“It clearly shows the caliber of criminals is getting more brazen, more violent,” said John Rivera, president of Miami-Dade County’s Police Benevolent Association, the police union. From the region’s top police officials to prosecutors and public defenders, there is growing unease about the shoot-first mind-set that has infected criminals in South Florida and across the nation. “There seems to be an indiscriminate, callous disregard for human life that is shocking and stunning,” said Public Defender Howard Finkelstein. “It’s almost that they believe violence is a respectable way to resolve conflicts.” . . . "[Prison] is not a deterrent anymore,” Lamberti said. ‘These [Dunkin’ Donuts robbers] weren’t upset because they couldn’t pay their rent or their 401(k)s went down. These are just cold-blooded thugs.”
The Tactical Life blog has this article from the Miami Times wherein the cops warn us that criminals are getting more violent and senseless in their rampages. Beyond mostly clucking their tongues at the problem that they seem to despair of solution, one of the things the cops claim will help is, you guessed it, disarming us -- stripping citizens of semi-automatic rifles of military utility. As in this quote:
Like Lamberti, Miami Police Chief John Timoney has noticed a change in the criminal mind-set. Timoney blames the trend on the proliferation of assault weapons on the streets. Whether people with homicidal tendencies seek out such firepower or the weapons trigger an aggressive response in those who hold them, Timoney said the constant factor is AK-47-style weapons, which he would like to see banned. “These are weapons of war,” Timoney said. “They have nothing to do with protection.”
Uh, huh. Pardon me, but the hell they don't. My "evil assault weapon" protects me from the criminals on my street (who give me a wide berth) and from predatory government officials, including (not to put too fine a point on it) one John Timoney, "Only One" Police Chief of Miami.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Obsolete?
One of the main points running through the narrative of Absolved is that there are no obsolete weapons, there are merely obsolete tactics. Thus, a weapon which could kill a man a thousand years ago, such as a bow, a knife or a tomahawk, can just as easily kill a man today if properly employed. The continued utility of the bayonet -- a knife on a pole -- generations after it was first thought to be "obsolete" is but one example. Now here at the excellent blog StrategyPage is further evidence.
A snippet:
Preparations for war require large stockpiles of spares and munitions to sustain combat operations until factories can ramp up to meet wartime needs. When new weapons or equipment are introduced, many of these "war stocks" become obsolete, or sort of obsolete. In the early stages of a war, older equipment will often be hauled out of storage to help keep the fight going. So "obsolete in peacetime" is not the same as "obsolete in wartime". But even in peacetime, technological breakthroughs can suddenly make some gear cheaper to replace than continue using. More "wasted" inventory.
For example, during the 1991 Kuwait war, there was an unexpected need for deep penetrating bombs that could destroy underground Iraqi command bunkers. New bombs were designed, built, tested and delivered in less than two months by using barrels from obsolete 8 inch army artillery pieces to build the needed "bunker buster" bomb. According to the GAO, those old barrels were useless. To troops in wartime, no weapon is useless.
Many nations do this packrat thing, although the Russians are probably the worst offenders. They still have large quantities of World War II ammo and equipment in storage. Much of it was finally sold off when the Cold War ended in 1991. This was much appreciated by museums and private collectors. But they didn't sell everything, and even the U.S. has much vintage material sitting around, waiting for another opportunity. . . Demilitarizing (taking it apart and disposing of it) is expensive, so the tendency is to just leave the old ammo in the bunker and hope no one will notice.
But sometimes, the old stuff comes in handy.
A snippet:
Preparations for war require large stockpiles of spares and munitions to sustain combat operations until factories can ramp up to meet wartime needs. When new weapons or equipment are introduced, many of these "war stocks" become obsolete, or sort of obsolete. In the early stages of a war, older equipment will often be hauled out of storage to help keep the fight going. So "obsolete in peacetime" is not the same as "obsolete in wartime". But even in peacetime, technological breakthroughs can suddenly make some gear cheaper to replace than continue using. More "wasted" inventory.
For example, during the 1991 Kuwait war, there was an unexpected need for deep penetrating bombs that could destroy underground Iraqi command bunkers. New bombs were designed, built, tested and delivered in less than two months by using barrels from obsolete 8 inch army artillery pieces to build the needed "bunker buster" bomb. According to the GAO, those old barrels were useless. To troops in wartime, no weapon is useless.
Many nations do this packrat thing, although the Russians are probably the worst offenders. They still have large quantities of World War II ammo and equipment in storage. Much of it was finally sold off when the Cold War ended in 1991. This was much appreciated by museums and private collectors. But they didn't sell everything, and even the U.S. has much vintage material sitting around, waiting for another opportunity. . . Demilitarizing (taking it apart and disposing of it) is expensive, so the tendency is to just leave the old ammo in the bunker and hope no one will notice.
But sometimes, the old stuff comes in handy.
Praxis: Lighten the Load
There is a tendency amongst practicioners of the armed citizenry to slavishly copy the gear requirements adopted by the US Army and Marines. This tendency finds its way into "gear lists" of "required equipment" that strain the budget, and worse, the backs of citizen soldiers.
One of my favorite photos of the Irish Civil War is found on the cover of the trade paperback edition of Tim Pat Coogan's classic, The IRA: A History. It shows anti-Treaty Volunteers of de Valera's faction patrolling a Dublin street. Their uniform is trench coats and fedoras and they are each armed simply with an SMLE in .303 and a bandoleer of ammunition in stripper clips. Likely, some of them have pistols concealed under their coats. But that is it. They are ready to fight, or if outnumbered and put under pressure, to easily dump arms and blend into the crowd.
"The speed with which tactical forces forget the main lessons from their collected experience, particularly those pertaining to weapons usage, would be difficult to overstate." -- S.L.A. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry Operations and Weapons Usage in Korea, Winter of 1950-51, p. 15
The overloading of the American infantryman is by no means merely a modern sin. S.L.A. Marshall was the first to lay out the problem in bookform in
The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation available from the Marine Corps Association Bookstore for $9.95.
Recently, the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have once again demonstrated the folly of overloading the man at the point of contact.
See this article and this report.
From the article:
No doubt about it, the Corps’ full combat load is making sure grunts live up to the name. But relief is in sight for Marines tired of humping the heft of full “battle rattle,” as the Corps looks to refine its stance on how much body armor and gear must be worn into combat.
According to a Naval Research Advisory Committee report, the average Marine carries 97 to 135 pounds in combat loads — far above the recommended weight of 50 pounds. The bulk of the weight carried is protective equipment.
“Considerable anecdotal information based on current combat operations indicates heavier loads severely reduce Marine or soldier effectiveness, especially on long-duration patrols, close-in urban combat and other adverse situations,” said a NRAC study, released in September.
“Common sense tells you that if you put more weight on a Marine, obviously he’s going to be slowed down,” said Capt. Jose Vengoechea, project officer for the Lighten the Load initiative at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in Quantico, Va., in a phone interview. “We break the rules. No one should have to carry more than 30 percent of their weight in combat.”
Combat loads vary from Marine to Marine. Machine gunners, squad leaders and Navy corpsmen, for example, all carry more weight than the average rifleman, Vengoechea said.
Every pound counts, no matter what the job.
“You can believe if you have a guy who is 170 pounds and you put 80 pounds on him, he’s not going to last very long,” Vengoechea said.
“As a society, we’re into surviving the hit, not avoiding the hit,” Vengoechea said. If, for example, a Marine spotted an insurgent who shot at him, how fast could the Marine run wearing 130 pounds of gear and expect to catch him?
How fast indeed.
So, my fellow gunnies of the armed citizenry, look to your gear with a serious eye to lightening your load. How much more than a rifle, bandoleer and canteen do you really need? Can you dispense with a canteen in urban environments? And if your AO is in the countryside, how much MUST you carry and how much can be downloaded into dispersed caches?
Read the above sources.
Study.
Think.
And ACT.
Now, while you still have the luxury.
Mike
III
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Godzilla, Good Old Boys and Christmas Morning
Well, here it is, 3 o'clock on Christmas morning and I'm up because my wife woke me at 2 to tell me that my 18-year-old college freshman daughter wasn't back from midnight church like she promised. Girl wouldn't answer her cell phone, and seeing as how she was out with her new Naval-Academy-bound boyfriend (he's going to their prep school in Rhode Island) and was about an hour and a half past the previously agreed upon time, I began dressing to drive over and roust the boy's old man. I mean, if I wasn't sleeping he wasn't going to sleep either. Just about the time I get my second shoe on and grab the keys and the .45, she calls saying they've been talking at the Waffle House. (And, yes, I can hear dishes clanking in the background.) Well, better than being dead beside the road.
OK, fine, that's one heart attack I don't have to have. She's home now and all through the house not a creature is stirring except, of course, me with angina. So I fire up the computer and what do I find?
The LA PTB's (Power That Be) have banned the possession of fifty caliber ammunition in the environs of that modern example of civic excrescence. While its just the latest example of Californication, I sent this letter to the LA Times. (I mean I ain't sleeping and Christmas or not, letter writing is my default mode).
To the Editor, LA Times
As a fifty caliber rifle shooter I note with interest that I am no longer welcome within the city limits of LA. The police chief says that fifty cals are only needed to deal with "Godzilla."
Well, when Godzilla comes to town don't come crying to me about how you don't have the means to deal with him. If he eats both the Mayor and the Police Chief, I'll merely be back here in Alabama laughing.
Reminds me of the story about the Tennessee good old boy who owned a Holland & Holland elephant gun in some big Nitro Express caliber. His friends used to rag him about it. "Earl what do you own an elephant gun for? You ain't never goin' to Africa and you know it."
"I keep it to protect me from any rogue elephants that might be around."
"But, Earl, there AIN'T no rogue elephants in Tennessee."
"That's because I'm ready for 'em and they know it."
Personally I think it would be a much more polite and refined society if a seventeen year old girl could walk into a Seven Eleven at 2 o'clock in the morning and buy an RPG without having to show ID.
One day, when the Nanny State collapses of its own tyrannical weight, we'll all find out I'm right.
Until then, if Godzilla comes to town me and my fifty caliber shooter buddies are just goin' to stay right here in Alabama in front of the TV set and munch popcorn while the atomic lizard tears y'all a new anal sphincter out of the heart of LA. Serves you right. Hope he eats Hollywood too. Especially Rosie O'Donnell. Heck, I'd pay to watch THAT.
Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
Sigh. I used to be up at three o'clock on Christmas morning assembling toys. I miss those days.
Mike
III
OK, fine, that's one heart attack I don't have to have. She's home now and all through the house not a creature is stirring except, of course, me with angina. So I fire up the computer and what do I find?
The LA PTB's (Power That Be) have banned the possession of fifty caliber ammunition in the environs of that modern example of civic excrescence. While its just the latest example of Californication, I sent this letter to the LA Times. (I mean I ain't sleeping and Christmas or not, letter writing is my default mode).
To the Editor, LA Times
As a fifty caliber rifle shooter I note with interest that I am no longer welcome within the city limits of LA. The police chief says that fifty cals are only needed to deal with "Godzilla."
Well, when Godzilla comes to town don't come crying to me about how you don't have the means to deal with him. If he eats both the Mayor and the Police Chief, I'll merely be back here in Alabama laughing.
Reminds me of the story about the Tennessee good old boy who owned a Holland & Holland elephant gun in some big Nitro Express caliber. His friends used to rag him about it. "Earl what do you own an elephant gun for? You ain't never goin' to Africa and you know it."
"I keep it to protect me from any rogue elephants that might be around."
"But, Earl, there AIN'T no rogue elephants in Tennessee."
"That's because I'm ready for 'em and they know it."
Personally I think it would be a much more polite and refined society if a seventeen year old girl could walk into a Seven Eleven at 2 o'clock in the morning and buy an RPG without having to show ID.
One day, when the Nanny State collapses of its own tyrannical weight, we'll all find out I'm right.
Until then, if Godzilla comes to town me and my fifty caliber shooter buddies are just goin' to stay right here in Alabama in front of the TV set and munch popcorn while the atomic lizard tears y'all a new anal sphincter out of the heart of LA. Serves you right. Hope he eats Hollywood too. Especially Rosie O'Donnell. Heck, I'd pay to watch THAT.
Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
Sigh. I used to be up at three o'clock on Christmas morning assembling toys. I miss those days.
Mike
III
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Have a blessed Christmas, folks.
I'm going to spend most of the next 24 hours with family and friends. I hope you do too. And remember, while you do, those men and women who are serving overseas, the prisoners like Wayne Fincher and David Olofson, and all those who froze in many Christmases past serving their country and standing by their principles. Remember especially the men of Valley Forge, and count your many blessings.
Merry Christmas from Mike, Rosey, Hannah, Zoe, Matthew, Nicole, Mason and Gabriel.
Merry Christmas from Mike, Rosey, Hannah, Zoe, Matthew, Nicole, Mason and Gabriel.
How the Enemy Thinks (and How They Take Heart From both Heller and the Pragmatists)
"Grow the f#ck up, boy. I have a joke for ya though...how do ya pick up chicks at Mount Carmel? That's right buddy, with a dust buster....bahahaha!" -- Willy at Buzz-Flash
"Don't dance on our grave until you dig it." -- Mike Vanderboegh
Well, folks, I slapped some more gun grabbers who are making their naked desire desire for your liberty and property perfectly clear -- over at Buzz-Flash they're fairly slobbering. The exchange is so interesting that I'm going to waste space and reprint the whole thing lest they take it down or edit it.
Note how they interpret the much-vaunted Heller decision, and especially in the counterpunch to my response how "Willy" uses one of Jeff Knox's replies to me (without following that thread to its end -- Jeff and I have agreed to quit calling each other names and we are currently together fighting the Holder nomination) to indicate how we may be ignored and, of course, subsequently attacked. (Funny thing, Willy mistakenly attributes Jeff's words to his father Neal, thus indicating that he is at least old enough to know the difference. Is Willy a "progressive-pragmatist"? I'll leave you to judge.)
But as you will read, the interview is uninhibited grave dancing on the 2nd Amendment -- only thing is, we ain't dead yet. ;-) As I explain to Willy in the coda below.
Mike
III
Scott Vogel and Freedom States Alliance See Americans' Attitudes About Guns Changing
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 1:56pm. Interviews
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
On every single level, from the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to House Congressional races and local ballot initiatives, the gun lobby's fear mongering lost.
-- Scott Vogel, Communications Director, Freedom States Alliance
* * *
Is America's love affair with guns finally ready for a divorce? Is the NRA more bark than bite? Can anyone really make a sane argument for civilians having .50 caliber sniper rifles?
With a new administration not beholden to the zealots of the gun lobby, maybe some headway can finally be made in getting our national gun fixation under control.
BuzzFlash interviewed Scott Vogel, Communications Director of Freedom States Alliance (FSA). FSA is actively changing the way America thinks about guns in order to build and strengthen the grassroots movement to reduce gun violence. FSA believes that all Americans deserve to live in a country free from the fear, threat, and devastation caused by gun violence -- each one of us deserves to be safe in our homes, schools, and communities. The focus of FSA is to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries through public awareness campaigns and by providing technical assistance and support to grassroots organizations.
Freedom States Alliance works directly with a network of seven state-based gun violence prevention organizations. (In full disclosure, Mark Karlin, the Editor and Publisher of BuzzFlash.com, helped found FSA.)
* * *
BuzzFlash: Did the National Rifle Association, or NRA, suffer a decisive defeat at the polls this year in the presidential race?
Scott Vogel: First, the Freedom States Alliance, which oversees our daily news blog, GunGuys.com, does not endorse political candidates. But having said that, yes, the gun lobby suffered a major defeat in this year's election cycle. It is one of the most important, yet "under reported" stories of this year's campaign.
On every single level, from the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to House Congressional races and local ballot initiatives, the gun lobby's fear mongering lost, and sensible candidates who support gun violence prevention won. In states where the gun lobby boasts of its power in key battleground states, and where the NRA claims to have large numbers of hunters and NRA members, such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Barack Obama won handily.
The Obama-Biden victory demonstrated definitively that our country is making a dramatic shift from the extremist agenda of the gun lobby to endorsing new leadership to address important issues, such as gun violence prevention.
Now, in this political environment, it is clear that President-elect Obama must act with crushing urgency to fix the broken economy, deal with two wars in the Middle East, and tackle the climate crisis. As gun violence prevention advocates, we also believe that we have a sensible, non-ideological administration now that is open to solving important problems, such as gun violence, in very pragmatic terms.
BuzzFlash: How did the NRA fare in U.S. House and Senate races?
Scott Vogel: There is no other way to say it, the gun lobby stepped into the "election ring" and got knocked out.
The Brady Campaign released a report in the aftermath of the elections and found that Brady-endorsed candidates won over 90% of their races. In U.S. Senate races between a Brady-backed candidate and an NRA -endorsed or "A" rated candidate, voters chose the Brady candidate 100% of the time, and in House races, 84% of the time.
Let's not forget that it was the NRA who said this was one of the most important elections in the organization's history, spending over $40 million dollars to defeat Barack Obama and other candidates who support common sense gun laws. After the gun lobby's dramatic defeats in 2006 and 2008, I think the American people should be asking if the gun lobby's extremist agenda is relevant anymore.
BuzzFlash: Putting this in context, is the reputation of the NRA as being invincible more perception than reality?
Scott Vogel: The NRA's political power is certainly based on "perception," but clearly that perspective is changing. Political observers and candidates are realizing that it doesn't help their careers and their standing to suck up to the gun lobby, and, in fact, it might spell the end of their political ambitions.
Also, keep in mind that over the last 25 years, fewer and fewer American households own guns, so the gun lobby's "base" has been dramatically shrinking. According to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), only 34% of U.S. households have guns, and individual gun ownership has dropped to only 22%. By every measure, this trending will continue downward.
I also think that the paranoia of "gun confiscation" preached by the gun lobby to block any and all efforts to enact common sense gun laws just doesn't resonate with voters anymore. I think the American people have, at least significantly, stopped listening to the NRA's scare tactics.
Take the issue of background checks on all gun sales, for example. Making it harder for drug dealers, domestic abusers, felons, and gang members to obtain deadly weapons by mandating a background check on every gun sale is simply a mainstream and sensible position. The great majority of the American people, across the entire political spectrum, support background checks. But the gun lobby vehemently opposes them and claims it will lead to "confiscating" all guns. I think many Americans have stopped listening to the delusional voices within the gun lobby.
The only leg that the gun lobby stands on is this "threat" that they can sway an election - which, as we have discussed, they clearly can't. I think the NRA's desperation will only get worse.
BuzzFlash: Why in the world does the NRA Institute for Legislative Action support the sale of weapons such as the .50 caliber sniper rifle that can be used to assassinate people from a mile away?
Scott Vogel: The gun lobby's position on pretty much every proposal to protect our national security and our communities from the threat of gun violence, including .50 caliber sniper rifles, can be summed up in one word: "No." The NRA simply has a knee-jerk reaction to every life-saving policy, if it involves regulating the gun industry in any way. The gun lobby has blinders on to the real world, and they fight every policy on an extreme and ideological basis. Their opposition makes no sense.
Even though the NRA knows that the national security of the United States is vulnerable to attack from powerful .50 caliber sniper rifles, especially our civilian aircraft during takeoff and landing, the gun lobby opposes our efforts to keep .50 caliber sniper rifles out of the hands of terrorists. The reason is that supporting a ban on .50 caliber sniper rifles would make the gun lobby look "weak" to their base of extremists who fight under the banner of "no surrender," not to mention the immense profit motive by the gun industry to sell .50 caliber rifles. The five men just convicted on conspiracy charges for a terrorist plot against Ft. Dix had practiced with and tried to buy assault weapons.
But the NRA knows that if there was ever, god forbid, an attack with a .50 caliber sniper rifle - which is why we are urgently calling for an immediate federal ban on these weapons of terror - the gun lobby would have to face the intense scrutiny of the American public about why they enabled a terrorist attack to occur.
BuzzFlash: Likewise, why is the NRA pushing for the right of individuals to shoot anyone they even perceive as a threat to them, or "claim" is a threat to them?
Scott Vogel: To some extent, the gun lobby has started running out of ideas to push on behalf of their base. Their agenda to allow armed civilians a "license to murder," as we call it, to shoot and kill anyone whom a gun owner "feels" is a threat, even if his or her safety is not in jeopardy, is one of the most extreme positions that the NRA pushes.
The gun lobby is now venturing into areas that go beyond guns. They are supporting, in effect, vigilante justice. For example, there was an incident in Texas, where Joe Horn called a 9-1-1 operator to report that his neighbor's house was being burglarized. Although the 9-1-1 operator told Horn to stay in his home, he took his shotgun, left his house and shot to death two men, both Hispanic immigrants, then claiming self-defense. This is just one chilling example. It is very troubling, especially to law enforcement officials and prosecutors who strongly oppose these "castle doctrine" type laws. The truth is that we already have legal protections for people defending themselves.
But that's not all that the gun lobby is pushing for in terms of extending their radical agenda. The gun lobby is fervently pressing to allow college students - we're talking about 18, 19, 20-year-old males mind you - to carry hidden and loaded guns on campus and in dorm rooms, despite their pervasive access to drugs and alcohol. They claim that their argument is to stop another Virginia Tech type massacre, but the reality is that they just want to eviscerate any and all restrictions on carrying deadly guns, whether it be on college campuses, or at child day care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, and even government buildings and courtrooms. It's an extreme position to say the least.
BuzzFlash: How do you think the Supreme Court ruling this year that held, for the first time in its history, that the Second Amendment protects the "right to keep and bear arms" will affect gun control in the future?
Scott Vogel: It's difficult to say how the Supreme Court's ruling in Heller, which stripped the District of Columbia of its decades old handgun ban, will impact legislation to stop gun violence in the long term. My organization, the Freedom States Alliance, believes it was simply a craven, political decision by the conservative majority that ignored longstanding precedent and the robust history of gun regulations in the United States.
It was an unprecedented reversal by the Court to suddenly strike down a gun violence prevention measure based on the claim that DC's gun laws violated the Second Amendment. The Court simply had no basis to hear the case, and certainly an even weaker argument in its ruling. In fact, even conservative legal scholars have lambasted the Supreme Court's ruling, notably criticizing Justice Scalia for his incoherent opinion. They have said that the Court had no business telling an American city that they can't deal with gun violence on the local level.
On the one hand, cities such as Chicago, where we live, are fighting to keep our handgun ban. But after the Court's Heller ruling, it's very uncertain. A federal judge in Chicago just upheld the city's ban, but it is now being appealed. Other Illinois communities are ending their handgun bans and replacing them with stringent gun regulations for fear of the enormous legal costs, for local governments trying to fight the gun lobby and potentially losing. They just can't afford the potential cost with this weakened economy.
One "possibility" is that the Court's ruling in Heller will take the sting out of the gun lobby's radical agenda by acknowledging that there is a "Second Amendment" right to own guns - which we fervently disagree with - but that right, in no way, prohibits common sense gun regulations.
To cite Justice Scalia himself from his majority opinion:
"Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited...[It is not a] right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. ...[The Court's] opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms," (p. 54-55).
In short, based on the Court's own decision, there is nothing in its ruling to prohibit robust regulations of firearms or the gun industry.
BuzzFlash: As a follow-up, what constitutes an "arm"? Is a bazooka an "arm"? A .50 caliber sniper rifle? How can the Supreme Court decide what constitutes an "arm" when the only guns around when the Constitution was written were flintlocks and muskets?
Scott Vogel: It's a very good question. At what point, as the industry continues to innovate with deadlier and more powerful weapons, is a "gun" no longer just a gun? That's why we need to better identify and classify firearms and make clear distinctions between bolt action hunting rifles, and cop-killing assault weapons, because there are important differences. The gun lobby has succeeded in blurring and weakening the definitions and functions of firearms to block legislation, often claiming that any gun regulation will affect "hunting rifles," which is patently not true.
Your point is well taken. Even if you believe in an interpretation that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership, the Amendment was written when muskets were not the deadly products that are mass produced today. Now a mentally unstable student can easily obtain two powerful handguns with multiple high-capacity magazines and commit mass murder, such as the 32 students and professors killed at Virginia Tech. As you said, a terrorist armed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle could target a chemical or industrial refinery in a horrific attack. Is this weapon a gun? I don't think so.
BuzzFlash: Recently the Interior Department implemented a regulation allowing individuals to carry hidden handguns into National Parks. Just why exactly would anyone need to bring a concealed handgun into a National Park?
Scott Vogel: Gun owners don't need to carry hidden and loaded guns in our national parks, or anywhere else, for that matter. The majority of Americans are in agreement, we simply don't want guns to be carried in our national pristine wilderness areas and national treasures. It's an offensive policy, frankly.
This is, yet again, another farewell gift by George W. Bush to his buddies in the gun lobby. There is simply no reason for this rule change. We are urging President-elect Obama, immediately upon taking office, to reverse the Interior Department's rule change.
During the Interior Department's public comment period on the proposed rule change, the Department received 140,000 comments, the vast majority opposing the gun lobby's radical agenda. But the Bush administration still went with the dangerous rule change anyway.
Most upsetting is that the Bush administration completely and utterly dismissed the advice of the career professionals who protect our national parks, including our park rangers, law enforcement officials, and conservationists. In a letter sent to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne on April 3, 2008, seven former directors of the National Park Service said that there was no need to change the existing regulation.
BuzzFlash: Do you think that handgun control proponents have given up the fight, given the string of concessions that the Bush Administration made to the NRA over the past 8 years, many of which were supported by Democrats?
Scott Vogel: I think that gun violence prevention advocates have felt the sting of the last eight years, living in the wilderness, as it were, under the Bush administration's extremist and pro-gun ideology. Remember, the NRA bragged in 2000 that if George W. Bush won election, they would be working out of his office, and they were right.
The gun lobby and gun industry got pretty much everything they wanted out of the Bush administration. It was their version of a shopping spree. The gun lobby succeeded in giving unprecedented legal immunity to the gun industry against civil lawsuits. They blocked efforts to renew and strengthen the federal assault weapons ban in 2004. They succeeded in preventing the release of gun crime trace data to local law enforcement officials to curb gun trafficking, called the Tiahrt Amendment.
As we just discussed, they allowed guns to be carried in our national parks. And although Bush's own Solicitor General asked that the Supreme Court send back the Heller case to the District of Columbia's Court of Appeals for a less stringent standard of review, Vice-President Cheney went against his own President and joined a legal brief from members of Congress who support the NRA.
And then, of course, there is the list of things they "didn't do," pressing for life-saving policies such as extending Brady background checks on all gun sales, or closing the gun show loophole, or even fully funding ATF to effectively close down rogue gun dealers. The Bush administration permitted the ever increasing lethality of firearms, standing idly by while .50 caliber sniper rifles became more prevalent and allowing an explosion of new and powerful assault weapons to be mass produced and mass marketed.
Although it seems like ancient history now, one of the biggest issues in the democratic primary in 2000 between Sen. Bill Bradley and Vice-President Al Gore was their differences on gun violence prevention. Bradley supported both licensing gun owners and registering guns, whereas Gore preferred licensing, and later advocated for background checks against Gov. Bush during the 2000 election.
In fact, when Jim Lehrer of the NewsHour asked what was the difference between Gore and Bush on the gun issue, Gore said of the Texas Governor: "He's with the NRA -- and I'm not."
President Clinton used gun control as a scapegoat for losing Congress in the 1994 midterm elections. And several of Gore's campaign advisers said that the "gun issue" cost him West Virginia and Arkansas - despite the fact that Gore won the popular vote and received a half million more votes over Bush. With all that in mind, the funding from several foundations, large donors and even advocates for gun violence prevention dried up or went away.
The prevailing wisdom in politics was that the "gun issue" was a losing position. For a time, many advocates simply felt that under President Bush's radical administration, gun control was a lost cause, and so we saw a kind of "depression" set in. It has been difficult.
But the truth is that there are advocates and organizations across the country that have not given up, and that continue to fight for their principles to enact solutions to save lives from gun violence.
Now, with a new administration, and a dramatically different point of view and expectation that government has a significant role to play in bettering our lives and society, we believe that there are opportunities, even small incremental steps, to start making a difference on the gun violence epidemic.
BuzzFlash: Do you believe that there might come a time when NRA members might become rational about the dangers of certain types of weaponry? After all, the NRA successfully supported the "right" of people on the FBI terrorists watch list to buy a gun. That threatens our national security. Why do members of the NRA support compromising our safety as a nation?
Scott Vogel: I think there will always be a radical fringe of the pro-gun movement that will always see attempts to reduce gun violence as an infringement on their survival, power, and identity. The gun issue is symbolic, and deeply embedded in the psyche of a lot of extreme gun owners. Those individuals are not like to change their beliefs and support efforts to curb gun violence.
Those gun owners see the world through a prism of fear, and imagine that enemies such as gun violence prevention advocates, are trying to take away their ability to defend themselves and their families.
But you're right, it is deeply ironic that the same radical gun owners who live in perpetual fear of stronger gun laws being enacted actually risk their own lives and their families by owning guns, especially if their weapons are not stored securely.
But those fringe groups or individuals bear no real impact on our politics. The truth is that over time, as gun ownership continues to decrease, and as older generations pass on, the youth of today simply do not share the extremist viewpoints by the gun proponents of the past. Young people today, on the whole, don't see guns, just like the issue of equality for gay and lesbian Americans, as a divisive cultural issue. They are far more pragmatic and less ideological and extreme than the older generation.
I think the younger generation demonstrated that, in carrying Barack Obama to the White House, there is a space for a new and hopeful era in politics where government becomes a "solutions business." I also think that, just like the issue of global warming, we will continue to see a shift where gun violence becomes less of a divisive political issue, and more of a mainstream and bipartisan challenge for our generation to solve.
BuzzFlash interview by Mark Karlin.
* * *
My reply:
Extrapolating from your own cowardice
Submitted by Dutchman6 on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 12:55am.
As a "bitter clinger" I will concede to Mr. Vogel the point that the GOP and the NRA have been poltically neutered and swept from the field and firearm owners like me no longer can count on any buffer between us and further gun control. You would be surprised how little that worries us. You have us surrounded, you poor bastards.
Your mistake is in thinking that the NRA and the GOP protected US, whereas they were actually protecting YOU. As long as there was a reasonable expectation of deflecting the further seizure of our liberty and our property by political means, we were content to let the NRA and GOP play the game. Now, nothing separates you from both us and the unintended consequences of your actions.
You can already see this played out in every gun shop in the country, as they are swamped with customers, many of them first time buyers. The question you must ask yourselves is: Are these people arming, spending good money during hard times, merely to turn them over when told to by the Obama regime? Don't extrapolate our behavior from your own cowardice. Just because YOU wouldn't think of disobeying a government order at the risk of your life, doesn't mean we wouldn't. And do I need to remind you that we're the ones with the firearms?
Surely you understand we outnumber the federal police by many orders of magnitude. For 75 years we have been pushed back from our traditional liberties when it comes to firearms and each time we backed up, grumbling but complying. But now many of us are done backing up and we will refuse to obey any new limitations on our liberty or property.
For what have we to show for our seven plus decades of increasingly tighter gun laws? Have they limited criminal behavior? No, gun laws by definition are only aimed at the law abiding. Criminals will do what they will. It has recently become popular for criminals to steal AR-15 patrol rifles from police cars. In what way would banning civilians from owning AR-15s prevent that? And if the street gangs are armed with such weapons, why should honest folks be debarred from the same weapons to defend themselves against the gangs?
Understand this, you can pass any "law" you like but we will not obey them. Then you must reconcile yourselves to come to our homes and seize them from us. And sometime after the first few of us die in your confiscatory raids, you will discover another truth taught by history. Read the story of the Deacons for Defense and Justice during the 60s. They would be the first to spit on your proposals. For those black veterans who took up arms against the Klan understood that just because a government was "elected" didn't mean it was fair, or legitimate.
And when that happens, even when democracy turns to tyranny, we of the despised minority still get to vote. We just won't use voting booths to do it. Sparking a civil war is a funny way to "reduce gun deaths."
Mike Vanderboegh, Three Percenter
PS: I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."
Then we have Willy (an appropriate moniker if there ever was one). I present Willy's posts as they appear (the "progressive's apparently aren't big on paragraphs on their blogs).
extrapolating...something
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:04am.
Wow... you must not be a big fan of Neal Knox...who has been making a lot of sense. try reading his articles in the shotgun news these last couple issues. The reason all you delusional paranoid gun f*gs are buying all the guns (and raising the prices for normal folks such as myself) is because you're easily manipulated. its great fun to watch the rumor mill on gunboards.com-all I have to say is that the UN is destroying the world's surplus ammo stores and you send AIM and Century and the rest of 'em the money you should be saving for your kid's college fund-tell you obama isa commie and you eat it right up...end of the world dude!. Pathetic really. Try to remember Colt and Ruger where big supporters of the assualt rifle ban...which failed to ban their products for some reason. But never mind that now, instead, tell me who you think you are going to shoot if the "Gobnit" comes for yer guns? the vegetarian couple down the street or Operators from blackwater security? Who exactly? Lets be clear here, on the off chance this mildly right of center administration actually has time to worry about you and your little guns, they will come for them in Strykers and APCs and they will kill you and half the people on your block, just like we do in Iraq. Your small arms would be about as effective as a AK in every house in iraq is at the moment.Grow the f#ck up, boy. I have a joke for ya though...how do ya pick up chicks at Mount Carmel? That's right buddy, with a dust buster....bahahaha! Sooo...Big talk from a guy in camo underwear, but sadly, you're more likely to use your guns to shoot your fellow citizens than anyone who actually has any power over you-maybe your gun angst will alow you to shoot all the black guys in your neigborhood? Somehow I doubt you're smart enough to do anything effective. The folks setting your pathetic little gun agenda have great experience at playing you against me. and you fell for it. You might want to consider this: Everyone I know is buying guns to protect ourselves from dipsticks like you, rather than from a gun thieving government. while I suspect you're probably a fat pussy, and hardly man enough to shoot anyone, I could be wrong so, in the Spirit of hope...I suggest you might want to turn your rage in the direction of your actual tormentors...and try to remember, that in this country, your power doesn't really come from the barrel of a gun. in fact, the second you start shooting, you will be lost. "They" live for that shit.
more bad spelling lol
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:27am.
ps, after saying all of that, I do have to admit the article is mildly annoying. The little blue hyper links on "cop killing assualt weapons" are a bit moronic. One wonders if this is a good time to antagonise the little gunnies right now...I do have a saying myself though: "it's not guns that kill people, it's morons with guns". Sadly, it just so happens we have a lot of them there morons here in 'murika-the one above would be a perfect example of someone who maybe should have to take some sort of written exam before plunking donne 300 bucks for a WASR at his local Dunhams. One also wonders how it would be if the gunf@gs went to as much trouble supporting a actual democracy with decent paying jobs like they have in say...Switzerland...as they do in hoarding weapons and taking carbine classes here in preparation for the "SHTF" as they love to say...whether it would be just as safe in american as in switzerland where, as the gunf*gs like to point out, there is a machine gun in every home
reprinted with permission
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:44am.
The Knox Report From the Firearms Coalition Mutual Assured Destruction The power is in the threat, not the execution By Jeff Knox (October 29, 2008) There are some who are fond of repeating Jefferson’s comment about the tree of liberty needing to be “refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” though they often skip the part about patriots and choose to only include the tyrants. The problem is that in actual practice you couldn’t leave out, “the blood of patriots,” because when the blood of tyrants is spilt, the blood of patriots must also be spilt. There is simply no way around it. The same guys are often fond of bumper sticker slogans like, “…from my cold dead fingers,” and the more erudite, “MOLON LAVE,” and while I can appreciate the sentiment, I also know that in 99.995% of cases it’s simply not true. The fact is that only those who have nothing to lose (and nothing to live for) are willing to give up everything – including their lives – in a symbolic gesture of defiance. The rest of us, those with families – kids, grand-kids, vulnerable parents – and homes, jobs, and lives, are not interested in ditching the house, refrigerator, and HD-TV in exchange for a prison cell or a mountain cave. Sure, if the Russian paratroopers start landing in “Red Dawn” fashion, many of us will grab our guns and go join the “Wolverines,” but that’s only when everything is gone anyway. Don’t expect average Americans to rise up in revolution because the government is playing fast and loose with the Bill of Rights or because taxes get too high. That’s not the way modern Americans think, nor is it the way the world works today. Armed revolt in America would not lead to a renaissance of Jeffersonian liberalism; it would lead to the destruction of our nation and the guarantee that whatever replaced it would be worse than what it replaced. Like nuclear deterrence, it is the threat that saves the world, not the execution. If all of the 60 to 80 million gunowners in this nation were to rise up as one to ward off invasion or reject tyranny, they would be an unstoppable force. Nay-sayers like to dismiss this idea because of the technological advantages enjoyed by the modern military, but there are 90 guns for every 100 people in the US and many, if not most, of the 2 million members of the military and the 1 million sworn law enforcement officers are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and the principles of liberty. There is simply no doubt that the citizens’ militia does have the capacity and potential to defeat just about any military force in the world. Only serious application of nuclear and/or biological weapons – wiping out a substantial portion of the population – would be able to turn the tide. While this is all accurate and works well on paper, just like Marxism and Amway networks, the whole thing falls apart in practice because people never do what you want them to do or what they ought to do – even when doing so is clearly in their own best interests. During the Revolutionary war, a full 40 to 45% of Americans actively supported the revolt. Today, less than 6% of gunowners are even minimally active in political activism. Gunowners turn out for elections at about the same rate as the non-gun owning public. If gunowners and supporters of liberty can’t even agree on a presidential candidate, what makes any of them think that they will be able to agree on a revolution? The threat of armed revolt must be maintained, but like the mutual assured destruction of nuclear war, its implementation must be avoided at all costs. If we have the numbers and the commitment to win a revolution then we should easily be able to win an election. The solution lies in the ballot box rather than the ammo box because the reality of a new revolution is that it is an all or worse than nothing proposition. When people who should know better talk about revolution being the answer, impressionable idiots and misfits like Timothy McVeigh or the morons caught plotting to assassinate Barack Obama, believe that they are leading the revolution when in reality they are just giving the government an excuse to tighten the screws and pushing the public to accept the screw-tightening as necessary. The whole idea behind mutual assured destruction is that it forces the parties to find better ways to settle their differences. Our founders put the mechanisms in place and it’s up to us to use those mechanisms to restore liberty and save the republic. Permission to reprint or post this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes is hereby granted provided this credit is included. Text is available at www.FirearmsCoalition.org. To receive The Firearms Coalition’s bi-monthly newsletter, The Hard Corps Report, write to PO Box 3313, Manassas, VA 20108
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:45am.
Written by Jeff Knox, on 10-30-2008 14:19 As expected, and intended, my latest Knox Report column has upset some in the, "All is lost; let's start a shooting war" camp. It is mind boggling to me that intelligent people could be so short sighted and misguided as to think that killing people and blowing things up is somehow going to make things better for our grandchildren. They seem to think that because only about 5% of the populace supported the idea of seceding from the English Empire back in 1776, that their "magic number" is 3% and they think they have that because some survey suggested that 3% of the population thinks violence against the government is justified or could be justified today. What they fail to take into account is the "bluster factor" of people who will agree with such a statement, but who don't really mean it, and the radical other side - the people who support the terrorist tactics of the Animal Liberation Front and radical Leftists like Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. What I want to know is, where are the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Adamses and Hancocks? Who do these Bozos think is going to lead the new America out of the ashes and back to its Constitutional glory, and why arent these giants running for public office and leading the political revolution? What do they think China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea are going to be doing while their merry little band of terrorists is busy crippling our nation and trying to foment rebellion? What exactly do they expect the "end" of their rebellion to look like? How are our children and grandchildren going to be better off? Revolution is like cannibalism; it can be justified, but only when there is absolutely no other choice for survival. Anyone who talks revolution but isn't actively and diligently working hard every day to elect quality people to office at every level and to educate the elected officials already in office about their core responsibilities, is just a bag of hot air who would rather talk about sacrificing everything - and possibly act on that talk - than do the hard work and make the sacrifices necessary to solve the problems within the system our founders created. When our forefathers revolted against English rule, they were in an untenable situation. They had no vote in the legislative body. They had no say in their government. They had no voice in regulatory matters. They were mere subjects and had no means of redressing wrongs. That is not our situation today. We have a voice. We have a vote. We have the means to talk directly to our elected officials and our fellow citizens, and we have the means to fire politicians who don't listen to our council and to replace them with politicians who understand their jobs. It is not easy and it is often frustrating, but it is not impossible and our situation is not hopeless. Things might be headed further in the wrong direction with the coming elections, but such swings are part of a pendulum and that pendulum will swing back in our direction again - unless some self-proclaimed freedom fighters screw it all up and convince the majority that liberty is too dangerous and freedom too costly. That's exactly what happened in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh decided that he was going to get the revolution rolling by blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City. The pendulum was already swinging back to the right. The public was fed up with the federal government's anti-liberty actions and had sent a large crop of, mostly very conservative, mostly firs-time politicians to Washington to start straightening out the mess. The "far right" was building and growing and, while there was a loud "lunatic fringe" element to the militia movement, the overall motion was in the right direction - until McVeigh took his action. The destruction of the Murrah Federal Building caused a backlash that continues today. Where once "unorganized militias" and groups calling themselves "patriots" with a focus on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, suddenly there were empty shells and the name "patriot" became tainted and remains suspect to this day. Timothy McVeigh - and the gun show philosophers who fueled his misguided sense of patriotism - did more to hurt the cause of liberty than Janet Reno and Bill Clinton could have ever dreamed. One misguided moron with a rifle can do more harm to the fight to restore our gun rights than a thousand Barack Obamas or Hillary Clintons. So I say to Mike Vanderboegh and those who believe as he apparently does: If you want to start a violent revolution, go do it in Iran, or Cuba, or Mexico, but don't bring you destructive, self-defeating, chest beating into my fight for the Constitution and liberty. If the time comes when we must resort to violence to restore our republic, I will be in the vanguard, but until that time comes, I will dedicate my life - as my father dedicated his life - to using the Constitution, and the rights and limits it illuminates, as the most powerful weapon for preserving it and the republic. ----------------
To which I responded:
Don't dance on our grave until you dig it.
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Submitted by Dutchman6 on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 8:24am.
Hey, Willy, it's Jeff Knox not his late father Neal and I wouldn't place too much faith on an old post of his. You can call us all the names in the world and make tasteless jokes about dead Davidian innocents, it still changes nothing. Pass what laws you may wish. Pass them, and watch what happens. We're done backing up. You may kill us for our temerity, but you will find the killing a far longer, larger and more mutually ghastly outcome than the Clintonistas gave the Davidians. We understand Waco rules now. May God have mercy on the souls of those who try to reapply them to us. On them, and those who send them.
Mike Vanderboegh, Three Percenter
"Don't dance on our grave until you dig it." -- Mike Vanderboegh
Well, folks, I slapped some more gun grabbers who are making their naked desire desire for your liberty and property perfectly clear -- over at Buzz-Flash they're fairly slobbering. The exchange is so interesting that I'm going to waste space and reprint the whole thing lest they take it down or edit it.
Note how they interpret the much-vaunted Heller decision, and especially in the counterpunch to my response how "Willy" uses one of Jeff Knox's replies to me (without following that thread to its end -- Jeff and I have agreed to quit calling each other names and we are currently together fighting the Holder nomination) to indicate how we may be ignored and, of course, subsequently attacked. (Funny thing, Willy mistakenly attributes Jeff's words to his father Neal, thus indicating that he is at least old enough to know the difference. Is Willy a "progressive-pragmatist"? I'll leave you to judge.)
But as you will read, the interview is uninhibited grave dancing on the 2nd Amendment -- only thing is, we ain't dead yet. ;-) As I explain to Willy in the coda below.
Mike
III
Scott Vogel and Freedom States Alliance See Americans' Attitudes About Guns Changing
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 1:56pm. Interviews
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
On every single level, from the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to House Congressional races and local ballot initiatives, the gun lobby's fear mongering lost.
-- Scott Vogel, Communications Director, Freedom States Alliance
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Is America's love affair with guns finally ready for a divorce? Is the NRA more bark than bite? Can anyone really make a sane argument for civilians having .50 caliber sniper rifles?
With a new administration not beholden to the zealots of the gun lobby, maybe some headway can finally be made in getting our national gun fixation under control.
BuzzFlash interviewed Scott Vogel, Communications Director of Freedom States Alliance (FSA). FSA is actively changing the way America thinks about guns in order to build and strengthen the grassroots movement to reduce gun violence. FSA believes that all Americans deserve to live in a country free from the fear, threat, and devastation caused by gun violence -- each one of us deserves to be safe in our homes, schools, and communities. The focus of FSA is to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries through public awareness campaigns and by providing technical assistance and support to grassroots organizations.
Freedom States Alliance works directly with a network of seven state-based gun violence prevention organizations. (In full disclosure, Mark Karlin, the Editor and Publisher of BuzzFlash.com, helped found FSA.)
* * *
BuzzFlash: Did the National Rifle Association, or NRA, suffer a decisive defeat at the polls this year in the presidential race?
Scott Vogel: First, the Freedom States Alliance, which oversees our daily news blog, GunGuys.com, does not endorse political candidates. But having said that, yes, the gun lobby suffered a major defeat in this year's election cycle. It is one of the most important, yet "under reported" stories of this year's campaign.
On every single level, from the election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to House Congressional races and local ballot initiatives, the gun lobby's fear mongering lost, and sensible candidates who support gun violence prevention won. In states where the gun lobby boasts of its power in key battleground states, and where the NRA claims to have large numbers of hunters and NRA members, such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Barack Obama won handily.
The Obama-Biden victory demonstrated definitively that our country is making a dramatic shift from the extremist agenda of the gun lobby to endorsing new leadership to address important issues, such as gun violence prevention.
Now, in this political environment, it is clear that President-elect Obama must act with crushing urgency to fix the broken economy, deal with two wars in the Middle East, and tackle the climate crisis. As gun violence prevention advocates, we also believe that we have a sensible, non-ideological administration now that is open to solving important problems, such as gun violence, in very pragmatic terms.
BuzzFlash: How did the NRA fare in U.S. House and Senate races?
Scott Vogel: There is no other way to say it, the gun lobby stepped into the "election ring" and got knocked out.
The Brady Campaign released a report in the aftermath of the elections and found that Brady-endorsed candidates won over 90% of their races. In U.S. Senate races between a Brady-backed candidate and an NRA -endorsed or "A" rated candidate, voters chose the Brady candidate 100% of the time, and in House races, 84% of the time.
Let's not forget that it was the NRA who said this was one of the most important elections in the organization's history, spending over $40 million dollars to defeat Barack Obama and other candidates who support common sense gun laws. After the gun lobby's dramatic defeats in 2006 and 2008, I think the American people should be asking if the gun lobby's extremist agenda is relevant anymore.
BuzzFlash: Putting this in context, is the reputation of the NRA as being invincible more perception than reality?
Scott Vogel: The NRA's political power is certainly based on "perception," but clearly that perspective is changing. Political observers and candidates are realizing that it doesn't help their careers and their standing to suck up to the gun lobby, and, in fact, it might spell the end of their political ambitions.
Also, keep in mind that over the last 25 years, fewer and fewer American households own guns, so the gun lobby's "base" has been dramatically shrinking. According to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), only 34% of U.S. households have guns, and individual gun ownership has dropped to only 22%. By every measure, this trending will continue downward.
I also think that the paranoia of "gun confiscation" preached by the gun lobby to block any and all efforts to enact common sense gun laws just doesn't resonate with voters anymore. I think the American people have, at least significantly, stopped listening to the NRA's scare tactics.
Take the issue of background checks on all gun sales, for example. Making it harder for drug dealers, domestic abusers, felons, and gang members to obtain deadly weapons by mandating a background check on every gun sale is simply a mainstream and sensible position. The great majority of the American people, across the entire political spectrum, support background checks. But the gun lobby vehemently opposes them and claims it will lead to "confiscating" all guns. I think many Americans have stopped listening to the delusional voices within the gun lobby.
The only leg that the gun lobby stands on is this "threat" that they can sway an election - which, as we have discussed, they clearly can't. I think the NRA's desperation will only get worse.
BuzzFlash: Why in the world does the NRA Institute for Legislative Action support the sale of weapons such as the .50 caliber sniper rifle that can be used to assassinate people from a mile away?
Scott Vogel: The gun lobby's position on pretty much every proposal to protect our national security and our communities from the threat of gun violence, including .50 caliber sniper rifles, can be summed up in one word: "No." The NRA simply has a knee-jerk reaction to every life-saving policy, if it involves regulating the gun industry in any way. The gun lobby has blinders on to the real world, and they fight every policy on an extreme and ideological basis. Their opposition makes no sense.
Even though the NRA knows that the national security of the United States is vulnerable to attack from powerful .50 caliber sniper rifles, especially our civilian aircraft during takeoff and landing, the gun lobby opposes our efforts to keep .50 caliber sniper rifles out of the hands of terrorists. The reason is that supporting a ban on .50 caliber sniper rifles would make the gun lobby look "weak" to their base of extremists who fight under the banner of "no surrender," not to mention the immense profit motive by the gun industry to sell .50 caliber rifles. The five men just convicted on conspiracy charges for a terrorist plot against Ft. Dix had practiced with and tried to buy assault weapons.
But the NRA knows that if there was ever, god forbid, an attack with a .50 caliber sniper rifle - which is why we are urgently calling for an immediate federal ban on these weapons of terror - the gun lobby would have to face the intense scrutiny of the American public about why they enabled a terrorist attack to occur.
BuzzFlash: Likewise, why is the NRA pushing for the right of individuals to shoot anyone they even perceive as a threat to them, or "claim" is a threat to them?
Scott Vogel: To some extent, the gun lobby has started running out of ideas to push on behalf of their base. Their agenda to allow armed civilians a "license to murder," as we call it, to shoot and kill anyone whom a gun owner "feels" is a threat, even if his or her safety is not in jeopardy, is one of the most extreme positions that the NRA pushes.
The gun lobby is now venturing into areas that go beyond guns. They are supporting, in effect, vigilante justice. For example, there was an incident in Texas, where Joe Horn called a 9-1-1 operator to report that his neighbor's house was being burglarized. Although the 9-1-1 operator told Horn to stay in his home, he took his shotgun, left his house and shot to death two men, both Hispanic immigrants, then claiming self-defense. This is just one chilling example. It is very troubling, especially to law enforcement officials and prosecutors who strongly oppose these "castle doctrine" type laws. The truth is that we already have legal protections for people defending themselves.
But that's not all that the gun lobby is pushing for in terms of extending their radical agenda. The gun lobby is fervently pressing to allow college students - we're talking about 18, 19, 20-year-old males mind you - to carry hidden and loaded guns on campus and in dorm rooms, despite their pervasive access to drugs and alcohol. They claim that their argument is to stop another Virginia Tech type massacre, but the reality is that they just want to eviscerate any and all restrictions on carrying deadly guns, whether it be on college campuses, or at child day care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, and even government buildings and courtrooms. It's an extreme position to say the least.
BuzzFlash: How do you think the Supreme Court ruling this year that held, for the first time in its history, that the Second Amendment protects the "right to keep and bear arms" will affect gun control in the future?
Scott Vogel: It's difficult to say how the Supreme Court's ruling in Heller, which stripped the District of Columbia of its decades old handgun ban, will impact legislation to stop gun violence in the long term. My organization, the Freedom States Alliance, believes it was simply a craven, political decision by the conservative majority that ignored longstanding precedent and the robust history of gun regulations in the United States.
It was an unprecedented reversal by the Court to suddenly strike down a gun violence prevention measure based on the claim that DC's gun laws violated the Second Amendment. The Court simply had no basis to hear the case, and certainly an even weaker argument in its ruling. In fact, even conservative legal scholars have lambasted the Supreme Court's ruling, notably criticizing Justice Scalia for his incoherent opinion. They have said that the Court had no business telling an American city that they can't deal with gun violence on the local level.
On the one hand, cities such as Chicago, where we live, are fighting to keep our handgun ban. But after the Court's Heller ruling, it's very uncertain. A federal judge in Chicago just upheld the city's ban, but it is now being appealed. Other Illinois communities are ending their handgun bans and replacing them with stringent gun regulations for fear of the enormous legal costs, for local governments trying to fight the gun lobby and potentially losing. They just can't afford the potential cost with this weakened economy.
One "possibility" is that the Court's ruling in Heller will take the sting out of the gun lobby's radical agenda by acknowledging that there is a "Second Amendment" right to own guns - which we fervently disagree with - but that right, in no way, prohibits common sense gun regulations.
To cite Justice Scalia himself from his majority opinion:
"Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited...[It is not a] right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. ...[The Court's] opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms," (p. 54-55).
In short, based on the Court's own decision, there is nothing in its ruling to prohibit robust regulations of firearms or the gun industry.
BuzzFlash: As a follow-up, what constitutes an "arm"? Is a bazooka an "arm"? A .50 caliber sniper rifle? How can the Supreme Court decide what constitutes an "arm" when the only guns around when the Constitution was written were flintlocks and muskets?
Scott Vogel: It's a very good question. At what point, as the industry continues to innovate with deadlier and more powerful weapons, is a "gun" no longer just a gun? That's why we need to better identify and classify firearms and make clear distinctions between bolt action hunting rifles, and cop-killing assault weapons, because there are important differences. The gun lobby has succeeded in blurring and weakening the definitions and functions of firearms to block legislation, often claiming that any gun regulation will affect "hunting rifles," which is patently not true.
Your point is well taken. Even if you believe in an interpretation that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership, the Amendment was written when muskets were not the deadly products that are mass produced today. Now a mentally unstable student can easily obtain two powerful handguns with multiple high-capacity magazines and commit mass murder, such as the 32 students and professors killed at Virginia Tech. As you said, a terrorist armed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle could target a chemical or industrial refinery in a horrific attack. Is this weapon a gun? I don't think so.
BuzzFlash: Recently the Interior Department implemented a regulation allowing individuals to carry hidden handguns into National Parks. Just why exactly would anyone need to bring a concealed handgun into a National Park?
Scott Vogel: Gun owners don't need to carry hidden and loaded guns in our national parks, or anywhere else, for that matter. The majority of Americans are in agreement, we simply don't want guns to be carried in our national pristine wilderness areas and national treasures. It's an offensive policy, frankly.
This is, yet again, another farewell gift by George W. Bush to his buddies in the gun lobby. There is simply no reason for this rule change. We are urging President-elect Obama, immediately upon taking office, to reverse the Interior Department's rule change.
During the Interior Department's public comment period on the proposed rule change, the Department received 140,000 comments, the vast majority opposing the gun lobby's radical agenda. But the Bush administration still went with the dangerous rule change anyway.
Most upsetting is that the Bush administration completely and utterly dismissed the advice of the career professionals who protect our national parks, including our park rangers, law enforcement officials, and conservationists. In a letter sent to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne on April 3, 2008, seven former directors of the National Park Service said that there was no need to change the existing regulation.
BuzzFlash: Do you think that handgun control proponents have given up the fight, given the string of concessions that the Bush Administration made to the NRA over the past 8 years, many of which were supported by Democrats?
Scott Vogel: I think that gun violence prevention advocates have felt the sting of the last eight years, living in the wilderness, as it were, under the Bush administration's extremist and pro-gun ideology. Remember, the NRA bragged in 2000 that if George W. Bush won election, they would be working out of his office, and they were right.
The gun lobby and gun industry got pretty much everything they wanted out of the Bush administration. It was their version of a shopping spree. The gun lobby succeeded in giving unprecedented legal immunity to the gun industry against civil lawsuits. They blocked efforts to renew and strengthen the federal assault weapons ban in 2004. They succeeded in preventing the release of gun crime trace data to local law enforcement officials to curb gun trafficking, called the Tiahrt Amendment.
As we just discussed, they allowed guns to be carried in our national parks. And although Bush's own Solicitor General asked that the Supreme Court send back the Heller case to the District of Columbia's Court of Appeals for a less stringent standard of review, Vice-President Cheney went against his own President and joined a legal brief from members of Congress who support the NRA.
And then, of course, there is the list of things they "didn't do," pressing for life-saving policies such as extending Brady background checks on all gun sales, or closing the gun show loophole, or even fully funding ATF to effectively close down rogue gun dealers. The Bush administration permitted the ever increasing lethality of firearms, standing idly by while .50 caliber sniper rifles became more prevalent and allowing an explosion of new and powerful assault weapons to be mass produced and mass marketed.
Although it seems like ancient history now, one of the biggest issues in the democratic primary in 2000 between Sen. Bill Bradley and Vice-President Al Gore was their differences on gun violence prevention. Bradley supported both licensing gun owners and registering guns, whereas Gore preferred licensing, and later advocated for background checks against Gov. Bush during the 2000 election.
In fact, when Jim Lehrer of the NewsHour asked what was the difference between Gore and Bush on the gun issue, Gore said of the Texas Governor: "He's with the NRA -- and I'm not."
President Clinton used gun control as a scapegoat for losing Congress in the 1994 midterm elections. And several of Gore's campaign advisers said that the "gun issue" cost him West Virginia and Arkansas - despite the fact that Gore won the popular vote and received a half million more votes over Bush. With all that in mind, the funding from several foundations, large donors and even advocates for gun violence prevention dried up or went away.
The prevailing wisdom in politics was that the "gun issue" was a losing position. For a time, many advocates simply felt that under President Bush's radical administration, gun control was a lost cause, and so we saw a kind of "depression" set in. It has been difficult.
But the truth is that there are advocates and organizations across the country that have not given up, and that continue to fight for their principles to enact solutions to save lives from gun violence.
Now, with a new administration, and a dramatically different point of view and expectation that government has a significant role to play in bettering our lives and society, we believe that there are opportunities, even small incremental steps, to start making a difference on the gun violence epidemic.
BuzzFlash: Do you believe that there might come a time when NRA members might become rational about the dangers of certain types of weaponry? After all, the NRA successfully supported the "right" of people on the FBI terrorists watch list to buy a gun. That threatens our national security. Why do members of the NRA support compromising our safety as a nation?
Scott Vogel: I think there will always be a radical fringe of the pro-gun movement that will always see attempts to reduce gun violence as an infringement on their survival, power, and identity. The gun issue is symbolic, and deeply embedded in the psyche of a lot of extreme gun owners. Those individuals are not like to change their beliefs and support efforts to curb gun violence.
Those gun owners see the world through a prism of fear, and imagine that enemies such as gun violence prevention advocates, are trying to take away their ability to defend themselves and their families.
But you're right, it is deeply ironic that the same radical gun owners who live in perpetual fear of stronger gun laws being enacted actually risk their own lives and their families by owning guns, especially if their weapons are not stored securely.
But those fringe groups or individuals bear no real impact on our politics. The truth is that over time, as gun ownership continues to decrease, and as older generations pass on, the youth of today simply do not share the extremist viewpoints by the gun proponents of the past. Young people today, on the whole, don't see guns, just like the issue of equality for gay and lesbian Americans, as a divisive cultural issue. They are far more pragmatic and less ideological and extreme than the older generation.
I think the younger generation demonstrated that, in carrying Barack Obama to the White House, there is a space for a new and hopeful era in politics where government becomes a "solutions business." I also think that, just like the issue of global warming, we will continue to see a shift where gun violence becomes less of a divisive political issue, and more of a mainstream and bipartisan challenge for our generation to solve.
BuzzFlash interview by Mark Karlin.
* * *
My reply:
Extrapolating from your own cowardice
Submitted by Dutchman6 on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 12:55am.
As a "bitter clinger" I will concede to Mr. Vogel the point that the GOP and the NRA have been poltically neutered and swept from the field and firearm owners like me no longer can count on any buffer between us and further gun control. You would be surprised how little that worries us. You have us surrounded, you poor bastards.
Your mistake is in thinking that the NRA and the GOP protected US, whereas they were actually protecting YOU. As long as there was a reasonable expectation of deflecting the further seizure of our liberty and our property by political means, we were content to let the NRA and GOP play the game. Now, nothing separates you from both us and the unintended consequences of your actions.
You can already see this played out in every gun shop in the country, as they are swamped with customers, many of them first time buyers. The question you must ask yourselves is: Are these people arming, spending good money during hard times, merely to turn them over when told to by the Obama regime? Don't extrapolate our behavior from your own cowardice. Just because YOU wouldn't think of disobeying a government order at the risk of your life, doesn't mean we wouldn't. And do I need to remind you that we're the ones with the firearms?
Surely you understand we outnumber the federal police by many orders of magnitude. For 75 years we have been pushed back from our traditional liberties when it comes to firearms and each time we backed up, grumbling but complying. But now many of us are done backing up and we will refuse to obey any new limitations on our liberty or property.
For what have we to show for our seven plus decades of increasingly tighter gun laws? Have they limited criminal behavior? No, gun laws by definition are only aimed at the law abiding. Criminals will do what they will. It has recently become popular for criminals to steal AR-15 patrol rifles from police cars. In what way would banning civilians from owning AR-15s prevent that? And if the street gangs are armed with such weapons, why should honest folks be debarred from the same weapons to defend themselves against the gangs?
Understand this, you can pass any "law" you like but we will not obey them. Then you must reconcile yourselves to come to our homes and seize them from us. And sometime after the first few of us die in your confiscatory raids, you will discover another truth taught by history. Read the story of the Deacons for Defense and Justice during the 60s. They would be the first to spit on your proposals. For those black veterans who took up arms against the Klan understood that just because a government was "elected" didn't mean it was fair, or legitimate.
And when that happens, even when democracy turns to tyranny, we of the despised minority still get to vote. We just won't use voting booths to do it. Sparking a civil war is a funny way to "reduce gun deaths."
Mike Vanderboegh, Three Percenter
PS: I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."
Then we have Willy (an appropriate moniker if there ever was one). I present Willy's posts as they appear (the "progressive's apparently aren't big on paragraphs on their blogs).
extrapolating...something
new
Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:04am.
Wow... you must not be a big fan of Neal Knox...who has been making a lot of sense. try reading his articles in the shotgun news these last couple issues. The reason all you delusional paranoid gun f*gs are buying all the guns (and raising the prices for normal folks such as myself) is because you're easily manipulated. its great fun to watch the rumor mill on gunboards.com-all I have to say is that the UN is destroying the world's surplus ammo stores and you send AIM and Century and the rest of 'em the money you should be saving for your kid's college fund-tell you obama isa commie and you eat it right up...end of the world dude!. Pathetic really. Try to remember Colt and Ruger where big supporters of the assualt rifle ban...which failed to ban their products for some reason. But never mind that now, instead, tell me who you think you are going to shoot if the "Gobnit" comes for yer guns? the vegetarian couple down the street or Operators from blackwater security? Who exactly? Lets be clear here, on the off chance this mildly right of center administration actually has time to worry about you and your little guns, they will come for them in Strykers and APCs and they will kill you and half the people on your block, just like we do in Iraq. Your small arms would be about as effective as a AK in every house in iraq is at the moment.Grow the f#ck up, boy. I have a joke for ya though...how do ya pick up chicks at Mount Carmel? That's right buddy, with a dust buster....bahahaha! Sooo...Big talk from a guy in camo underwear, but sadly, you're more likely to use your guns to shoot your fellow citizens than anyone who actually has any power over you-maybe your gun angst will alow you to shoot all the black guys in your neigborhood? Somehow I doubt you're smart enough to do anything effective. The folks setting your pathetic little gun agenda have great experience at playing you against me. and you fell for it. You might want to consider this: Everyone I know is buying guns to protect ourselves from dipsticks like you, rather than from a gun thieving government. while I suspect you're probably a fat pussy, and hardly man enough to shoot anyone, I could be wrong so, in the Spirit of hope...I suggest you might want to turn your rage in the direction of your actual tormentors...and try to remember, that in this country, your power doesn't really come from the barrel of a gun. in fact, the second you start shooting, you will be lost. "They" live for that shit.
more bad spelling lol
new
Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:27am.
ps, after saying all of that, I do have to admit the article is mildly annoying. The little blue hyper links on "cop killing assualt weapons" are a bit moronic. One wonders if this is a good time to antagonise the little gunnies right now...I do have a saying myself though: "it's not guns that kill people, it's morons with guns". Sadly, it just so happens we have a lot of them there morons here in 'murika-the one above would be a perfect example of someone who maybe should have to take some sort of written exam before plunking donne 300 bucks for a WASR at his local Dunhams. One also wonders how it would be if the gunf@gs went to as much trouble supporting a actual democracy with decent paying jobs like they have in say...Switzerland...as they do in hoarding weapons and taking carbine classes here in preparation for the "SHTF" as they love to say...whether it would be just as safe in american as in switzerland where, as the gunf*gs like to point out, there is a machine gun in every home
reprinted with permission
new
Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:44am.
The Knox Report From the Firearms Coalition Mutual Assured Destruction The power is in the threat, not the execution By Jeff Knox (October 29, 2008) There are some who are fond of repeating Jefferson’s comment about the tree of liberty needing to be “refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” though they often skip the part about patriots and choose to only include the tyrants. The problem is that in actual practice you couldn’t leave out, “the blood of patriots,” because when the blood of tyrants is spilt, the blood of patriots must also be spilt. There is simply no way around it. The same guys are often fond of bumper sticker slogans like, “…from my cold dead fingers,” and the more erudite, “MOLON LAVE,” and while I can appreciate the sentiment, I also know that in 99.995% of cases it’s simply not true. The fact is that only those who have nothing to lose (and nothing to live for) are willing to give up everything – including their lives – in a symbolic gesture of defiance. The rest of us, those with families – kids, grand-kids, vulnerable parents – and homes, jobs, and lives, are not interested in ditching the house, refrigerator, and HD-TV in exchange for a prison cell or a mountain cave. Sure, if the Russian paratroopers start landing in “Red Dawn” fashion, many of us will grab our guns and go join the “Wolverines,” but that’s only when everything is gone anyway. Don’t expect average Americans to rise up in revolution because the government is playing fast and loose with the Bill of Rights or because taxes get too high. That’s not the way modern Americans think, nor is it the way the world works today. Armed revolt in America would not lead to a renaissance of Jeffersonian liberalism; it would lead to the destruction of our nation and the guarantee that whatever replaced it would be worse than what it replaced. Like nuclear deterrence, it is the threat that saves the world, not the execution. If all of the 60 to 80 million gunowners in this nation were to rise up as one to ward off invasion or reject tyranny, they would be an unstoppable force. Nay-sayers like to dismiss this idea because of the technological advantages enjoyed by the modern military, but there are 90 guns for every 100 people in the US and many, if not most, of the 2 million members of the military and the 1 million sworn law enforcement officers are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and the principles of liberty. There is simply no doubt that the citizens’ militia does have the capacity and potential to defeat just about any military force in the world. Only serious application of nuclear and/or biological weapons – wiping out a substantial portion of the population – would be able to turn the tide. While this is all accurate and works well on paper, just like Marxism and Amway networks, the whole thing falls apart in practice because people never do what you want them to do or what they ought to do – even when doing so is clearly in their own best interests. During the Revolutionary war, a full 40 to 45% of Americans actively supported the revolt. Today, less than 6% of gunowners are even minimally active in political activism. Gunowners turn out for elections at about the same rate as the non-gun owning public. If gunowners and supporters of liberty can’t even agree on a presidential candidate, what makes any of them think that they will be able to agree on a revolution? The threat of armed revolt must be maintained, but like the mutual assured destruction of nuclear war, its implementation must be avoided at all costs. If we have the numbers and the commitment to win a revolution then we should easily be able to win an election. The solution lies in the ballot box rather than the ammo box because the reality of a new revolution is that it is an all or worse than nothing proposition. When people who should know better talk about revolution being the answer, impressionable idiots and misfits like Timothy McVeigh or the morons caught plotting to assassinate Barack Obama, believe that they are leading the revolution when in reality they are just giving the government an excuse to tighten the screws and pushing the public to accept the screw-tightening as necessary. The whole idea behind mutual assured destruction is that it forces the parties to find better ways to settle their differences. Our founders put the mechanisms in place and it’s up to us to use those mechanisms to restore liberty and save the republic. Permission to reprint or post this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes is hereby granted provided this credit is included. Text is available at www.FirearmsCoalition.org. To receive The Firearms Coalition’s bi-monthly newsletter, The Hard Corps Report, write to PO Box 3313, Manassas, VA 20108
more
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Submitted by willy on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 4:45am.
Written by Jeff Knox, on 10-30-2008 14:19 As expected, and intended, my latest Knox Report column has upset some in the, "All is lost; let's start a shooting war" camp. It is mind boggling to me that intelligent people could be so short sighted and misguided as to think that killing people and blowing things up is somehow going to make things better for our grandchildren. They seem to think that because only about 5% of the populace supported the idea of seceding from the English Empire back in 1776, that their "magic number" is 3% and they think they have that because some survey suggested that 3% of the population thinks violence against the government is justified or could be justified today. What they fail to take into account is the "bluster factor" of people who will agree with such a statement, but who don't really mean it, and the radical other side - the people who support the terrorist tactics of the Animal Liberation Front and radical Leftists like Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. What I want to know is, where are the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Adamses and Hancocks? Who do these Bozos think is going to lead the new America out of the ashes and back to its Constitutional glory, and why arent these giants running for public office and leading the political revolution? What do they think China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea are going to be doing while their merry little band of terrorists is busy crippling our nation and trying to foment rebellion? What exactly do they expect the "end" of their rebellion to look like? How are our children and grandchildren going to be better off? Revolution is like cannibalism; it can be justified, but only when there is absolutely no other choice for survival. Anyone who talks revolution but isn't actively and diligently working hard every day to elect quality people to office at every level and to educate the elected officials already in office about their core responsibilities, is just a bag of hot air who would rather talk about sacrificing everything - and possibly act on that talk - than do the hard work and make the sacrifices necessary to solve the problems within the system our founders created. When our forefathers revolted against English rule, they were in an untenable situation. They had no vote in the legislative body. They had no say in their government. They had no voice in regulatory matters. They were mere subjects and had no means of redressing wrongs. That is not our situation today. We have a voice. We have a vote. We have the means to talk directly to our elected officials and our fellow citizens, and we have the means to fire politicians who don't listen to our council and to replace them with politicians who understand their jobs. It is not easy and it is often frustrating, but it is not impossible and our situation is not hopeless. Things might be headed further in the wrong direction with the coming elections, but such swings are part of a pendulum and that pendulum will swing back in our direction again - unless some self-proclaimed freedom fighters screw it all up and convince the majority that liberty is too dangerous and freedom too costly. That's exactly what happened in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh decided that he was going to get the revolution rolling by blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City. The pendulum was already swinging back to the right. The public was fed up with the federal government's anti-liberty actions and had sent a large crop of, mostly very conservative, mostly firs-time politicians to Washington to start straightening out the mess. The "far right" was building and growing and, while there was a loud "lunatic fringe" element to the militia movement, the overall motion was in the right direction - until McVeigh took his action. The destruction of the Murrah Federal Building caused a backlash that continues today. Where once "unorganized militias" and groups calling themselves "patriots" with a focus on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, suddenly there were empty shells and the name "patriot" became tainted and remains suspect to this day. Timothy McVeigh - and the gun show philosophers who fueled his misguided sense of patriotism - did more to hurt the cause of liberty than Janet Reno and Bill Clinton could have ever dreamed. One misguided moron with a rifle can do more harm to the fight to restore our gun rights than a thousand Barack Obamas or Hillary Clintons. So I say to Mike Vanderboegh and those who believe as he apparently does: If you want to start a violent revolution, go do it in Iran, or Cuba, or Mexico, but don't bring you destructive, self-defeating, chest beating into my fight for the Constitution and liberty. If the time comes when we must resort to violence to restore our republic, I will be in the vanguard, but until that time comes, I will dedicate my life - as my father dedicated his life - to using the Constitution, and the rights and limits it illuminates, as the most powerful weapon for preserving it and the republic. ----------------
To which I responded:
Don't dance on our grave until you dig it.
new
Submitted by Dutchman6 on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 8:24am.
Hey, Willy, it's Jeff Knox not his late father Neal and I wouldn't place too much faith on an old post of his. You can call us all the names in the world and make tasteless jokes about dead Davidian innocents, it still changes nothing. Pass what laws you may wish. Pass them, and watch what happens. We're done backing up. You may kill us for our temerity, but you will find the killing a far longer, larger and more mutually ghastly outcome than the Clintonistas gave the Davidians. We understand Waco rules now. May God have mercy on the souls of those who try to reapply them to us. On them, and those who send them.
Mike Vanderboegh, Three Percenter
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Bankrupt: Jack Kelly Evokes Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings"
Folks,
Jack Kelly is a retired Special Forces officer who once interviewed me for a series he was doing for the Toledo Blade. He's the real deal and he calls 'em like he sees 'em. Jack wrote the following column on the situation we find ourselves in today, pointing out that this is nothing new under the sun. He notes:
"I used to infuriate my English teacher in high school by declaring that all anyone needed to know about life could be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling. (She was not a fan of the bard of the barrack-room.) But the more I see of the world, the more sure I am that this is so. My favorite Kipling poem is "The Gods of the Copybook Headings."
For those unsure of the terms of poem's title, here is an explanation from John Derbyshire:
Published in October 1919 when the poet was 53 years old, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" has proved enduringly popular, despite the fact that copybooks disappeared from schoolrooms in Britain and America during, or shortly after, World War 2. A copybook was an exercise book used to practice one's handwriting in. The pages were blank except for horizontal rulings and a printed specimen of perfect handwriting at the top. You were supposed to copy this specimen all down the page. The specimens were proverbs or quotations, or little commonplace hortatory or admonitory sayings—the ones in the poem illustrate the kind of thing. These were the copybook headings.
Kipling had lost his dearly loved son in World War 1, and a precious daughter some years earlier. He was a drained man in 1919, and England, with which he identified intensely, was a drained nation. . . With all this as background, it is hard to disagree with the general opinion that "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a clinging to old-fashioned common sense by a man deeply in need of something to cling to.
"Old-fashioned common sense" is one way to put it, "out of fashion principle" would be another. I'm with Jack on the universal truths to be found in Kipling. But here is Kelly's modern parallel. Kipling's entire poem will be found after, and my own final observation at the bottom.
The Economy Needs a Painful Period of Adjustment
By Jack Kelly
Our government now owes more money than all of us in the country put together possess.
As of Sep. 30, federal financial statements showed approximately $56.4 trillion in debts, liabilities, and unfunded promises for Medicare and Social Security, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation reported. The Federal Reserve estimated total household net worth at that time at $56.5 trillion.
Since then the stock market has crashed, tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth have evaporated, and the government has committed $700 million to bail out financial institutions.
A government which long has been morally and intellectually bankrupt is now financially bankrupt too.
An example of moral and intellectual bankruptcy is the $1 trillion "stimulus" package Congress is contemplating to encourage us to continue the behaviors that got us into this mess in the first place.
We've been living beyond our means on money borrowed mostly from the Chinese. Like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, this had to end at some point, and could only end badly.
The stock market crash has sobered many of us up. We're saving as much as we can to guard against the rainy days that appear likely in our future.
But tens of thousands of Americans make their living selling us things we don't need and can't afford. If we live within our means, their jobs are in jeopardy, and the recession could deepen.
The theory behind the stimulus package is that we can spend our way out of the recession. As former Sen. Fred Thompson put it, this is like telling a fat guy the way to lose weight is to eat more.
The stimulus package Congress passed last Spring didn't work, and this one probably won't, either. But it will delay necessary reforms, and could make the inevitable crash more painful.
We're like alcoholics who've been on a 30-year bender. We can't quit cold turkey without a painful period of adjustment. But if we don't go through that period of adjustment, we can't ever get well. America can't in the long run be prosperous unless we make things other people want to buy, and finance most of our investments through our own savings.
Democrats will run things for the next four years, so the recession should last at least that long. That's because the economic philosophy of the Democratic Party is to subsidize failure and punish success. Bailing out auto companies that couldn't make money in good times, and raising taxes on those job creators who are still making money may be good for gathering votes, but not for growing an economy.
I used to infuriate my English teacher in high school by declaring that all anyone needed to know about life could be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling. (She was not a fan of the bard of the barrack-room.) But the more I see of the world, the more sure I am that this is so. My favorite Kipling poem is "The Gods of the Copybook Headings":
"We were living in trees when they met us. They showed each of us in turn, that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn. But we found them lacking in Vision, Uplift, and Breadth of Mind, so we left them to teach the gorillas, while we followed the March of Mankind...
"With the hopes that our world was built on, they were utterly out of touch. They denied that the moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; they denied that wishes were horses, they denied that a pig had wings; so we worshipped the gods of the Market, who promised these beautiful things....
"In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance for all, by robbing selected Peter, to pay for collective Paul. But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work, you die.'
"...And after this is accomplished, and the Brave New World begins, When all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins, as surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the Gods of the Copybook Headings, with terror and slaughter return."
The complete text:
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
OK, I don't post these just to make you think. I post them to make you think AND act. Get busy.
Mike Vanderboegh
III
Jack Kelly is a retired Special Forces officer who once interviewed me for a series he was doing for the Toledo Blade. He's the real deal and he calls 'em like he sees 'em. Jack wrote the following column on the situation we find ourselves in today, pointing out that this is nothing new under the sun. He notes:
"I used to infuriate my English teacher in high school by declaring that all anyone needed to know about life could be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling. (She was not a fan of the bard of the barrack-room.) But the more I see of the world, the more sure I am that this is so. My favorite Kipling poem is "The Gods of the Copybook Headings."
For those unsure of the terms of poem's title, here is an explanation from John Derbyshire:
Published in October 1919 when the poet was 53 years old, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" has proved enduringly popular, despite the fact that copybooks disappeared from schoolrooms in Britain and America during, or shortly after, World War 2. A copybook was an exercise book used to practice one's handwriting in. The pages were blank except for horizontal rulings and a printed specimen of perfect handwriting at the top. You were supposed to copy this specimen all down the page. The specimens were proverbs or quotations, or little commonplace hortatory or admonitory sayings—the ones in the poem illustrate the kind of thing. These were the copybook headings.
Kipling had lost his dearly loved son in World War 1, and a precious daughter some years earlier. He was a drained man in 1919, and England, with which he identified intensely, was a drained nation. . . With all this as background, it is hard to disagree with the general opinion that "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a clinging to old-fashioned common sense by a man deeply in need of something to cling to.
"Old-fashioned common sense" is one way to put it, "out of fashion principle" would be another. I'm with Jack on the universal truths to be found in Kipling. But here is Kelly's modern parallel. Kipling's entire poem will be found after, and my own final observation at the bottom.
The Economy Needs a Painful Period of Adjustment
By Jack Kelly
Our government now owes more money than all of us in the country put together possess.
As of Sep. 30, federal financial statements showed approximately $56.4 trillion in debts, liabilities, and unfunded promises for Medicare and Social Security, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation reported. The Federal Reserve estimated total household net worth at that time at $56.5 trillion.
Since then the stock market has crashed, tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth have evaporated, and the government has committed $700 million to bail out financial institutions.
A government which long has been morally and intellectually bankrupt is now financially bankrupt too.
An example of moral and intellectual bankruptcy is the $1 trillion "stimulus" package Congress is contemplating to encourage us to continue the behaviors that got us into this mess in the first place.
We've been living beyond our means on money borrowed mostly from the Chinese. Like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, this had to end at some point, and could only end badly.
The stock market crash has sobered many of us up. We're saving as much as we can to guard against the rainy days that appear likely in our future.
But tens of thousands of Americans make their living selling us things we don't need and can't afford. If we live within our means, their jobs are in jeopardy, and the recession could deepen.
The theory behind the stimulus package is that we can spend our way out of the recession. As former Sen. Fred Thompson put it, this is like telling a fat guy the way to lose weight is to eat more.
The stimulus package Congress passed last Spring didn't work, and this one probably won't, either. But it will delay necessary reforms, and could make the inevitable crash more painful.
We're like alcoholics who've been on a 30-year bender. We can't quit cold turkey without a painful period of adjustment. But if we don't go through that period of adjustment, we can't ever get well. America can't in the long run be prosperous unless we make things other people want to buy, and finance most of our investments through our own savings.
Democrats will run things for the next four years, so the recession should last at least that long. That's because the economic philosophy of the Democratic Party is to subsidize failure and punish success. Bailing out auto companies that couldn't make money in good times, and raising taxes on those job creators who are still making money may be good for gathering votes, but not for growing an economy.
I used to infuriate my English teacher in high school by declaring that all anyone needed to know about life could be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling. (She was not a fan of the bard of the barrack-room.) But the more I see of the world, the more sure I am that this is so. My favorite Kipling poem is "The Gods of the Copybook Headings":
"We were living in trees when they met us. They showed each of us in turn, that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn. But we found them lacking in Vision, Uplift, and Breadth of Mind, so we left them to teach the gorillas, while we followed the March of Mankind...
"With the hopes that our world was built on, they were utterly out of touch. They denied that the moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; they denied that wishes were horses, they denied that a pig had wings; so we worshipped the gods of the Market, who promised these beautiful things....
"In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance for all, by robbing selected Peter, to pay for collective Paul. But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work, you die.'
"...And after this is accomplished, and the Brave New World begins, When all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins, as surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the Gods of the Copybook Headings, with terror and slaughter return."
The complete text:
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
OK, I don't post these just to make you think. I post them to make you think AND act. Get busy.
Mike Vanderboegh
III
Monday, December 22, 2008
Thinking about Schwerpunkts
All you fans of fourth generation warfare need to go here and read through all the links. When you internalize that data, you'll be smarter than me. (Not terribly difficult.) You'll also be better prepared to think through the battles to come.
What you absolutely need to know about Hannukah
Folks,
I'm a Southern Baptist. I was raised a Northern Baptist, then fell in with pagan communists, crawled back up to Presbyterianism and finally settled on Southern Baptists. Part of that was the Southern Baptists have better church suppers. Oh, yeah they do. Along the way I took some time to study the world's other religions, especially Judaism. Even so, I learned more from this essay below.
Go here.
I'm a Southern Baptist. I was raised a Northern Baptist, then fell in with pagan communists, crawled back up to Presbyterianism and finally settled on Southern Baptists. Part of that was the Southern Baptists have better church suppers. Oh, yeah they do. Along the way I took some time to study the world's other religions, especially Judaism. Even so, I learned more from this essay below.
Go here.
The Men Behind the Wire: Olofson Update.
Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons
But every man must stand behind
The men behind the wire
"A True Soldier"
Folks,
Everyone knows how tough it is to be away from loved ones at Christmas. How much tougher is it to be forcibly kept away from your family and everything else you hold dear -- imprisoned by a lying, law-breaking tyrannical agency on false charges? That is where David Olofson finds himself this Christmas.
I have this update on David from Larry Pratt:
"David is tough and seems to be holding up well. He is a true soldier, and not one who thinks that all he has to do is 'follow orders.' The Relief Fund is OK, but some have had to drop off. Right now, that has only slowed our ability to prepay on the car loan. The trend will eventually be negative regarding monthly payments. If you were to mention this need in your communications, the place for folks to go is: http://gunowners.org/olofson.htm. It is set up to let folks agree to have their credit card hit once a month at $10, $20 or $25. Whenever they must drop off, a call to GOA takes care of the need."
I know times are tough. They're going to get tougher. How much tougher are they for men behind the wire like David Olofson and Wayne Fincher? How about their families? I'll make it easy, here's the link.
One more thing. If you're not a member of GOA yet for whatever reason, then just send them an anonymous donation. You think the NRA would do what they're doing? In a Fudd's dreams.
Mike
III
Came to take away our sons
But every man must stand behind
The men behind the wire
"A True Soldier"
Folks,
Everyone knows how tough it is to be away from loved ones at Christmas. How much tougher is it to be forcibly kept away from your family and everything else you hold dear -- imprisoned by a lying, law-breaking tyrannical agency on false charges? That is where David Olofson finds himself this Christmas.
I have this update on David from Larry Pratt:
"David is tough and seems to be holding up well. He is a true soldier, and not one who thinks that all he has to do is 'follow orders.' The Relief Fund is OK, but some have had to drop off. Right now, that has only slowed our ability to prepay on the car loan. The trend will eventually be negative regarding monthly payments. If you were to mention this need in your communications, the place for folks to go is: http://gunowners.org/olofson.htm. It is set up to let folks agree to have their credit card hit once a month at $10, $20 or $25. Whenever they must drop off, a call to GOA takes care of the need."
I know times are tough. They're going to get tougher. How much tougher are they for men behind the wire like David Olofson and Wayne Fincher? How about their families? I'll make it easy, here's the link.
One more thing. If you're not a member of GOA yet for whatever reason, then just send them an anonymous donation. You think the NRA would do what they're doing? In a Fudd's dreams.
Mike
III
Personnel IS Policy: Put a Hold on Eric Holder
Folks,
They say that personnel is policy. If so, and I believe it to be true, then we Three Percenters are really not going to like the Obama administration. Of course this comes as no surprise to anyone, but of all the people BHO seeks to surround himself with in DC, Eric Holder as the nominee for Attorney General has to be the most offensive stench in the nostrils of free men and women.
Now everyone knows about Holder's assistance to Clinton in the pardon of Marc Rich. Likewise they are well aware of his "service" to the Clintonista regime in the Elian Gonzalez federal kidnapping, where he famously denied taking the little boy at the point of a gun. See here.
We are also well aware of how consistently anti-firearm freedom he's been. Less well known is his work on the post-OKC Counter Terrorism Bill, which strengthened the federal suite of proto-tyranny tools.
But I would like to draw your attention to two other items from Holder's record that cause me more concern than all of the above.
The first dates from September 1999. Read this:
Prosecutor Who Raised Questions About Waco Cover-Up Removed
By Michelle Mittelstadt
September 14, 1999
Associated Press
WASHINGTON--The federal prosecutor who raised questions about a possible Justice Department cover-up in the Waco standoff was abruptly removed from the case along with his boss, according to a court filing made public Tuesday.
Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder recused U.S. Attorney James W. Blagg in San Antonio and assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston in Waco, Texas, from any further dealings in criminal or civil proceedings related to the siege.
Holder appointed the U.S. attorney in a neighboring district as a "special attorney to the U.S. attorney general."
The court filing in Waco provides no explanation for the decision to recuse the U.S. attorneys' office for the Western District of Texas, to which Blagg and Johnston are assigned, but said the action took effect last Friday.
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told reporters Tuesday that the Senate investigation should go beyond Waco to the Justice Department's forthrightness on other matters, such as allegations of campaign finance violations by the 1996 Clinton campaign.
"I think it's going to have to be broader than just Waco itself," said Lott, R-Miss. "I think we have a bigger focus here. ... There are a number of investigations that they are basically either not doing or they have stiffed us on. So we need to find out what's going on."
The recusal of the U.S. attorney's office isn't the first in the Waco case. Attorney General Janet Reno last week recused herself, saying she will be a witness in the independent inquiry she ordered into the fiery end of the 1993 siege.
Johnston, in a letter made public Monday, wrote Reno recently warning that aides within her own department were misleading her about federal agents' roles.
"I have formed the belief that facts may have been kept from you and quite possibly are being kept from you even now by components of the department," Johnston wrote in an Aug. 30 letter.
Johnston also has been at odds with Blagg, his superior, and other Justice officials over the investigation of the government's actions during the standoff with the Davidians at their compound outside Waco. It was Johnston who pressed Justice Department officials to allow independent filmmakers to review evidence sifted from the charred ruins of the Davidians' compound--evidence that led to the FBI's recent admission that potentially incendiary tear gas canisters were fired on April 19, 1993.
That disclosure, after six years of denials, sparked a furor on Capitol Hill and has led to congressional inquiries and Reno's appointment of an independent investigator.
Blagg, Johnston and the Justice Department provided no immediate comment. . .
Burton, who chairs the committee, said the Justice Department buried the panel in an avalanche of documents shortly before the 1995 hearings began, and congressional investigators depended on a Justice summary to guide them.
"The Justice Department dumped 100,000 documents on the committee three days before the hearings, knowing that they couldn't possibly go through them," the Indiana Republican said in an interview. Although Burton was on the Government Reform Committee in 1995, he was not on the subcommittee that led the investigation.
Burton also noted that the Justice Department was forced to acknowledge last week that it failed in 1995 to give Congress the key page from a 1993 FBI lab report mentioning the use of military tear gas. The final page of that 49-page report, with the key tear gas mention, was missing, he noted.
"I don't think that's a coincidence," he said.
Almost six out of 10 Americans believe the FBI has been intentionally trying to cover up its actions at Waco, an ABC News poll released Monday indicated. . .
The records Waxman cited, discovered among more than 40 boxes of material compiled during the earlier House hearings, include an FBI pilot's 1993 statement recalling a radio transmission in which agents had a conversation "relative to the utilization of some sort of military round ... on a concrete bunker." And post-raid interview summaries include an unnamed FBI agent's explanation that smoke captured on film "came from (an) attempt to penetrate bunker with one military and two (non-incendiary) rounds."
So Holder helped cover up the details of federal misconduct in the Waco massacre. But a fellow who is good at covering up one federal conspiracy is useful in covering up others.
Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney, has been independently investigating the circumstances of his brother Kenny's strange death while in federal custody at the time of the OKC bombing. Go here to see some graphic pictures of what Kenny Trentadue looked like after he was received from the tender mercies of the Bureau of Prisons after what the Clintonistas claimed was a suicide hanging.
The particulars of Kenneth Trentadue's murder at the hands of federal authorities are hazy. This is partly because Eric Holder managed to short circuit a Senate investigation.
DOJ memos leaked to Jesse Trentadue by an FBI agent indicate just how important Holder was in the cover-up.
Jesse Trentadue said recently,
“They’re Department of Justice memos, they’re actually e mails, and they’re talking about Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and what he has to do to keep the lid on this story,” said Trentadue, adding that the memos make it clear than an attempt to deflect press attention is the goal, along with claiming that the investigation is ongoing in order to keep everything secret.
“This was a coordinated cover-up run at the highest levels of justice and out of the White House,” said Trentadue, noting that the memos refer to the cover-up as “The Trentadue Mission” and use terms like “The Invasion of Normandy” to illustrate the scale of the operation.
“You have to ask yourself, why would the death of one little person, which they claim was a suicide by hanging, generate this kind of activity at the highest levels of the Clinton/Reno Justice Department, the answer is….they knew this murder, if investigated, would lead to the Oklahoma City Bombing and lead to the fact that the Department of Justice, through the FBI and ATF informants, was involved and this occurred just before the re-election of Bill Clinton in 1996,” said Trentadue.
“Mr. Holder’s job was to cover-up my brother’s murder, basically to stop all inquiry,” said Trentadue, saying the e mails were “inflammatory,” referring as they do to “Trentadue’s and Trentadon’ts”.
“Holder’s job was to stop the Democrats and Republicans from looking into this….you have to ask yourself why the Deputy Attorney General of the United States in involved in covering up the death of an inmate and the answer’s simple, they knew that death if investigated would lead back to the bombing, it would lead back to the government’s knowledge and involvement,” said Trentadue, adding that the release of the information would have been a disaster for the re-election hopes of Bill Clinton in 1996.
The leaked memos themselves are posted here.
So why do I think these actions are more compelling than the issues currently being discussed? Simple. In all the others you could argue that Holder was merely doing his job, or holding opinions, about firearms for example, that are controversial. Even in the Marc Rich pardon, he was in the grey zone somewhere between impropriety and illegality.
But in the Waco and Trentadue coverups, Holder was slap in the middle of criminal conspiracies to evade prosecution for federal misdeeds.
As Foghorn T. Leghorn would say, the fox has done been appointed to rule the chicken coop.
Now Jeff Knox, writing here, has called for all gunnies to answer the call to bring pressure on their Senators to stop the Holder nomination. David Codrea, using both his War on Guns and Cleveland Gun Rights Examiner blogs (example here), has seconded this call. Peter at Western Rifle Shooters Association has also.
In fact, Pete says this:
Remember -- this guy is the planned boss of the FBI and BATFE thugs who will be coming to kill you. Get it?
EXACTLY.
I realize that this may endanger the "pragmatists'" characterization of me as "insane," but I call on all Three Percenters to contact their Senators on this one. We won't be able to win the vote, but using the arcane rules of the Senate, we only need one Senator to put a hold on him to slow this outrage down down, and maybe, stop it.
I have no illusions. Even if we do manage to get him to withdraw his nomination, they'll probably appoint someone equally objectionable. However, this falls under the heading of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." The one thing we must not allow to happen is to give the impression that we agree by acquiescence.
I'm with Knox on this one. Fight the Holder nomination with everything you've got.
They say that personnel is policy. If so, and I believe it to be true, then we Three Percenters are really not going to like the Obama administration. Of course this comes as no surprise to anyone, but of all the people BHO seeks to surround himself with in DC, Eric Holder as the nominee for Attorney General has to be the most offensive stench in the nostrils of free men and women.
Now everyone knows about Holder's assistance to Clinton in the pardon of Marc Rich. Likewise they are well aware of his "service" to the Clintonista regime in the Elian Gonzalez federal kidnapping, where he famously denied taking the little boy at the point of a gun. See here.
We are also well aware of how consistently anti-firearm freedom he's been. Less well known is his work on the post-OKC Counter Terrorism Bill, which strengthened the federal suite of proto-tyranny tools.
But I would like to draw your attention to two other items from Holder's record that cause me more concern than all of the above.
The first dates from September 1999. Read this:
Prosecutor Who Raised Questions About Waco Cover-Up Removed
By Michelle Mittelstadt
September 14, 1999
Associated Press
WASHINGTON--The federal prosecutor who raised questions about a possible Justice Department cover-up in the Waco standoff was abruptly removed from the case along with his boss, according to a court filing made public Tuesday.
Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder recused U.S. Attorney James W. Blagg in San Antonio and assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston in Waco, Texas, from any further dealings in criminal or civil proceedings related to the siege.
Holder appointed the U.S. attorney in a neighboring district as a "special attorney to the U.S. attorney general."
The court filing in Waco provides no explanation for the decision to recuse the U.S. attorneys' office for the Western District of Texas, to which Blagg and Johnston are assigned, but said the action took effect last Friday.
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told reporters Tuesday that the Senate investigation should go beyond Waco to the Justice Department's forthrightness on other matters, such as allegations of campaign finance violations by the 1996 Clinton campaign.
"I think it's going to have to be broader than just Waco itself," said Lott, R-Miss. "I think we have a bigger focus here. ... There are a number of investigations that they are basically either not doing or they have stiffed us on. So we need to find out what's going on."
The recusal of the U.S. attorney's office isn't the first in the Waco case. Attorney General Janet Reno last week recused herself, saying she will be a witness in the independent inquiry she ordered into the fiery end of the 1993 siege.
Johnston, in a letter made public Monday, wrote Reno recently warning that aides within her own department were misleading her about federal agents' roles.
"I have formed the belief that facts may have been kept from you and quite possibly are being kept from you even now by components of the department," Johnston wrote in an Aug. 30 letter.
Johnston also has been at odds with Blagg, his superior, and other Justice officials over the investigation of the government's actions during the standoff with the Davidians at their compound outside Waco. It was Johnston who pressed Justice Department officials to allow independent filmmakers to review evidence sifted from the charred ruins of the Davidians' compound--evidence that led to the FBI's recent admission that potentially incendiary tear gas canisters were fired on April 19, 1993.
That disclosure, after six years of denials, sparked a furor on Capitol Hill and has led to congressional inquiries and Reno's appointment of an independent investigator.
Blagg, Johnston and the Justice Department provided no immediate comment. . .
Burton, who chairs the committee, said the Justice Department buried the panel in an avalanche of documents shortly before the 1995 hearings began, and congressional investigators depended on a Justice summary to guide them.
"The Justice Department dumped 100,000 documents on the committee three days before the hearings, knowing that they couldn't possibly go through them," the Indiana Republican said in an interview. Although Burton was on the Government Reform Committee in 1995, he was not on the subcommittee that led the investigation.
Burton also noted that the Justice Department was forced to acknowledge last week that it failed in 1995 to give Congress the key page from a 1993 FBI lab report mentioning the use of military tear gas. The final page of that 49-page report, with the key tear gas mention, was missing, he noted.
"I don't think that's a coincidence," he said.
Almost six out of 10 Americans believe the FBI has been intentionally trying to cover up its actions at Waco, an ABC News poll released Monday indicated. . .
The records Waxman cited, discovered among more than 40 boxes of material compiled during the earlier House hearings, include an FBI pilot's 1993 statement recalling a radio transmission in which agents had a conversation "relative to the utilization of some sort of military round ... on a concrete bunker." And post-raid interview summaries include an unnamed FBI agent's explanation that smoke captured on film "came from (an) attempt to penetrate bunker with one military and two (non-incendiary) rounds."
So Holder helped cover up the details of federal misconduct in the Waco massacre. But a fellow who is good at covering up one federal conspiracy is useful in covering up others.
Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney, has been independently investigating the circumstances of his brother Kenny's strange death while in federal custody at the time of the OKC bombing. Go here to see some graphic pictures of what Kenny Trentadue looked like after he was received from the tender mercies of the Bureau of Prisons after what the Clintonistas claimed was a suicide hanging.
The particulars of Kenneth Trentadue's murder at the hands of federal authorities are hazy. This is partly because Eric Holder managed to short circuit a Senate investigation.
DOJ memos leaked to Jesse Trentadue by an FBI agent indicate just how important Holder was in the cover-up.
Jesse Trentadue said recently,
“They’re Department of Justice memos, they’re actually e mails, and they’re talking about Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and what he has to do to keep the lid on this story,” said Trentadue, adding that the memos make it clear than an attempt to deflect press attention is the goal, along with claiming that the investigation is ongoing in order to keep everything secret.
“This was a coordinated cover-up run at the highest levels of justice and out of the White House,” said Trentadue, noting that the memos refer to the cover-up as “The Trentadue Mission” and use terms like “The Invasion of Normandy” to illustrate the scale of the operation.
“You have to ask yourself, why would the death of one little person, which they claim was a suicide by hanging, generate this kind of activity at the highest levels of the Clinton/Reno Justice Department, the answer is….they knew this murder, if investigated, would lead to the Oklahoma City Bombing and lead to the fact that the Department of Justice, through the FBI and ATF informants, was involved and this occurred just before the re-election of Bill Clinton in 1996,” said Trentadue.
“Mr. Holder’s job was to cover-up my brother’s murder, basically to stop all inquiry,” said Trentadue, saying the e mails were “inflammatory,” referring as they do to “Trentadue’s and Trentadon’ts”.
“Holder’s job was to stop the Democrats and Republicans from looking into this….you have to ask yourself why the Deputy Attorney General of the United States in involved in covering up the death of an inmate and the answer’s simple, they knew that death if investigated would lead back to the bombing, it would lead back to the government’s knowledge and involvement,” said Trentadue, adding that the release of the information would have been a disaster for the re-election hopes of Bill Clinton in 1996.
The leaked memos themselves are posted here.
So why do I think these actions are more compelling than the issues currently being discussed? Simple. In all the others you could argue that Holder was merely doing his job, or holding opinions, about firearms for example, that are controversial. Even in the Marc Rich pardon, he was in the grey zone somewhere between impropriety and illegality.
But in the Waco and Trentadue coverups, Holder was slap in the middle of criminal conspiracies to evade prosecution for federal misdeeds.
As Foghorn T. Leghorn would say, the fox has done been appointed to rule the chicken coop.
Now Jeff Knox, writing here, has called for all gunnies to answer the call to bring pressure on their Senators to stop the Holder nomination. David Codrea, using both his War on Guns and Cleveland Gun Rights Examiner blogs (example here), has seconded this call. Peter at Western Rifle Shooters Association has also.
In fact, Pete says this:
Remember -- this guy is the planned boss of the FBI and BATFE thugs who will be coming to kill you. Get it?
EXACTLY.
I realize that this may endanger the "pragmatists'" characterization of me as "insane," but I call on all Three Percenters to contact their Senators on this one. We won't be able to win the vote, but using the arcane rules of the Senate, we only need one Senator to put a hold on him to slow this outrage down down, and maybe, stop it.
I have no illusions. Even if we do manage to get him to withdraw his nomination, they'll probably appoint someone equally objectionable. However, this falls under the heading of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." The one thing we must not allow to happen is to give the impression that we agree by acquiescence.
I'm with Knox on this one. Fight the Holder nomination with everything you've got.
Dominoes
Folks,
Here's the latest from my favorite Brit, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
Mike
III
Protectionist dominoes are beginning to tumble across the world
The riots have begun.
Civil protest is breaking out in cities across Russia, China, and beyond.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 10:30AM GMT 22 Dec 2008
Greece has been in turmoil for 11 days. The mood seems to have turned "pre-insurrectionary" in parts of Athens - to borrow from the Marxist handbook.
This is a foretaste of what the world may face as the "crisis of capitalism" - another Marxist phase making a comeback - starts to turn two hundred million lives upside down.
We are advancing to the political stage of this global train wreck. Regimes are being tested. Those relying on perma-boom to mask a lack of democratic or ancestral legitimacy may try to gain time by the usual methods: trade barriers, sabre-rattling, and barbed wire.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, is worried enough to ditch a half-century of IMF orthodoxy, calling for a fiscal boost worth 2pc of world GDP to "prevent global depression".
"If we are not able to do that, then social unrest may happen in many countries, including advanced economies. We are facing an unprecedented decline in output. All around the planet, the people have reacted with feelings going from surprise to anger, and from anger to fear," he said.
Russia has begun to shut down trade as it adjusts to the shock of Urals oil below $40 a barrel. It has imposed import tariffs of 30pc on cars, 15pc on farm kit, and 95pc on poultry (above quota levels). "It is possible during the financial crisis to support domestic producers by raising customs duties," said Premier Vladimir Putin.
Russia is not alone. India and Vietnam have imposed steel tariffs. Indonesia is resorting to special "licences" to choke off imports.
The Kremlin is alarmed by a 13pc fall in industrial output over the last five months. There have been street protests in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok and Barnaul. Police crushed "Dissent Marchers" holding copies of Russia's constitution above their heads in Moscow's Triumfalnaya Square.
"Russia has not seen anything like these nationwide protests before," said Boris Kagarlitsky from Moscow's Globalization Institute.
The Duma is widening the treason law to catch most forms of political dissent, and unwelcome forms of journalism. Jury trials for state crimes are to be abolished.
Yevgeny Kiseloyov at the Moscow Times said it feels eerily like December 1 1934 when Stalin unveiled his "Enemies of the People" law, kicking off the Great Terror.
The omens are not good in China either. Taxis are being bugged by state police. The great unknown is how Beijing will respond as its state-directed export strategy hits a brick wall, leaving exposed a vast eyesore of concrete and excess plant.
Exports fell 2.2pc in November. Toy, textile, footwear, and furniture plants are being closed across Guangdong, now the riot hub of South China. Some 40m Chinese workers are expected to lose their jobs. Party officials have warned of "mass-scale social turmoil".
The Politburo is giving mixed signals. We don't yet know how much of the country's plan to boost domestic demand through a $586bn stimulus package is real, and how much is a wish-list sent to party bosses in the hinterland without funding.
Shortly after President Hu Jintao said China is "losing competitive edge in the world market", we saw a move towards export subsidies for the steel industry and a dip in the yuan peg - even though China already has the world's biggest reserves ($2 trillion) and the biggest trade surplus ($40bn a month).
So is the Communist Party mulling a 1930s "beggar-thy-neighbour" strategy of devaluation to export its way out of trouble? Such raw mercantilism can only draw a sharp retort from Washington and Brussels in this climate.
"During a global slowdown, you can't have countries trying to take advantage of others by manipulating their currencies," said Frank Vargo from the US National Association of Manufacturers.
It is a view shared entirely by President-elect Barack Obama. "China must change its currency practices. Because it pegs its currency at an artificially low rate, China is running massive current account surpluses. This is not good for American firms and workers, not good for the world," he said in October. The new intake of radical Democrats on Capitol Hill will hold him to it.
There has been much talk lately of America's Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which set off the protectionist dominoes in 1930. It is usually invoked by free traders to make the wrong point. The relevant message of Smoot-Hawley is that America was then the big exporter, playing the China role. By resorting to tariffs, it set off retaliation, and was the biggest victim of its own folly.
Britain and the Dominions retreated into Imperial Preference. Other countries joined. This became the "growth bloc" of the 1930s, free from the deflation constraints of the Gold Standard. High tariffs stopped the stimulus leaking out.
It was a successful strategy - given the awful alternatives - and was the key reason why Britain's economy contracted by just 5pc during the Depression, against 15pc for France, and 30pc for the US.
Could we see such a closed "growth bloc" emerging now, this time led by the US, entailing a massive rupture of world's trading system? Perhaps.
This crisis has already brought us a monetary revolution as interest rates approach zero across the G10. It may overturn the "New World Order" as well, unless we move with great care in grim months ahead. This is where events turn dangerous.
The last great era of globalisation peaked just before 1914. You know the rest of the story.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/3870089/Protectionist-dominoes-are-beginning-to-tumble-across-the-world.html
Here's the latest from my favorite Brit, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
Mike
III
Protectionist dominoes are beginning to tumble across the world
The riots have begun.
Civil protest is breaking out in cities across Russia, China, and beyond.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 10:30AM GMT 22 Dec 2008
Greece has been in turmoil for 11 days. The mood seems to have turned "pre-insurrectionary" in parts of Athens - to borrow from the Marxist handbook.
This is a foretaste of what the world may face as the "crisis of capitalism" - another Marxist phase making a comeback - starts to turn two hundred million lives upside down.
We are advancing to the political stage of this global train wreck. Regimes are being tested. Those relying on perma-boom to mask a lack of democratic or ancestral legitimacy may try to gain time by the usual methods: trade barriers, sabre-rattling, and barbed wire.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, is worried enough to ditch a half-century of IMF orthodoxy, calling for a fiscal boost worth 2pc of world GDP to "prevent global depression".
"If we are not able to do that, then social unrest may happen in many countries, including advanced economies. We are facing an unprecedented decline in output. All around the planet, the people have reacted with feelings going from surprise to anger, and from anger to fear," he said.
Russia has begun to shut down trade as it adjusts to the shock of Urals oil below $40 a barrel. It has imposed import tariffs of 30pc on cars, 15pc on farm kit, and 95pc on poultry (above quota levels). "It is possible during the financial crisis to support domestic producers by raising customs duties," said Premier Vladimir Putin.
Russia is not alone. India and Vietnam have imposed steel tariffs. Indonesia is resorting to special "licences" to choke off imports.
The Kremlin is alarmed by a 13pc fall in industrial output over the last five months. There have been street protests in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok and Barnaul. Police crushed "Dissent Marchers" holding copies of Russia's constitution above their heads in Moscow's Triumfalnaya Square.
"Russia has not seen anything like these nationwide protests before," said Boris Kagarlitsky from Moscow's Globalization Institute.
The Duma is widening the treason law to catch most forms of political dissent, and unwelcome forms of journalism. Jury trials for state crimes are to be abolished.
Yevgeny Kiseloyov at the Moscow Times said it feels eerily like December 1 1934 when Stalin unveiled his "Enemies of the People" law, kicking off the Great Terror.
The omens are not good in China either. Taxis are being bugged by state police. The great unknown is how Beijing will respond as its state-directed export strategy hits a brick wall, leaving exposed a vast eyesore of concrete and excess plant.
Exports fell 2.2pc in November. Toy, textile, footwear, and furniture plants are being closed across Guangdong, now the riot hub of South China. Some 40m Chinese workers are expected to lose their jobs. Party officials have warned of "mass-scale social turmoil".
The Politburo is giving mixed signals. We don't yet know how much of the country's plan to boost domestic demand through a $586bn stimulus package is real, and how much is a wish-list sent to party bosses in the hinterland without funding.
Shortly after President Hu Jintao said China is "losing competitive edge in the world market", we saw a move towards export subsidies for the steel industry and a dip in the yuan peg - even though China already has the world's biggest reserves ($2 trillion) and the biggest trade surplus ($40bn a month).
So is the Communist Party mulling a 1930s "beggar-thy-neighbour" strategy of devaluation to export its way out of trouble? Such raw mercantilism can only draw a sharp retort from Washington and Brussels in this climate.
"During a global slowdown, you can't have countries trying to take advantage of others by manipulating their currencies," said Frank Vargo from the US National Association of Manufacturers.
It is a view shared entirely by President-elect Barack Obama. "China must change its currency practices. Because it pegs its currency at an artificially low rate, China is running massive current account surpluses. This is not good for American firms and workers, not good for the world," he said in October. The new intake of radical Democrats on Capitol Hill will hold him to it.
There has been much talk lately of America's Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which set off the protectionist dominoes in 1930. It is usually invoked by free traders to make the wrong point. The relevant message of Smoot-Hawley is that America was then the big exporter, playing the China role. By resorting to tariffs, it set off retaliation, and was the biggest victim of its own folly.
Britain and the Dominions retreated into Imperial Preference. Other countries joined. This became the "growth bloc" of the 1930s, free from the deflation constraints of the Gold Standard. High tariffs stopped the stimulus leaking out.
It was a successful strategy - given the awful alternatives - and was the key reason why Britain's economy contracted by just 5pc during the Depression, against 15pc for France, and 30pc for the US.
Could we see such a closed "growth bloc" emerging now, this time led by the US, entailing a massive rupture of world's trading system? Perhaps.
This crisis has already brought us a monetary revolution as interest rates approach zero across the G10. It may overturn the "New World Order" as well, unless we move with great care in grim months ahead. This is where events turn dangerous.
The last great era of globalisation peaked just before 1914. You know the rest of the story.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/3870089/Protectionist-dominoes-are-beginning-to-tumble-across-the-world.html
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Taxing Your Way to Civil War, or, What's $400 times NOTHING?
Folks,
A self-described retired engineer, Scott Dixon, proposes to tax guns out of existence here. I wonder what $400 times NOTHING is? My letter to his editor below. My thanks to David Codrea for bringing it to my attention.
Mike
III
To the editor, Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings.
tidingsopinion@dailytidings.com
Scott Dixon wants a $400 tax each year for each firearm in America. He believes that this will lead to fewer firearm deaths. Perhaps, but only after one side or the other wins the civil war which would erupt if his proposal is adopted.
Frankly, some of us firearm owners are done being pushed back from our traditional rights to liberty and property. For 75 years we have backed up at every gun control law, and we will now back up no further. Has crime abated because there are more gun control laws that, by definition, restrain only the law-abiding? No, but Dixon isn’t really after criminals and their behavior, he’s after law-abiding citizens’ firearms – their means of defense against criminal behavior and oppressive government.
Dixon’s plan is too cute by half if he thinks that gun owners are going to buy a plan that merely taxes our property out of existence rather than seizing it outright. Does he think we’re morons? Expecting us to obey such a government order is an extrapolation from his own cowardice. Just because he would obey a tyrannical regime doesn’t mean that we will. And may I remind him that we have the means to resist?
If Mr. Dixon wants his tax, he's going to have to kill me to get it. Not surprisingly, when his raid party comes to my door, I will shoot back. Nor will I be the only one. How is that going to lead to fewer firearm deaths exactly?
A self-described retired engineer, Scott Dixon, proposes to tax guns out of existence here. I wonder what $400 times NOTHING is? My letter to his editor below. My thanks to David Codrea for bringing it to my attention.
Mike
III
To the editor, Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings.
tidingsopinion@dailytidings.com
Scott Dixon wants a $400 tax each year for each firearm in America. He believes that this will lead to fewer firearm deaths. Perhaps, but only after one side or the other wins the civil war which would erupt if his proposal is adopted.
Frankly, some of us firearm owners are done being pushed back from our traditional rights to liberty and property. For 75 years we have backed up at every gun control law, and we will now back up no further. Has crime abated because there are more gun control laws that, by definition, restrain only the law-abiding? No, but Dixon isn’t really after criminals and their behavior, he’s after law-abiding citizens’ firearms – their means of defense against criminal behavior and oppressive government.
Dixon’s plan is too cute by half if he thinks that gun owners are going to buy a plan that merely taxes our property out of existence rather than seizing it outright. Does he think we’re morons? Expecting us to obey such a government order is an extrapolation from his own cowardice. Just because he would obey a tyrannical regime doesn’t mean that we will. And may I remind him that we have the means to resist?
If Mr. Dixon wants his tax, he's going to have to kill me to get it. Not surprisingly, when his raid party comes to my door, I will shoot back. Nor will I be the only one. How is that going to lead to fewer firearm deaths exactly?
Guard Duty: A Suggestion to the Three Percent on How to Deal With Pragmatists
Guard Duty
by Mike Vanderboegh
21 December 2008
Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.
-- Hamlet, Act III, scene 2
The Bard, wise in all things human, observes that some folks must be always vigilant against the dangers posed by evil men while others get to sleep through life, never being forced to pay attention to what is happening around them. Some accept the responsibility of being guards. Others choose to sleep. But free men, if they wish to remain free, MUST be guards. At Virginia's Constitutional Ratification convention in 1788, Patrick Henry warned his fellow delegates:
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined."
Ruined. We have very nearly arrived at the point Patrick Henry warned us about. Yet the danger does not relieve those of us who are guards from the responsibility of faithfully discharging our civic duty. If anything, it only sharpens our call to guard duty. Understand, this is not only about the right to firearms.
Joseph Story (1779-1845), was the son of a member of the Sons of Liberty who participated in the Boston Tea Party. A brilliant lawyer, in 1811 Story became the youngest Supreme Court Associate Justice ever appointed at the age of thirty-two. In 1833, he published a three volume set entitled Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States , a work of profound learning which is still the standard treatise on the subject. Story wrote, "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms" is "the palladium of the liberties of a republic." He also said this:
"The sacred rights of property are to be guarded at every point. I call them sacred, because, if they are unprotected, all other rights become worthless or visionary. What is personal liberty, if it does not draw after it the right to enjoy the fruits of our own industry? What is political liberty, if it imparts only perpetual poverty to us and all our posterity? What is the privilege of a vote, if the majority of the hour may sweep away the earnings of our whole lives, to gratify the rapacity of the indolent, the cunning, or the profligate, who are borne into power upon the tide of a temporary popularity?"
The "majority of the hour." Is that not what the Obama administration represents? The gun confiscationist impulse among Obama's entourage is not only a threat to our access to arms but to our property rights as well. The new "Assault Weapons Ban," we are promised by the gun grabbers, will "have teeth." There is no doubt from the Obama transition team's own statements that they intend to ban, hence confiscate, heretofore legal semi-automatic rifles of military utility. It is our property as much as our liberty they aim to seize. And what do we profit if we successfully defend our right to arms, but cannot afford to purchase the ammunition without which they become mere expensive clubs? Sam Adams once asked:
"Now what liberty can there be where property is taken without consent?"
Or, one might add, where the ability to acquire property is artificially and tyrannically denied? The answer is, there can be none.
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass
There has been much unfortunate name-calling between the Three Percenters and the so-called Pragmatists these past six months since the printing of my letter in the Madison newspaper. They started out calling us "insane" (among the nicer terms) and we responded by calling them "cowards" and the debate went downhill from there. I shoulder as much blame for this as the next man, maybe more. As a guard, I should know better.
You know, the stern, undistractable attitude of the guards at Buckingham Palace has become cartoonish in the public mind over the years. It is now a given that tourists will approach them and do everything (including the flashing of mammary glands large and small, I am told) in order to get them to react. They do not react. They do not argue. They guard.
As Constitutional guards, I have come to the conclusion that we should do more guarding and less arguing about whether or not we have the right to guard our own liberty and property. We have taken our posts by common declaration. Let the tourists mug and mock, but let us not mug and mock them back. Let us instead guard, by declaration and example.
The truth of the matter is that when the tyrant's myrmidons approach the guard post, the tourists will scatter anyway. Seeking to convert them by anything less than consistent, stern example is foolhardy. For those who might be persuaded to our position will only be swayed by conduct that they admire, not facile taunting, however effective.
Equally foolhardy, from the Pragmatists' point of view, is their expectation that they can protect their liberties without, at base, Patrick Henry's "downright force." They are foolhardy to believe that we can guard anything, whether it is our liberty or property or even the cash register at the local gas station without the threat of defensive violence. The Founders understood this.
The Pragmatists blame us for staking out a position that will lead to violence. Yet this is as ridiculous as blaming a potential rape victim for pulling out her .38 revolver and telling her would-be attacker to put that thing back in his pants before somebody gets dead. We do not seek to attack the government. We seek merely to defend ourselves from government depredations of liberty and property. We merely seek to guard.
So let us be about our Constitutional guard duty, and refuse to engage the salad-bar philosophy tourists in taunting contests. To the extent we are able to do this, it will be seen both by our potential allies and our looming enemies as evidence of our serious purpose. And if we are able to do that, we will have taken a long step down the road back to the Founders' idea of the armed citizenry as the most important credible deterrent to potential American tyranny.
by Mike Vanderboegh
21 December 2008
Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.
-- Hamlet, Act III, scene 2
The Bard, wise in all things human, observes that some folks must be always vigilant against the dangers posed by evil men while others get to sleep through life, never being forced to pay attention to what is happening around them. Some accept the responsibility of being guards. Others choose to sleep. But free men, if they wish to remain free, MUST be guards. At Virginia's Constitutional Ratification convention in 1788, Patrick Henry warned his fellow delegates:
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined."
Ruined. We have very nearly arrived at the point Patrick Henry warned us about. Yet the danger does not relieve those of us who are guards from the responsibility of faithfully discharging our civic duty. If anything, it only sharpens our call to guard duty. Understand, this is not only about the right to firearms.
Joseph Story (1779-1845), was the son of a member of the Sons of Liberty who participated in the Boston Tea Party. A brilliant lawyer, in 1811 Story became the youngest Supreme Court Associate Justice ever appointed at the age of thirty-two. In 1833, he published a three volume set entitled Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States , a work of profound learning which is still the standard treatise on the subject. Story wrote, "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms" is "the palladium of the liberties of a republic." He also said this:
"The sacred rights of property are to be guarded at every point. I call them sacred, because, if they are unprotected, all other rights become worthless or visionary. What is personal liberty, if it does not draw after it the right to enjoy the fruits of our own industry? What is political liberty, if it imparts only perpetual poverty to us and all our posterity? What is the privilege of a vote, if the majority of the hour may sweep away the earnings of our whole lives, to gratify the rapacity of the indolent, the cunning, or the profligate, who are borne into power upon the tide of a temporary popularity?"
The "majority of the hour." Is that not what the Obama administration represents? The gun confiscationist impulse among Obama's entourage is not only a threat to our access to arms but to our property rights as well. The new "Assault Weapons Ban," we are promised by the gun grabbers, will "have teeth." There is no doubt from the Obama transition team's own statements that they intend to ban, hence confiscate, heretofore legal semi-automatic rifles of military utility. It is our property as much as our liberty they aim to seize. And what do we profit if we successfully defend our right to arms, but cannot afford to purchase the ammunition without which they become mere expensive clubs? Sam Adams once asked:
"Now what liberty can there be where property is taken without consent?"
Or, one might add, where the ability to acquire property is artificially and tyrannically denied? The answer is, there can be none.
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass
There has been much unfortunate name-calling between the Three Percenters and the so-called Pragmatists these past six months since the printing of my letter in the Madison newspaper. They started out calling us "insane" (among the nicer terms) and we responded by calling them "cowards" and the debate went downhill from there. I shoulder as much blame for this as the next man, maybe more. As a guard, I should know better.
You know, the stern, undistractable attitude of the guards at Buckingham Palace has become cartoonish in the public mind over the years. It is now a given that tourists will approach them and do everything (including the flashing of mammary glands large and small, I am told) in order to get them to react. They do not react. They do not argue. They guard.
As Constitutional guards, I have come to the conclusion that we should do more guarding and less arguing about whether or not we have the right to guard our own liberty and property. We have taken our posts by common declaration. Let the tourists mug and mock, but let us not mug and mock them back. Let us instead guard, by declaration and example.
The truth of the matter is that when the tyrant's myrmidons approach the guard post, the tourists will scatter anyway. Seeking to convert them by anything less than consistent, stern example is foolhardy. For those who might be persuaded to our position will only be swayed by conduct that they admire, not facile taunting, however effective.
Equally foolhardy, from the Pragmatists' point of view, is their expectation that they can protect their liberties without, at base, Patrick Henry's "downright force." They are foolhardy to believe that we can guard anything, whether it is our liberty or property or even the cash register at the local gas station without the threat of defensive violence. The Founders understood this.
The Pragmatists blame us for staking out a position that will lead to violence. Yet this is as ridiculous as blaming a potential rape victim for pulling out her .38 revolver and telling her would-be attacker to put that thing back in his pants before somebody gets dead. We do not seek to attack the government. We seek merely to defend ourselves from government depredations of liberty and property. We merely seek to guard.
So let us be about our Constitutional guard duty, and refuse to engage the salad-bar philosophy tourists in taunting contests. To the extent we are able to do this, it will be seen both by our potential allies and our looming enemies as evidence of our serious purpose. And if we are able to do that, we will have taken a long step down the road back to the Founders' idea of the armed citizenry as the most important credible deterrent to potential American tyranny.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Habit: "An army . . . ought to be able to shoot 'possible' before it lets the band play too loud."
Folks,
As I struggle to finish Absolved and keep fresh material on this blog simultaneously, I find myself dipping back into my older essays for topics that are still pertinent and will be of interest to the many new readers who have rallied to the Three Percent cause. Their principal virtue in my tired eyes at the moment is that I don't have to rewrite them. And they are, I must admit, still on point to our present situation. I wrote this back in February.
"HABIT"
"An army . . . ought to be able to shoot 'possible' before it lets the band play too loud."
"Tyree, tell me about Spanish Man's Grave." Sergeant Tyree spat left and looked squint-eyed under his hat brim at Ross Pennell. "Can't rightly tell much, sir. Never been there. Only hearsay. He drawed a picture of it once -- Captain MacAfee. Spanish soldiers ridin' an' marchin' up from Santa Fe coupla centuries ago, all shinin' in armor and golden helmets, with plumes and yellow silken flags. Musta been purty." Tyree shook his head. "But it didn't work out. The Apaches caught the whole kit and kaboodle of 'em in the tablelands and killed every mother's son. Got 'em like at the bottom of the well, they say. Ever since then it's been Apache holy ground. It did something to their bad god for all time. Only their good god lives in the Grave. Once the Apaches get in to Spanish Man's, they're safe home. Big and powerful medicine that protects them."
"Anybody from Fort Starke ever been there?" "No white man was ever there, is what I think. A lot of 'em will lie they was, but I think only them dead caballeros know where it is, and they ain't a one of 'em ever talked since the massacre." "Tyree," Pennell said, I wonder what those Spaniards did wrong?"
"I ain't a man to blame dead men," Tyree said, "but the captain used to say an army ought to have a lotta brains before it shows a lotta flags. He used to say it ought to be able to shoot 'possible' before it lets the band play too loud. And he used to say that only a well-trained veteran looks right in a bright uniform, and that dirty uniform shirts make the best empires. But maybe we'll find out what the Spaniards did wrong, Mr. Pennell. I've knowed we was goin' to the Grave fer four days." . . . -- "Spanish Man's Grave" by James Warner Bellah in Reveille, Curtis Publishing, 1947.
I've been a fan of James Warner Bellah's writing since childhood, long before I even knew his name. Born in Delaware in 1899, Bellah went to Canada before the U.S. entered World War I, joining the Royal Flying Corps and serving as a pilot in the 117th Squadron. After the Great War ended, he began writing, publishing his first novel in 1923. In the 1930s he worked as journalist for the New York Post. A student of history, he joined the United States Army before Pearl Harbor and served as an infantry officer in Southeast Asia. After the war he resumed his writing career and struck gold with a series of stories first published in the Saturday Evening Post, about the U.S. Cavalry during the Indian wars. John Ford's epic cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande (all starring John Wayne), were Bellah screenplays, based on his short stories, "Massacre," "Mission Without a Name," and "The Big Hunt." Bellah went on to write the screenplays for other movies, including Sergeant Rutledge and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He died in 1976.
"Wherever ten or twenty of them in dirty shirt blue were gathered together -- that became the United States." --James Warner Bellah, from his screen adaptation of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was always my favorite. Wayne's portrayal of tough, competent, sentimental Captain Nathan Brittles ("Never apologize, Mr. Cohill. Its a sign of weakness"), a character based upon the real U.S. cavalry officer Frederick W. Benteen, was a classic. I first saw it as kid on late night TV and was enthralled. I suppose that's why back in the late 80s I wrote a manuscript biography of Benteen's civil war career (sadly unpublished). The concept of the man who does his duty, no matter the cost, speaks of eternal truths.
But even if Nathan Brittles is my favorite Bellah character, "Spanish Man's Grave" is my favorite Bellah story. Young Lieutenant Ross Pennell, worn-out Captain MacAfee, hard-bitten Sergeant Tyree, a corporal and seven men, are on patrol when they spot smoke in the distance -- a burning homestead. MacAfee halts his mount.
"Mr. Pennell," he spoke haltingly, "this . . .is as far as I go," and he sat there with his eyes closed, like marbles in his skull. Marbles covered with chicken skin. A worn-out man, old before his time, drained dry by the Colors, sitting his mount a thousand miles down the wastelands, staring at distant smoke with his eyes closed.
"Drained dry by the Colors." MacAfee is dying. His left arm and leg have gone dead and now he is blind. Pennell moves to help him from his saddle, but MacAfee speaks:
"Mr. Pennell, there are only three things to remember out here. Always make them think you are in force, or will be soon. Always frighten them until they stop thinking and take refuge in Medicine. Then turn it against them, spoil its power and break it, so they can't trust anything. And always treat your luck with respect, so that it will never turn against you. This time I was going to take the patrol down and try to find Spanish Man's Grave. I wanted to show dirty uniform shirt blue down there and spoil that Medicine for them. The Apaches have been living too long on that old massacre story -- believing too much in their immunity. Flout it in their faces, show them that the gods hate them, too, and you've gone a long way toward making them behave. I want you to take the patrol down."
Then, before Pennell can help the Captain from his horse, MacAfee dies as he lived, "straight-shouldered in the saddle."
The patrol buries the Captain and rides on to the smoke, finding the broken bodies of a tortured homesteader and his gang-raped wife. Their daughter is missing, abducted by the Apaches. The determined but inexperienced Pennell tells Tyree they are pushing on to Spanish Man's Grave. The way is hard, the odds long, the men fearful and, toward the end, rebellious. Pennell has had them do things they don't understand, like making enough squad fires at night for two companies of cavalry rather than a small one for their short squad. (Von Steuben was the first, but not the last, to comment that American soldiers always have to be told the "why" of things before risking their lives.) Finally Pennell explains himself:
"We're going to the Grave because the Apaches are going. They're going because they're running to Medicine, for protection -- to get away from two companies. Drive 'em to Medicine, turn it on 'em, show 'em its no good either! That's the second thing you always do." . . . "Those dead Spaniards," Pennell said, "came through the easiest route. The fact that they were all killed means they must have laid themselves open to tactical murder. They've done it all through their history; that's why they've got no history left, only a record."
The story is chock full of the hard lessons of war that soldiers must learn before they can win. Yet the narrative lets you know in ways spoken and hinted that here, in these pitifully few men, products of their tough training and bitter experience, is the "army that can shoot 'possible.'" They do not need a band. Using clues from the dead Captain and Tyree's recollections of the Spaniard's last stand, Pennell and Tyree get to the highest ground and spot, as Pennell deduced they would, the entrance to the Apache lair. Pennell then takes his men into the middle of Spanish Man's Grave in the dark of night, startling the war party at their fires:
Pennell called to the little Graeme girl again to lie flat and wait, and again the patrol fired, and again, until there was no more sound of thrashing agony, no more panther rush to get away, no more Apaches to teach the niceties to.
The girl is rescued and the Apaches are routed by a dead Captain's plan and a young Lieutenant's initiative. Bellah ends with this sentence: "And the way of their hard living was suddenly more worth while in that moment than all the emeralds of Hind and all the gold of Cathay." Hokey? Maybe. Just like the singing of the Star Spangled Banner that puts a catch in your throat.
"THEY HAD TRAINED INTENSIVELY"
As time went by we built the mythology of the Minute Men even further. We depicted them as a small but courageous band of farmers who responded to a spontaneous call to arms, an untrained and poorly armed rabble. The truth, of course, was very different. There were actually 14,000 colonials under arms in the militia and Minute Man regiments. They were alerted by organized alarm riders via a system that dated back to the 17th century wars. They had trained intensively for a year and were armed with the same type weapons as the British. Lexington was an important battle in the history of the United States, not only because it was the opening moment of the war that created our country but also because it provides us a microcosm of the drift to war -- with all the tensions, the misinterpretations, the fears and the posturings, the courageous and the foolish acts that augur the clash of arms. The distortion of this historical event has kept us from some vital insights concerning the way that wars begin. . ." -- General John R. Galvin, The Minute Men, The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution, Pergamon/Brassey, 1989, pp. VIII & IX
In Spanish Man's Grave, the cavalry employ the same principles of war against raiders that the colonial militias, the trained bands and the "snow shoe men" who preceded the Minutemen of the 1770s did against the Indian tribes of the East. These campaigns, and those of the French and Indian War, honed a system of militia training and organization that paid off on 19 April 1775. General Galvin's book is required reading for every student of the armed citizenry, for it demonstrates that the Minutemen's success at Concord and the savaging of the British column all the way back to Boston was neither accidental nor spontaneous.
For those of us today who believe that going down to the range four or five times a year is enough to demonstrate the proficiency necessary to provide as credible a deterrent to tyranny as the Minutemen, a quick skimming of Galvin's work ought to disabuse them of that silly notion. As I have written in many places before, merely having the means to resist tyranny is no evidence that you can do so successfully. You must have the will and the ability to do so.
You must, like Bellah's Captain MacAfee says, be able to fire a "possible" at distance. You must also know how to conduct yourself when firing at an enemy. And you must know how to get to the place where you can fire. And how to move forward, or backward, after doing so. The constitutional militias of the 90s worked on such competencies and were laughed at by "respectable" shooters. Yet, as I have written before (See: "Resistance is Futile": Waco Rules vs. Romanian Rules at http://waronguns.blogspot.com/2007/05/guest-editorial-resistance-is-futile.html), the 90s militias were enough to back down the Clintonistas from any more Wacos.
For all the silliness and stupidity that characterized the "militia generals" who capered and postured like clowns for the mainstream media back then, there were many other folks who quietly understood the lessons of the armed citizenry of our history. Shunning attention, they did the one thing that made them a countervailing force to predatory unconstitutional government -- they trained. And trained and trained. They trained until the lessons were a habit. And some of them are still training today.
"HABIT IS A MIGHTY ALLY"
"Tonight was a lark. It was practice. Prepare your mind to endure its like again and again, until it is nothing to you, until you can laugh in Polnikes' face and return his insults with a carefree heart. Remember that boys of Lakedaemon have endured these harrowings for hundreds of years. We spend tears now that we may conserve blood later. Polynikes was not seeking to harm you tonight. He was trying to teach that discipline of mind which will block out fear when the trumpets sound and the battle pipers mark the beat. Remember what I told you about the house with many rooms. There are rooms we must not enter. Anger. Fear. Any passion which leads the mind toward that 'possession' which undoes men in war. Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle. . . Habit is a mighty ally, my young friend. The habit of fear and anger, or the habit of self-composure and courage." (Dienekes) rapped the boy warmly on the shoulder; they both stood. "Go now. Get some sleep. I promise you, before you see battle again, we'll arm you with all the handiest habits." -- Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield.
Competition pistol shooters know about muscle memory. Muscle memory is a physical training but also a mental one. As seasoned handgun shooter Tom Gresham observed:
"Nearly all top pistol shooters dry fire—that is, they 'shoot' without ammunition. It can be done at home, after checking to make sure the gun is not loaded. Recoil obscures problems of technique, not to mention flinching. The goal of dry firing is to keep the sights on the target after the hammer falls. Repetition grooves muscle memory and enhances your ability to concentrate, enabling you to pull the trigger without disturbing the sight alignment." (Source: http://www.thetipzone.com/tip_pages/shooting/handgun.html)
Likewise, says Edwin Hall,
"When you have a chance to just sit back with no immediate worldly attention needed, you can train for shooting by imagining you are shooting. A boring meeting where you might be called upon for input is probably not a good place, but a snack break or lunch time might be. If you have this type of relaxed time, put it to use. Start by thinking about being at the range. Mentally rehearse all the steps taken to perform a perfect shot, all the way through checking it and finding it to be that perfect shot. Never even joke that it might have been less than perfect. All mental practice should be done visualizing perfect results. Perform these exercises whenever time permits. Be sincere. Don't just try; do!" (Source: ibid.)
What is true for handgunning is true for all other things in life. There is a muscle memory to maintaining liberty. There are both mental and physical habits produced by long training that make you a free man or woman and us, all of us, a free people. The Roman Vegetius said, "Let him who desires peace prepare for war." George Washington put a finer point on it: "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."
"He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms." -- Psalm 18:34
This is what the Founders intended by the 2nd Amendment: to put the elements of defensive war in the hands of the people. But they also expected us to be "well-regulated", that is to be competent with those weapons, to be trained in their use. They didn't put that responsibility on the federal government. They put it on us, the people. Now, it is true enough that most people today don't accept that responsibility any more. Many would even take it away from those who do. These sad facts do not absolve us from the responsibility of maintaining our freedom habits and our liberty muscle memory.
"Habit is a mighty ally." Indeed. And tyrants, like street thugs, pass by the man who looks ready to take them on and pick on the unready, the weak and the obvious victim. "They had trained intensively for a year," Galvin says of the Minutemen. How much have you trained lately in the arts of a free citizen?
As Robert Heinlein warned, "You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once." And he also cautioned, "Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss." So, work on your freedom muscle memory. Renew the old mental and physical habits of liberty that you have let fall into disuse. And stay away from the white lightning, for in this troubled time fast approaching you can't afford to miss that "possible."
As I struggle to finish Absolved and keep fresh material on this blog simultaneously, I find myself dipping back into my older essays for topics that are still pertinent and will be of interest to the many new readers who have rallied to the Three Percent cause. Their principal virtue in my tired eyes at the moment is that I don't have to rewrite them. And they are, I must admit, still on point to our present situation. I wrote this back in February.
"HABIT"
"An army . . . ought to be able to shoot 'possible' before it lets the band play too loud."
"Tyree, tell me about Spanish Man's Grave." Sergeant Tyree spat left and looked squint-eyed under his hat brim at Ross Pennell. "Can't rightly tell much, sir. Never been there. Only hearsay. He drawed a picture of it once -- Captain MacAfee. Spanish soldiers ridin' an' marchin' up from Santa Fe coupla centuries ago, all shinin' in armor and golden helmets, with plumes and yellow silken flags. Musta been purty." Tyree shook his head. "But it didn't work out. The Apaches caught the whole kit and kaboodle of 'em in the tablelands and killed every mother's son. Got 'em like at the bottom of the well, they say. Ever since then it's been Apache holy ground. It did something to their bad god for all time. Only their good god lives in the Grave. Once the Apaches get in to Spanish Man's, they're safe home. Big and powerful medicine that protects them."
"Anybody from Fort Starke ever been there?" "No white man was ever there, is what I think. A lot of 'em will lie they was, but I think only them dead caballeros know where it is, and they ain't a one of 'em ever talked since the massacre." "Tyree," Pennell said, I wonder what those Spaniards did wrong?"
"I ain't a man to blame dead men," Tyree said, "but the captain used to say an army ought to have a lotta brains before it shows a lotta flags. He used to say it ought to be able to shoot 'possible' before it lets the band play too loud. And he used to say that only a well-trained veteran looks right in a bright uniform, and that dirty uniform shirts make the best empires. But maybe we'll find out what the Spaniards did wrong, Mr. Pennell. I've knowed we was goin' to the Grave fer four days." . . . -- "Spanish Man's Grave" by James Warner Bellah in Reveille, Curtis Publishing, 1947.
I've been a fan of James Warner Bellah's writing since childhood, long before I even knew his name. Born in Delaware in 1899, Bellah went to Canada before the U.S. entered World War I, joining the Royal Flying Corps and serving as a pilot in the 117th Squadron. After the Great War ended, he began writing, publishing his first novel in 1923. In the 1930s he worked as journalist for the New York Post. A student of history, he joined the United States Army before Pearl Harbor and served as an infantry officer in Southeast Asia. After the war he resumed his writing career and struck gold with a series of stories first published in the Saturday Evening Post, about the U.S. Cavalry during the Indian wars. John Ford's epic cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande (all starring John Wayne), were Bellah screenplays, based on his short stories, "Massacre," "Mission Without a Name," and "The Big Hunt." Bellah went on to write the screenplays for other movies, including Sergeant Rutledge and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He died in 1976.
"Wherever ten or twenty of them in dirty shirt blue were gathered together -- that became the United States." --James Warner Bellah, from his screen adaptation of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was always my favorite. Wayne's portrayal of tough, competent, sentimental Captain Nathan Brittles ("Never apologize, Mr. Cohill. Its a sign of weakness"), a character based upon the real U.S. cavalry officer Frederick W. Benteen, was a classic. I first saw it as kid on late night TV and was enthralled. I suppose that's why back in the late 80s I wrote a manuscript biography of Benteen's civil war career (sadly unpublished). The concept of the man who does his duty, no matter the cost, speaks of eternal truths.
But even if Nathan Brittles is my favorite Bellah character, "Spanish Man's Grave" is my favorite Bellah story. Young Lieutenant Ross Pennell, worn-out Captain MacAfee, hard-bitten Sergeant Tyree, a corporal and seven men, are on patrol when they spot smoke in the distance -- a burning homestead. MacAfee halts his mount.
"Mr. Pennell," he spoke haltingly, "this . . .is as far as I go," and he sat there with his eyes closed, like marbles in his skull. Marbles covered with chicken skin. A worn-out man, old before his time, drained dry by the Colors, sitting his mount a thousand miles down the wastelands, staring at distant smoke with his eyes closed.
"Drained dry by the Colors." MacAfee is dying. His left arm and leg have gone dead and now he is blind. Pennell moves to help him from his saddle, but MacAfee speaks:
"Mr. Pennell, there are only three things to remember out here. Always make them think you are in force, or will be soon. Always frighten them until they stop thinking and take refuge in Medicine. Then turn it against them, spoil its power and break it, so they can't trust anything. And always treat your luck with respect, so that it will never turn against you. This time I was going to take the patrol down and try to find Spanish Man's Grave. I wanted to show dirty uniform shirt blue down there and spoil that Medicine for them. The Apaches have been living too long on that old massacre story -- believing too much in their immunity. Flout it in their faces, show them that the gods hate them, too, and you've gone a long way toward making them behave. I want you to take the patrol down."
Then, before Pennell can help the Captain from his horse, MacAfee dies as he lived, "straight-shouldered in the saddle."
The patrol buries the Captain and rides on to the smoke, finding the broken bodies of a tortured homesteader and his gang-raped wife. Their daughter is missing, abducted by the Apaches. The determined but inexperienced Pennell tells Tyree they are pushing on to Spanish Man's Grave. The way is hard, the odds long, the men fearful and, toward the end, rebellious. Pennell has had them do things they don't understand, like making enough squad fires at night for two companies of cavalry rather than a small one for their short squad. (Von Steuben was the first, but not the last, to comment that American soldiers always have to be told the "why" of things before risking their lives.) Finally Pennell explains himself:
"We're going to the Grave because the Apaches are going. They're going because they're running to Medicine, for protection -- to get away from two companies. Drive 'em to Medicine, turn it on 'em, show 'em its no good either! That's the second thing you always do." . . . "Those dead Spaniards," Pennell said, "came through the easiest route. The fact that they were all killed means they must have laid themselves open to tactical murder. They've done it all through their history; that's why they've got no history left, only a record."
The story is chock full of the hard lessons of war that soldiers must learn before they can win. Yet the narrative lets you know in ways spoken and hinted that here, in these pitifully few men, products of their tough training and bitter experience, is the "army that can shoot 'possible.'" They do not need a band. Using clues from the dead Captain and Tyree's recollections of the Spaniard's last stand, Pennell and Tyree get to the highest ground and spot, as Pennell deduced they would, the entrance to the Apache lair. Pennell then takes his men into the middle of Spanish Man's Grave in the dark of night, startling the war party at their fires:
Pennell called to the little Graeme girl again to lie flat and wait, and again the patrol fired, and again, until there was no more sound of thrashing agony, no more panther rush to get away, no more Apaches to teach the niceties to.
The girl is rescued and the Apaches are routed by a dead Captain's plan and a young Lieutenant's initiative. Bellah ends with this sentence: "And the way of their hard living was suddenly more worth while in that moment than all the emeralds of Hind and all the gold of Cathay." Hokey? Maybe. Just like the singing of the Star Spangled Banner that puts a catch in your throat.
"THEY HAD TRAINED INTENSIVELY"
As time went by we built the mythology of the Minute Men even further. We depicted them as a small but courageous band of farmers who responded to a spontaneous call to arms, an untrained and poorly armed rabble. The truth, of course, was very different. There were actually 14,000 colonials under arms in the militia and Minute Man regiments. They were alerted by organized alarm riders via a system that dated back to the 17th century wars. They had trained intensively for a year and were armed with the same type weapons as the British. Lexington was an important battle in the history of the United States, not only because it was the opening moment of the war that created our country but also because it provides us a microcosm of the drift to war -- with all the tensions, the misinterpretations, the fears and the posturings, the courageous and the foolish acts that augur the clash of arms. The distortion of this historical event has kept us from some vital insights concerning the way that wars begin. . ." -- General John R. Galvin, The Minute Men, The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution, Pergamon/Brassey, 1989, pp. VIII & IX
In Spanish Man's Grave, the cavalry employ the same principles of war against raiders that the colonial militias, the trained bands and the "snow shoe men" who preceded the Minutemen of the 1770s did against the Indian tribes of the East. These campaigns, and those of the French and Indian War, honed a system of militia training and organization that paid off on 19 April 1775. General Galvin's book is required reading for every student of the armed citizenry, for it demonstrates that the Minutemen's success at Concord and the savaging of the British column all the way back to Boston was neither accidental nor spontaneous.
For those of us today who believe that going down to the range four or five times a year is enough to demonstrate the proficiency necessary to provide as credible a deterrent to tyranny as the Minutemen, a quick skimming of Galvin's work ought to disabuse them of that silly notion. As I have written in many places before, merely having the means to resist tyranny is no evidence that you can do so successfully. You must have the will and the ability to do so.
You must, like Bellah's Captain MacAfee says, be able to fire a "possible" at distance. You must also know how to conduct yourself when firing at an enemy. And you must know how to get to the place where you can fire. And how to move forward, or backward, after doing so. The constitutional militias of the 90s worked on such competencies and were laughed at by "respectable" shooters. Yet, as I have written before (See: "Resistance is Futile": Waco Rules vs. Romanian Rules at http://waronguns.blogspot.com/2007/05/guest-editorial-resistance-is-futile.html), the 90s militias were enough to back down the Clintonistas from any more Wacos.
For all the silliness and stupidity that characterized the "militia generals" who capered and postured like clowns for the mainstream media back then, there were many other folks who quietly understood the lessons of the armed citizenry of our history. Shunning attention, they did the one thing that made them a countervailing force to predatory unconstitutional government -- they trained. And trained and trained. They trained until the lessons were a habit. And some of them are still training today.
"HABIT IS A MIGHTY ALLY"
"Tonight was a lark. It was practice. Prepare your mind to endure its like again and again, until it is nothing to you, until you can laugh in Polnikes' face and return his insults with a carefree heart. Remember that boys of Lakedaemon have endured these harrowings for hundreds of years. We spend tears now that we may conserve blood later. Polynikes was not seeking to harm you tonight. He was trying to teach that discipline of mind which will block out fear when the trumpets sound and the battle pipers mark the beat. Remember what I told you about the house with many rooms. There are rooms we must not enter. Anger. Fear. Any passion which leads the mind toward that 'possession' which undoes men in war. Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle. . . Habit is a mighty ally, my young friend. The habit of fear and anger, or the habit of self-composure and courage." (Dienekes) rapped the boy warmly on the shoulder; they both stood. "Go now. Get some sleep. I promise you, before you see battle again, we'll arm you with all the handiest habits." -- Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield.
Competition pistol shooters know about muscle memory. Muscle memory is a physical training but also a mental one. As seasoned handgun shooter Tom Gresham observed:
"Nearly all top pistol shooters dry fire—that is, they 'shoot' without ammunition. It can be done at home, after checking to make sure the gun is not loaded. Recoil obscures problems of technique, not to mention flinching. The goal of dry firing is to keep the sights on the target after the hammer falls. Repetition grooves muscle memory and enhances your ability to concentrate, enabling you to pull the trigger without disturbing the sight alignment." (Source: http://www.thetipzone.com/tip_pages/shooting/handgun.html)
Likewise, says Edwin Hall,
"When you have a chance to just sit back with no immediate worldly attention needed, you can train for shooting by imagining you are shooting. A boring meeting where you might be called upon for input is probably not a good place, but a snack break or lunch time might be. If you have this type of relaxed time, put it to use. Start by thinking about being at the range. Mentally rehearse all the steps taken to perform a perfect shot, all the way through checking it and finding it to be that perfect shot. Never even joke that it might have been less than perfect. All mental practice should be done visualizing perfect results. Perform these exercises whenever time permits. Be sincere. Don't just try; do!" (Source: ibid.)
What is true for handgunning is true for all other things in life. There is a muscle memory to maintaining liberty. There are both mental and physical habits produced by long training that make you a free man or woman and us, all of us, a free people. The Roman Vegetius said, "Let him who desires peace prepare for war." George Washington put a finer point on it: "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."
"He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms." -- Psalm 18:34
This is what the Founders intended by the 2nd Amendment: to put the elements of defensive war in the hands of the people. But they also expected us to be "well-regulated", that is to be competent with those weapons, to be trained in their use. They didn't put that responsibility on the federal government. They put it on us, the people. Now, it is true enough that most people today don't accept that responsibility any more. Many would even take it away from those who do. These sad facts do not absolve us from the responsibility of maintaining our freedom habits and our liberty muscle memory.
"Habit is a mighty ally." Indeed. And tyrants, like street thugs, pass by the man who looks ready to take them on and pick on the unready, the weak and the obvious victim. "They had trained intensively for a year," Galvin says of the Minutemen. How much have you trained lately in the arts of a free citizen?
As Robert Heinlein warned, "You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once." And he also cautioned, "Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss." So, work on your freedom muscle memory. Renew the old mental and physical habits of liberty that you have let fall into disuse. And stay away from the white lightning, for in this troubled time fast approaching you can't afford to miss that "possible."
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