"We will not forget those who solicited our deaths and the deaths of our families. We will not forget and history will not forgive."

"Tap dancing in a minefield blindfolded."

My reply to Bob Nicholson's latest.

Mr. Nicholson, As you have done me the courtesy of a reply to my email regarding your anti-NRA screed (something that rarely occurs with others of your collectivist proclivities), I thought it only fitting to return the favor by answering your ill-formed and ill-informed opinions and questions by giving you an honest glimpse into the world view of those of your fellow citizens whom you so evidently despise. I do so in the hope that such knowledge might help you avoid personal culpability for the civil war that you evidently seek.

You begin by asking sarcastically, "So how do you really feel about background checks?" The Founders would have thought the entire idea to be repugnant and unworthy of a government that claims to represent a free people. Requiring the people to obtain the prior permission of the government to exercise a God-given, inalienable and natural right as codified in the Constitution would be preposterous to the Founders. One might as well require prior government permission to exercise a First Amendment right.

If the law-abiding must seek government approval then such rights are not rights at all and are subject to federal ban at any whim of the bureaucracy. THAT is the central tyranny of your proposal. A related offense to liberty is this: that government control of the private sale of firearms is designed to develop lists, not of firearms but of firearm owners. And the only reason for that is to facilitate confiscation at some future date and time.

For bureaucrats can only send armed men to the doors of people who are on their list. Indeed, this is what happened to the Jews and other "political undesirables" in Nazi Germany. All arms having been previously registered by the nominally democratic regime of the Weimar Republic, the Nazis had no trouble disarming their opponents. Ironically, the same Weimar socialists who had registered everyone's weapons (including their own) then found themselves disarmed by means of the same lists they had created.

Understand, then, that we have no intention of traveling that road. We will fight and we will kill in righteous self defense anyone who tries to take our liberty, our property and our lives.

You may think us crazy for doing so, for even thinking that we have the right to shirk our "responsibility to society" (to use your words), but the fact of the matter is that we are here, we are not changing our minds, we are done backing up to every unconstitutional infringement the federal government has imposed upon us since the National Firearms Act of 1934 and we will shoot the armed thugs operating under color of law that your proposed policy sends to our doors to compel our obedience.

Accept that as the ironclad fact and promise that it is, deal with it and act accordingly. For we will not forget those who solicited our deaths and the deaths of our families. We will not forget and history will not forgive. (Cf. Nuremberg, 1945-46.)

As for your second paragraph sneering at the possibility of successfully fighting the federal government backed by the military, my first reaction was, "Just who does this jerk think the military is made up of?" The military, my apparently clueless friend, is made up of OUR sons and daughters (especially the tip-of-the-spear units) NOT those of our pretended "betters" who send theirs to hothouse-lily Ivy League schools where they chant "Black Lives Matter" while safely ensconced in their anti-free speech "comfort zones." OUR sons and daughters are the ones who have spent the last decade getting combat experience in foreign wars. OURS not theirs. And which way do you suppose our adult children will be pointing their government-provided ordnance when the orders (YOUR orders that YOU solicited) come down to disarm Grandpa Jack or kill Uncle Billy as "enemies of the people"?

My second reaction to that paragraph was disbelief that anyone could be so ignorant of military history as to make such a stupid statement. Rambo was certainly fiction, but in the extensive chronicles of guerrillas versus governments, the governments lose almost as often as the insurgents and when they do, they lose spectacularly. You may ask the ghost of His Majesty's General Thomas Gage how his gun raids worked out for King George the Third. Which leads me to my third comment to that appallingly ignorant paragraph. I wondered aloud, "This moke really doesn't understand that there are people who have been studying and preparing and training to do that very thing since the original sin of Waco in 1993."

For it is the same regime that committed the massacre at Waco that you evidently trust with the power to circumscribe our liberties, the power to seize our property, even at the cost of our lives. No one in the federal government was ever called to account for Waco, nor for any of the scandals to date in the Obama administration beginning with, but certainly not limited to, Fast and Furious. Well I've got news for you. As I told Eric Holder in a letter more than six years ago, there will be no more free Wacos. The next federal bloody misadventure of that sort will get us all a nice, ghastly civil war. And it will be a war that we have been considering how to win for the past twenty years.

I refer you to an essay I wrote regarding the application of 4th Generation warfare in the context of just such a civil war as you seek to provoke. You will find it here. I would draw your particular attention to Bill Clinton's Rules of Engagement:

The thing is, once started, the regime will find it almost impossible to stop on any terms besides their own unconditional surrender as they would be fighting an enraged but dispersed network insurgency. It is likely that after a few weeks of such blood-letting, the administration will be unable to find anybody left alive with sufficient influence among the insurgents with whom they can negotiate an end to the horror. The fact of the matter is that they would have done their best to kill the folks they would need to stop what they started. And they will want to stop it, oh, yes, out of concern for their own miserable hides if nothing else. For they will have provoked a conflict that will not be directed at the war-fighters, the grunts, even those in the outnumbered federal police, but rather at the war-makers, i.e. themselves.

In this they have only Bill Clinton to blame. When the Philanderer in Chief, frustrated with Serbian intransigence in 1999, changed the rules of engagement to include the political leadership, news media and the intellectual underpinning of his enemy's war effort, he accidentally filed suit under the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Serbians knuckled under, yes. But the rest of the world took note, including (the Three Percent). I assure you, the appeal to the higher court of history in that case has yet to be decided. . .

Johnston is as wrong as he can be when comparing past history to 4th Generation warfare, distributed networks and leaderless resistance, especially as will be practiced in the United States if it ever goes to war with itself. He is wrong, but the powerful men and women he is writing for think he's right. Unfortunately for them, in the situation the administration would find itself after Waco Two, the "decapitation" strategy would for them more resemble Russian Roulette played with an automatic pistol. . .

I have asked this question before. They will fight to the last ATF agent or to the last oath-breaking soldier. Will they fight to the first senior bureaucrat, the second Congressman, the third newspaper editor, the fourth Senator, the fifth White House aide? Can they stand Bill Clinton's rules of engagement?

What does this have to do with you? Well, remember what I said above, "We will not forget those who solicited our deaths and the deaths of our families. We will not forget and history will not forgive."

One of my readers had this reaction to your email bleating, Borg-like, that "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated":

"I find it baffling that Bob thinks we'd waste a single shot on people in the military. What a horrid waste of time and ammo, engaging those who didn't cause the problem. People like Bob, who sent them, however. . ."

He left the hypothetical results of your proposal for civil war hanging in the air. Ho Chi Minh once said, "Cherish your enemies, for they teach you the best lessons." You begin to see, perhaps, just how right the old collectivist butcher was, especially when by your advocacy of the precursors of tyranny, you invoke the Law of Unintended Consequences upon yourself. This is a mission I took upon myself many years ago: I am trying to save lives here, one unthinking collectivist tyrant wannabe at a time. I hope you can appreciate that.

For we represent two different world views, you and we. Boil it down and you believe that people should serve the government. If you didn't, you wouldn't trust a corrupt regime willing commit Waco massacres with one scintilla of essential liberty. We believe, like the Founders, that government should serve the people -- that it should be accountable to the people and restrained by the rule of law under the Constitution of the Founder's Republic. Each side believes fervently in these mutually exclusive propositions. It is collectivism versus individualism. Throughout history, such fundamental divides have most often been decided by sanguinary wars of unspeakable ferocity. If you believe otherwise, you are whistling past the graveyard of our own history.

My advice? Try to understand that you are tap dancing in a minefield blindfolded. You are unthinkingly toying with titanic forces you barely recognize. The NRA, as perhaps you can more readily understand now, is truly the least of your worries. Consider Ho Chi Minh's advice. Perhaps the best counsel that I can offer you is that provided by the Sheriff in Silverado, who when asked by a townsman what was happening, advised, "Hide and watch."

Sincerely,

Mike Vanderboegh

The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters