecticut’s finest might proceed if they decide to confiscate unregistered guns from the state’s 100,000 or more newly-minted felons. The level of concern is evidenced by daily long comment threads, speculative posts by people who are not members of law enforcement, and even a couple of contributed opinions from the LEO community. The rational consensus seems to be that if the gun-grab order were given, cops would pinch a registration scofflaw at the grocery store, at work, on the road…anyplace other than his or her home where a Ruby Ridge-style tragedy might ensue. Here I propose the alternative–that LEOs might not in fact be that rational if and when the time comes . . .

Zimmerman concludes:

I don’t mean to tar all LEOs with this brush. . . . (b)ut, they are at least as prone to groupthink and bunker mentality as any other organization, and likely more so given the nature of their work. It’s what led Lon Horiuchi to kill someone he couldn’t even see, and what led the LAPD to shoot up a random truck and two innocent citizens during the manhunt for Micheal Dorner.

So it’s not that some cops are willing and eager jackbooted thugs. The potential danger in Connecticut is that someday soon, officers like the ones who ran the Waco siege may show up at the home of a gun owner who’s done nothing but have his name appear on a list of people whose registration forms arrived on Jan 2. They’ll be thoroughly convinced that gun owner is a violent domestic terrorist who’s holding the rest of the family hostage. They’ll demand his or her spouse or children in exchange for food or a phone call.

And if s/he says no, as almost any of us would, the negotiator will just assume they’re holding out for more. They’ll think of the gun owner as the one who’s trading on the family’s lives. And then, at some point, they’ll call it quits and send in the tanks.

Zimmerman is correct that we should not expect completely rational behavior from CT state cops tasked with firearm confiscation raids. He is incorrect to think that the Waco paradigm -- fatally flawed or not -- is what we will see in CT. Unlike the Davidians, CT firearm owners will not sit still to be held under siege if they can help it.

Seven years ago I wrote "Resistance is Futile": Waco Rules vs. Romanian Rules, pointing out that we, at least, had learned the rules at Waco and would modify our behavior in accordance with that new understanding.

Nicolae Ceausescu after the application of Romanian Rules

(W)e've had almost 15 years to study Waco Rules now. Fifteen years of studying how to best direct the resources of the armed citizenry against the next predatory administration grown too big for its constitutional britches. Fifteen years of considering the lessons of Christmas, 1989. After the cold war with the Clintonistas, we gunnies began to understand the finer points of credible deterrence. Now, having completed a long and challenging curriculum, we certainly understand what Jefferson meant by "pardon and pacify them." It would be wiser if Mr. Prather and his historically foolish liberal friends did not seek to give us a final examination in this subject of study, for the results are NOT academic. Just ask Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Of course, you'll have to go to Hell to do that.

This is also what I tried to get across to Eric Holder five years ago in my letter No More Free Wacos: An Explication of the Obvious Addressed to Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States.

Elena Ceausescu a little worse for wear. She thought Waco Rules applied. Oops.

As I tried to explain to the Legislatures of New Jersey and Rhode Island, asking them, "Are you seriously proposing to have your own skulls turned into soap dishes?" --

(W)e live in a different century than Jenny Brooks. Had Jenny understood the principles of 4th Generation Warfare, she would have sent her boys to kill the Confederate Governor of the state of Alabama and his political minions -- not to mention the Confederate congressmen who passed the despotic laws and the newspaper editors who endorsed them. For 4th Generation Warfare understands that the way to defeat an enemy is to directly engage the war makers and decision takers. Win the war there, and the raid parties stop coming. This is the reality of war in the 21st Century -- this is the reality of the civil war you risk by pushing people you barely understand who have decided in their own minds that they will be pushed no longer.

Viewed from this reality, the tyrannical legislators of Connecticut voted in favor of their very own suicide pact, although I daresay none of them understood that at the time.

One of the lessons of Waco that ALWAYS comes up in discussions of Waco among LEOs, regardless of their opinion of the legitimacy of the ATF's raid, is that the first and most deadly mistake to the ATF raid party was the fact that the operational security of the exercise was blown from the beginning and yet raid commanders insisted upon going ahead anyway. The Davidians knew they were coming. That the entire raid wasn't wiped out in a Davidian ambush can only be attributed to the fact that the Davidians were peaceful, "law-abiding" people and they didn't understand either the nature of their enemy or that their fate -- all of them, men, women and children -- was sealed when the ATF fired the first rounds.

We have had the benefit of more than two decades of hindsight, and no one -- especially the forces of state violence in CT -- should expect that their victims will be as obliging as the Davidians. Indeed, I learned in a conversation with a resident of the state this week that the scariest words that form and inform the nightmares of the LE analysts in that state is the haunting phrase of an imaginary phone call: "They're coming." The analysts know, if the politicians do not, that CT law enforcement is riddled with resisters -- Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, limitless friends and neighbors of the men and women whom the CT state legislature has made instant "criminals" -- who will send out the Paul Revere warning when they learn the raid parties are on the way.

It doesn't take a military genius to figure that some will get out of the way and fade into the countryside according to preparations they have already made. Some will get their families out and stay behind, because of health reasons or stubbornness, determined to give the raid party a real ambush as the Davidians did not.

Given the lack of numbers available to the state authorities, they will fall back on the federally-sponsored vertical integration of law enforcement. They will turn to the tried and true "joint task forces." Yet as the analysts know only too well, that merely increases exponentially the opportunities for operational security compromise. It also guarantees one other thing, which they may or may not have thought through: The moment that federal forces get involved in such firearm raids in CT is the moment that the civil war starts in all 50 states.

As my friend Bob Wright once told an FBI SAC in Albuquerque NM when he asked Bob if he would take his men out of state to the site of another potential Waco:

"Why would I want to do that? There's plenty of you federal sonsabitches around here."

More importantly, from the point of view of the war makers and decision takers at all levels, such tyrannical murders being perpetrated by a combination of federal, state and local para-militarized police in one place will lead to all of them being targets under 4GW. The spark may happen in CT, thanks to that state's legislative tyrants, but the conflagration could certainly envelope the entire country with terminal results to politicians and the physical supporters and intellectual cheerleaders who form the brains of the bloody-handed tools who execute their orders.

Unless the state of CT holds in abeyance any enforcement of this intolerable act -- at least until the Supreme Court can rule -- you can count that some day, in the wee hours of the morning, someone's phone will ring and the voice on the other end will say, "They're coming."

Mike Vanderboegh

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