There will be raids. "Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!" Connecticut on the knife edge of civil war (and nobody has a clue). Dr. Bettelheim's advice to Red Mike Lawlor's intended victims.

I spent Friday largely in frustration, receiving advice about my trip to Connecticut that I did not want to hear, trying to get the attention of people who did not want to hear me and chasing down rumors I did not want to believe were true.

As for the advice, medical, political and otherwise, it can be summed up by this email I received from a long-time friend:

Mike, Being the mule-headed person I am. . . I have found out through bitter experience that God first whispers. When we don't listen, He shouts. When we still don't listen He reaches for a 2x4 to clunk us in order to gain our attention (just like like having to smack a mule to get it's attention). Consider not going and staying home. . .

At the risk of boring those who have been paying attention, let me sum up briefly the events in Connecticut of the past two years.

On 14 December 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The blood-dancers of the citizen disarmament lobby came out in full gyrations and by April Fool's Day 2013 it was announced that a deal had been reached in Hartford amongst House of Representatives politicians, some of whom should have known better, to produce what they bragged was the "toughest gun law in the country." This Intolerable Act included a ban on standard capacity magazines, mandating further that existing mags must be registered with the state. It also mandated registry of semi-automatic rifles of military utility and demanded background checks for private firearm sales. On 3 April the State Senate passed this "deal," followed shortly thereafter at midnight on 4 April by the House. It was signed into law by Governor Dannel Malloy on 4 April. The blood dancers were ecstatic at their victory.

Reaction among Connecticut firearm owners was immediate and outraged. On 20 April 2013, the Connecticut Citizen's Defense League held a large rally on the State House steps. I was privileged to speak at that rally and I urged Connecticut citizens to defy, resist, evade and smuggle in opposition to it. My speech was well received.

I pointed out during that speech that an unconstitutional law was null and void. It is evident that either some folks were paying attention or that great minds think alike, for it rapidly became clear that the law was going to be met by massive resistance and non-compliance. By the time the law kicked into effect on 1 January 2014 this became perfectly obvious. Something between 100,00 and 300,000 Connecticut firearm owners are now Class D felons. Having won their great victory, the blood dancers were flummoxed. They'd prevailed over the "gun queers," why wouldn't they just submit?

In frustration, the politicians who passed the law, the citizen disarmament blood-dancers and their media toadies have demanded that their diktat be enforced. In the middle of this, the CT state police mouthpiece declared that the state minions like him were the masters of the people.

Governor Malloy, against the urging of his own "gun control czar," Red Mike Lawlor, decided to issue whispered, unofficial orders to the state authorities to hold off on raids until he was re-elected. Rumors, since confirmed, came out of the governor's office that promises have been made to the anti-gunners that the law, still working its way through the federal courts, will be "vigorously enforced" after Malloy's re-election. Since 1 January of this year then, the non-compliant firearm owners of Connecticut and their state government have been eying each other nervously, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

As for me, in the meantime I made myself a nuisance by smuggling magazines and ammunition into the state in defiance of the law, writing open letters to the governor, state legislators and state police and -- my worst sin in their eyes -- publishing the names, home addresses and phone numbers of the tyrants who passed the bill. It turns out that such people like to put others on lists but get all hot and bothered if they get put on a list. Go figure.

In my open letter to the governor, I suggested that he merely take the pressure off by declaring publicly that the state would not enforce the law until the Supreme Court ruled on it. That would buy us a year or a year and a half, before the raids, and the shooting, started. Others have demanded that the law be repealed, as it should be. But the suspension of enforcement was, I thought, more immediately achievable. My sources, and other political analysts familiar with Connecticut politics, tell me that I was not the only one who suggested this. It is significant that even in the middle of a political campaign with his future on the line, Malloy has refused to do this simple, reasonable compromise. Even in the face of massive non-compliance, he wants to retain the ability to send in the raid parties to enforce the new diktat despite the risk to his political career and to the lives of innocents.

I even outed Red Mike Lawlor as a Russophile who had come to the attention of the KGB during his stay in the Soviet Union and other East Bloc countries at the height of the Cold War, reporting that my sources confirmed that he had files at both the FBI and the CIA after being investigated as a possible KGB mole.

Since that time, I have been trying to find a "mainstream" journalist to pursue that story, but my last hope of that apparently failed today. I am certain of my sources, for they are some of the same people who guided me through the Fast and Furious scandal with unerring accuracy. No one else, it seems, is interested in the possibility that the governor's designated "gun czar" may have been a Soviet agent of influence (or, at least, was once investigated as such).

Which brings me to the latest rumor straight from Lawlor's office. The governor and his minions, it seems, are genuinely frightened that they may lose this one, despite the best efforts of Joe Visconti to split the anti-Malloy vote. This week, the water-cooler rumor at the Connecticut State Police barracks around the state is that Red Mike Lawlor has promised that if the governor IS defeated that the raids will not wait for next year, but that he will, in the words of one source, "punish the gun nuts" by starting the raids within days of Malloy's defeat.

On Friday, I heard from another source I trust that they, too, had heard this and believed it to be true.

Thus, if the rumor IS true and Lawlor has his way, it doesn't matter if Malloy wins or loses -- there will be raids. Innocents will be killed, and the two-way shooting range of civil war will begin. If this guy isn't an anti-American agent of influence in somebody's pocket, we'll have to redefine the term.

So, what can Connecticut firearms owners do in the face of this breathtaking arrogance, of this clear and present danger to themselves and their families? To quote Command Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, "Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!"

I wish I could find a Connecticut "journalist" interested in asking Malloy and Lawlor what they intend, but I cannot. So we are left, dear friends, at the end of a very frustrating string of days, weeks, months and now years, with the Second Amendment remedy and Connecticut on the knife-edge edge of civil war: "Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!"

Addendum: In the wee hours of the morning, struggling against the competing forces of illness and insomnia, I pulled down a random paperback and found a quote from Dr. Bruno Bettelheim that, frankly (and somewhat surprisingly), I had never read before. Bettelheim's observations are very appropriate today in Connecticut, albeit to two different audiences. Both of these audiences, the self-declared tyrants and their intended victims, could benefit by considering them now, before the first shots are fired in Red Mike Lawlor's bloody plans.

The quote:

But this was only a last step in giving up living one's own life, in no longer defying the death instinct, which, in more scientific terms, has been called the principle of inertia. The first step was taken long before anyone entered the death camps. It was inertia that led millions of Jews into the ghettos that the SS created for them. It was inertia that made hundreds of thousands of Jews sit home, waiting for their executioners, when they were restricted to their homes. Those who did not allow inertia to take over used the imposing of such restrictions as a warning that it was high time to go underground, join resistance movements, provide themselves with forged papers, etc., if they had not done so long ago. Most of them survived. . .

I have met many Jews, as well as gentile anti-Nazis, who survived in Germany and in the occupied countries. But they were all people who realized that when a world goes to pieces, when inhumanity reigns supreme, man cannot go on with business as usual. One then has to radically re-evaluate all of what one has done, believed in, stood for. In short, one has to take a stand on the new reality, a firm stand, and not one of retirement into even greater privatization. . .

The Jews of Europe could equally have marched as free men against the SS, rather than to first grovel, then wait to be rounded up for their own extermination, and finally walk themselves to the gas chambers. It was their passive waiting for the SS to knock at their door without first securing a gun to shoot down at least one SS before being shot down themselves, that was the first step in a voluntary walk into the Reich's crematoria. . .

This book then is most of all a cautionary tale, as old as mankind. Those who seek to protect the body at all cost die many times over. Those who risk the body to survive as men have a good chance to live on.

-- Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, writing in the forward to Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account by Miklós Nyiszli, 1960. (Dr, Bettelheim was arrested by the Nazis at the time of the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and was held at the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He was very lucky to have been released in a propaganda ploy of the Nazis in 1939 and to flee Germany before the Holocaust really got into high gear.)

As for what lessons Connecticut firearm owners may take from the above, they can draw their own conclusions. A word to the wise, it is said, is sufficient. On the other side of the street, if Malloy truly understood how the potential strategies of Fourth Generation Warfare are targeted in the context of a future American civil war, he would not let Red Mike Lawlor pressure him down this bloody road. Not unless, that is, he has suicidal thoughts for himself and the corrupt proto-tyranny he temporarily heads. Compared to the universally dangerous probabilities that such tyrannical bad behavior risks, a brief stay of the enforcement of the Intolerable Act while awaiting a Supreme Court ruling doesn't look so unreasonable, does it? Unfortunately, like the story of Cassandra, the inertia is too powerful, no one of importance to the outcome is listening, and the potential of a disastrous tragedy awaits the entire country.

"Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!"