Stupidity on CW

I missed a couple of days because of work obligations, and it appears as though I was too late to say most of what needed to be said about this video because other blogs beat me to it.

I do, as you would expect, have a couple of thoughts to add that perhaps others haven’t thought of.

This idea comes along all the time from anti-gunners- the idea that a militia armed with AR-15’s can’t fight a government armed with tanks, fighter jets, and nukes. The most obvious retort to this, is that this argument only makes the case that the 2A applies to tanks, jets, nukes, and especially MANPADS, ATGMs, and other heavy weapons. (If you don’t want 2A to apply to nukes, I am sure that you would have no problem getting an Amendment passed to that effect.)

No, the less obvious answer is that a militia isn’t going to be relegated to a confined field of play, as if war was some sort of spectator sport like football. The more likely continuation of the above video is that Staff Sergeant Jeremiah Walker leaves his bunker from a long day of shooting drone launched Hellfire missiles at NRA members like Andy Baker and gets in his car to go home. When he gets there, he discovers his 12 year old son in bed in a pool of his own blood, his throat slashed from ear to ear. Rigor mortis has already set in. His wife and 4 year old daughter are missing. In the girls bed is a note which reads: “If you ever want to see your daughter alive again, the next Hellfire you shoot needs to hit Senator Schumer.”

He refuses, and redoubles his desire to kill the entire membership of the NRA. His daughter’s body is found in a ditch two days later, his wife is never found. In his rage, the distraught Staff Sergeant begins randomly firing Hellfires into right wing neighborhoods, killing dozens of people, some of whom may actually have been gun owners, most were not. The father of one of those killed is the vendor who sells pork to the base mess hall. One day, about a month after the daughter’s death, the Staff Sergeant is eating in the mess hall when he finds his wife’s engagement ring in his pulled pork. Tests confirm that the “pork” is a match to his wife’s DNA. The butcher is never caught and is currently wanted by the FBI, who believes that he has joined the growing underground resistance movement.

Two weeks after the arrest warrant is issued, the FBI is distracted by another case at the Norfolk navy base when 140 sailors die after someone added a deadly bacteria to a shipment of lettuce that was bound for the USS Gerald R. Ford’s mess facility. The entire US military is ordered to begin eating only MRE’s or canned food manufactured more than 6 months ago. Morale plunges with food quality, and the government soon realizes that they have less than 90 days of “safe” food supplies for themselves, even after confiscating all canned goods nationwide. Citizens in large cities begin having food riots as most people can’t get more than 900 calories a day. The food just isn’t there.

Civil wars get ugly. Bosnia. Rwanda. Rhodesia. Kosovo. Even the American Civil War. The US civil war, as a percentage of the US population, was the bloodiest war in American history. In 1860, the US census measured the population at 31.5 million people. Six to ten million were killed and wounded. That means the war killed and wounded 20 to 30 percent of the nation. If a conflict with similar casualty rates were to occur today, we would see about 40 million killed and another 30 million wounded in direct hostilities, and another 60 million dead from disease and famine. With casualty rates like that, societies break down. Medical systems stop working. Famine, disease, and poverty reign.

The secret here is that the government is scared. Every senior government official saw exactly what we saw- nearly 400 cops being held at bay by a single teenaged loser with an AR-15 because they didn’t want to get “clapped.”

Then they realize that the nation has well over 100 million gun owners, many of them veterans, who like to see how fast they can shoot things that are as far as a mile away. For fun. They remember the two losers who shut down all of DC by creating a sniper’s hide in the trunk of a car. How can they trust a police department to protect them when the shooting starts? This scares them, which is why there was a division of troops airlifted into DC in the days following J6.

And before those on the right get too smug, don’t be thinking that the military will automatically refuse orders to kill civilians. History is filled with examples of militaries that gleefully slaughtered their own citizens when ordered to do so.

No, the most likely outcome of a civil war is for some people, and some military units, to take one side in the conflict, and others to take the other. Then there will be those who are nominally on one side while feeding information to the other. It’s the kind of conflict that starts with a few thousand and soon sees everyone choosing sides. Picture a US Civil War, part 2 where a third of the nation is dead or incapacitated within half a decade.

That’s something that is truly frightening to me, and something to be avoided at any cost short of abject despotism. It is also an outcome that seems more likely every day, because there are those on both sides that seem to desire it.