Bring Your Sidearms To The Banks of the Potomac.

[JackRiddler]

It's the point about the government that gets me. I do not want us to be outgunned by them.

We ARE them. In the US, several million of us make up the police forces, military, security bureaucracies and contractors.

If the government ever attempts to put down a large uprising by force of arms, the outcome will be determined by what its foot-soldiers do. If they follow orders, "we" will lose. Of course they outgun "us." If enough of them refuse orders, "we" win. The size of our pathetic arsenals will have little to do with it, unless it serves as the pretext for rallying repressive measures. The most important element of defense against tyranny is the self-organization of the people.

[Nordic]

Amy Bishop's father thought he was "protecting his family" by having a shotgun in the house. Instead, his daughter shot and killed his son with the damn thing.

I've contemplated buying a gun in the last two years or so. But I don't want the government to know I have one. Kind of defeats the purpose, really.

Also, I fear bandits and theives and killers and rapists in a lawless Los Angeles far more than my own government. If civilization breaks down here, the government is gonna stay very far away, they'll be too afraid to intervene. It'll be every man for himself. Kind of like during the riots, when the police were all HIDING.

[compared2what?]

My quick and simple response to something I understand to be much more complicated and emotionally charged (including personal histories and the environment in which one lives), but I stand with Operator Kos on this. Maybe I'm missing something, or there's a secret embedded agenda to this call to assemble, but it reads to be un-inciting, lawful, respectful and responsible. Unless it turns ugly and attracts provocateurs, what's the problem? There are many responsible gun owners, including my own household and most, if not all, of my neighbors, and we don't live in 'Grizzly Adams' shacks (not yet anyway), but so what if we did?

Oh, wait, I thought the post title meant Bring your sidearms (and longarms) to the criminal financial institutions of the Potomac.....

That's what it does say, implicitly.

Because obviously, and I can't believe I have to keep repeating this, unless you can make a coherent and logical argument that freedom is contingent on universal open-carry laws:

Nobody's Second Amendment rights are being infringed at the moment. On the contrary, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that they're going to expand in the very near future, since SCOTUS finally heard arguments in McDonald v. Chicago just a few weeks ago.

The only question is by how much.

Furthermore, this whole right/left thing is an artificial distinction and a rhetorical red herring. I'm so far to the left I'm not even on the map in reality and although I wouldn't describe myself this way, it wouldn't be inaccurate in any particular to describe me as a social liberal. Yet, I am a die-hard advocate for a robust and unfucked-with Second Amendment.

It's just that -- as I more or less already said -- in my politically active lifetime, there's never been any reason for that advocacy to be vocal. Because the Second Amendment isn't and hasn't ever been meaningfully under siege. Having to wait five days before you can exercise your right to keep and bear a firearm by purchasing one does not fucking amount to infringement. For example.

Neither does being required not to carry it openly in public parks, school zones.

Nor do the overwhelming majority of the rest of the wide range of similarly non-obstructive, non-burdensome unoppressive gun-control regulations that may or may not apply to the state in which you happen to be when you feel moved to exercise that particular right.

There are a tiny, tiny number of strictly local exceptions to that. But since I happen to live smack in the middle of a city in which it's a practical impossibility to buy a gun legally, I do feel that it's fair to note that anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that even those don't do much to infringe on anybody's right to keep and bear arms in practice, given that I very seriously doubt that the average number of armed people on any given block of New York City is any lower than it would be in whatever-the population-density equivalent of a city block is in Butte, Montana.

Therefore, equally obviously, informed citizens with strong feelings about the Second Amendment have absolutely no reason to gather on the banks of the Potomac in order to show their determination not to have the weapons that nobody is trying to pry out of their cold dead hands taken away from them.

So for what reasonable reason are they gathering, as you understand it?

Because these are the first two reasons that spring to my mind:

(1) Informed citizens with strong feelings about the Second Amendment are intentionally using open-carry as a pretext for gathering on the banks of the Potomac to send a more generalized symbolic threat of armed violence against the state just for the sake of being ugly and intimidating.

(2) Informed citizens whose feelings about the Bill of Rights are unknown are using open-carry as a metaphorically effective pretext for further clouding the minds of their fellow citizens by intentionally inciting them to direct the anger and resentment they very naturally feel over the very real loss of rights, liberties, and other essential prerequisite conditions for enough individual autonomy to make life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness realistically achievable goals at a purely notional target that was custom-designed to give them something to shoot at without doing any real damage.

Neither of which is pretty, and only the latter of which is reasonable.

But I'm sure there are others. And I look forward to learning what they are.

[Nordic]

I think I should be able to buy and own a gun without the government knowing about it.

It's really none of their damn business.

Buying a gun should be like buying a lawnmower. A gun is a tool, nothing more. A damn dangerous tool, but probably less dangerous than, say, a chainsaw.

[Iamwhomiam]

Fish, I think you nailed it in your op. Through their agents provocateur, the militaristic operators within our US gov’t. are egging on those with itchy trigger fingers to act rashly, whether at this rally or somewhere else. For if they do react as some feel they sooner or later will, their actions will serve to bring about what they fear most: not only the stripping of their second amendment rights, but of all their rights by provoking the suspension of the constitution and the institution of martial law. This is my fear and a danger I sense posed by the ‘patriot’ movement.

Earlier this month I was a guest lecturer before a graduate level class of students taking a Criminal Justice course at a prestigious local college. The course they were enrolled in was one on Law and Society and had to do with Crime and Justice Policy. I was there to address Restorative Justice issues involving Restorative Practices.

You may wonder what could qualify me to address such a class, and so I will tell you.

I’ve worn many hats in this life, but the one I wore to this presentation I would have preferred not to have in my wardrobe.

I belong to a club closely related to firearms, but one not any sane person would seek to join. I didn’t choose to join this exclusive club, but four years on March 25, 2006 a licensed firearm owner decided to enroll me in it. That was the morning he decided to kill my son and five of his friends and seriously physically wound two others before taking his own life. Numerous others there were severely scarred, not physically, but emotionally.

With me participating in the lecture were several other reluctant club members: a mother whose daughter was killed by her son-in-law, who afterward took his own life; the sister of a woman who was killed by her brother-in-law, who afterward took his own life; a man whose sister it is suspected was killed by Charles Manson and the mother and sister of a woman whose body was found buried in the basement of a man who killed and dismembered thirteen women. All were victims of legally licensed firearm owners, except for the young woman suspected of being killed by Charles Manson, who was not legally allowed to possess a firearm.

I began my presentation by asking who among them had experienced a loss due to firearms. Seven had; 25% of all those enrolled in this class. I informed them that unfortunately, statistically, others in this class sooner or later would too. One third of those on our panel were relatives of victims of domestic gun violence committed by legal gun owners.

Perhaps needless to say, our presentations were powerfully moving.

Those of you who think it would be appropriate to take the life of another for whatever reason have little understanding of loss or the pain caused by such acts of violence, or how such an act will forever change the person you once were.

You feed the energy that promotes violence just by expressing such a clinging desire for life at the expense of another’s; a life you know must come to an end in one way or another and I feel sorry for you.

Operator Kos, you are an incredible hypocrite, imo. You advocate for personal firearms and you protest war? You surely are one confused individual.

Perhaps you are not the author you seem to claim to be, but then, I must assume you are.

[compared2what?]

I think I should be able to buy and own a gun without the government knowing about it.

It's really none of their damn business.

Buying a gun should be like buying a lawnmower. A gun is a tool, nothing more. A damn dangerous tool, but probably less dangerous than, say, a chainsaw.

Yet more dangerous than, say, a lawnmower. Although I agree that both are single-purpose tools. Chainsaws got a little more multi-dimensionality.

But seriously, honey, that's fine and good, but it isn't reasoned. I mean your presentation of it isn't, not that you're thinking is disordered. So I'm not sure exactly on what basis you think you should have that ability, or on what basis you think it's none of the government's business. Without elaboration, it sounds like you're saying that you think it's an invasion of privacy for the government to know what its citizens buy, across the board. Which would be fine if you had some other way of proving that your car or your house and property belonged to you and not to the car-thief or the mining company that said otherwise. Or whatever. My point being that there are a lot of purchases that generate a public record that's filed with the state. Stocks and bonds, for instance. Many, many things.

Are none of them the government's business? Should there be no legally binding contract when, say, you sell a book to a publisher? I mean, the judiciary is a branch of the government. The police (who investigate crimes) and the district attorneys (who prosecute them) would be pretty seriously handicapped when it came to stuff like finding out who shot and killed some nice young grad student during a car-jacking if there were absolutely no paper trail for the gun or the car.

Or...You know what? Since I have no idea whether that is what you're saying, or whether it's just what it sounds like you're saying, I'd probably be better off just asking the question I have in a simpler and more open-ended form. Which I guess is more or less:

Assuming that you buy the gun legally and use it legally, in what aspect of gun registration is the invasion and/or infringement vested, per your line of thinking?

[compared2what?]

I belong to a club closely related to firearms, but one not any sane person would seek to join. I didn’t choose to join this exclusive club, but four years on March 25, 2006 a licensed firearm owner decided to enroll me in it. That was the morning he decided to kill my son and five of his friends and seriously physically wound two others before taking his own life. Numerous others there were severely scarred, not physically, but emotionally.

With me participating in the lecture were several other reluctant club members: a mother whose daughter was killed by her son-in-law, who afterward took his own life; the sister of a woman who was killed by her brother-in-law, who afterward took his own life; a man whose sister it is suspected was killed by Charles Manson and the mother and sister of a woman whose body was found buried in the basement of a man who killed and dismembered thirteen women. All were victims of legally licensed firearm owners, except for the young woman suspected of being killed by Charles Manson, who was not legally allowed to possess a firearm.

I'm so sorry for your loss. Please accept my most heartfelt condolences for it. I would not have included such a cardboard hypothetical example of murder as I did in my previous post had I read yours first. But I hit reply at the end of Nordic's, before going any further. So I just want to make sure that you know I didn't read what you wrote and feel it so little that I just blithely went on to invent an empty imitation of gun-violence for the sake of argument without thinking twice about whether that might appear to you to be a diminution of your reality. And I sincerely apologize if it does read that way.

Yours in concord and sympathy,

c2w

[barracuda]

I belong to a club closely related to firearms, but one not any sane person would seek to join.

Iam, I appreciate your writing this post more than I can really express, and second c2w''s heartfelt sympathies. Once again the power of an individual story has trumped polemic on these discussions and added a layer of real world access I would have thought nearly impossible to find in a format like this. Thank you for that, and for evidencing a strength in the face of such tragedy which I'm certain would be beyond me.

[Nordic]

I think I should be able to buy and own a gun without the government knowing about it.

It's really none of their damn business.

Buying a gun should be like buying a lawnmower. A gun is a tool, nothing more. A damn dangerous tool, but probably less dangerous than, say, a chainsaw.

Yet more dangerous than, say, a lawnmower. Although I agree that both are single-purpose tools. Chainsaws got a little more multi-dimensionality.

But seriously, honey, that's fine and good, but it isn't reasoned. I mean your presentation of it isn't, not that you're thinking is disordered. So I'm not sure exactly on what basis you think you should have that ability, or on what basis you think it's none of the government's business. Without elaboration, it sounds like you're saying that you think it's an invasion of privacy for the government to know what its citizens buy, across the board. Which would be fine if you had some other way of proving that your car or your house and property belonged to you and not to the car-thief or the mining company that said otherwise. Or whatever. My point being that there are a lot of purchases that generate a public record that's filed with the state. Stocks and bonds, for instance. Many, many things.

Are none of them the government's business? Should there be no legally binding contract when, say, you sell a book to a publisher? I mean, the judiciary is a branch of the government. The police (who investigate crimes) and the district attorneys (who prosecute them) would be pretty seriously handicapped when it came to stuff like finding out who shot and killed some nice young grad student during a car-jacking if there were absolutely no paper trail for the gun or the car.

Or...You know what? Since I have no idea whether that is what you're saying, or whether it's just what it sounds like you're saying, I'd probably be better off just asking the question I have in a simpler and more open-ended form. Which I guess is more or less:

Assuming that you buy the gun legally and use it legally, in what aspect of gun registration is the invasion and/or infringement vested, per your line of thinking?

My answer to your question is this:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
ISBN 0 00M 6336426
Part 1


The Prison Industry

Footnote 5

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in there lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or, what about the Black Moria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur--what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalins's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

That is why I don't want them to know who has guns and who doesn't.

[82_28]

When I was a kid, there were these people in my suburban town, a family actually. They lived in a big house on a cul-de-sac. It was never spoken of really. But it was well known, with those "in the know", kids essentially who were into "rebellion" and whatnot, that they were arms dealers. The dad had all kinds of accounts with Russian mafia a friend of a friend told me way back when. From what I was led to believe (and makes perfect sense), is that when the Soviet Union fell, all manner of weaponry began to flow out of the region. Everything this all American, upstanding dad had (never met the dad though) was soviet issue. Everything from AKs, Kalishnikovs, pistols, night vision, RPGs, heat seeking shit -- yeah, you name it. I assume, for threads sake and the sake of my point, this must have been BIG back then -- just multiply my story with all the other dealers that were doubtlessly cashing in on this.

One day I was told the dad's kid was making fake IDs (for underage drinking purposes, at least for me). So I said "fuck yeah". Long story short, while I was waiting for him to finish my ID, I went out to the garage with another guy and he handed me a pistol, loaded. I couldn't believe I held within my hands this heavy cold object that could literally kill someone. I never EVER want to see or hold a gun again. I don't care what "they" do to me. I fucking hate guns.

That said, I am a believer in the Bill of Rights, hate the motherfucking NRA and though guns "aren't for me", I don't begrudge sane people from owning them. But, fuck guns.

[StarmanSkye]

Nordic: Man -- THANKS for reminding me and citing this potent passage of Solzhenitsyn's; That has bounced-around in my head for many years, non-specific and beyond conscious recall but informing my thoughts about similiar late-night roundups of suspects and dissidents occurring under US prodding or authority, from Chile to Guatamala and Vietnam, now Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and god knows WHAT secret places.

But in this context, having a well-armed citizenry sure hasn't helped Iraqis resist their living-hell over more than 40 years of tyranny and oppression under one US-sponsored satrap or another, or full-scale invasion and occupation. I don't think the US military/intelligence/police state would ever conduct a resistance clean-up in such a way they'd leave themselves vulnerable to ambush or assault by citizen-militia groups; Owning the Congress, courts, military, mass media, schools, banks and prisons gives the corporate-run Master Class pretty-much all the tools they need to keep the populace chewing their cuds while under the invisible yokes of their serfdom, occasionally given the self-indulgent liberty to practice the rights and priveleges of identity politics expression, waving their banners and wearing their sidearms at their Patriotic picnics or cheering their favorite-teams grandslam homerun or kick-off return or Gasoline Alley victory lap; I don't have a lot of confidence in the American public's willingness to question their fond assumptions or educate themselves on the critical issues and challenge their OWN role in enabling a predatory system that spread around the world and now has returned to their own shores, settling in with a vengeance. They'd much rather be diverted by convenient scapegoat targets for their blame and dissatisfaction, than commit to a principled repeat of the American Revolution they all LOVE to claim as their sacred birthright but which in practice they have sabotaged, betrayed and abandoned.

All the poseur Patriots and Tea Party defenders didn't stand-up and make themselves heard when it would have counted, in the run-up to an opportunistic, criminal war, the blackmail-threat of Congress by Central Bank and financial thieves, the midnight-surprise approval for an unread misnamed Patriot Act that rescinded basic rights, the retroactive 'approval' of torture, kidnapping and indefinite detention for the 'crime' of being an uncharged suspect ... And on and on.

But MAYBE there's hope after all given sufficient time and bitter experience, that the American public can still salvage some remnant of integrity and honor and create a decent, just society worth living for and defending ...

Its always infinitely harder to live for an ideal than it is to die for one. Or to work for peace and justice than to kill for it.

I don't begrudge honorable people the right to bear arms, but i sure don't see it as a bulwark against our piecemeal enslavement, and recognize the danger of unleashed vigilante violence against scapegoat patsies or how civil conflict of different 'sides' can and would be used to villianize the means of resistance. Too many crazies around looking for easy solutions to chronic, systemic problems.

[justdrew]

I don't think it's going to come down to that again though

[compared2what?]

That is why I don't want them to know who has guns and who doesn't.

Duly noted. And that makes perfect sense, in emotional terms. There's also some rational basis for wanting to own a weapon in order to protect and provide for yourself and your family in the event of some future post-apocalyptic every-man-for-himself scenario.

However, since the points already made by JackRiddler in ordinarily clear and coherent terms don't seem to be getting through, please forgive me for reiterating them more forcefully. Also please believe that I'm not criticizing you or anybody else personally. As I said, on a personal level, I'm sympathetic to that feeling. As a feeling. As a political stance or a reasoned argument, I'm neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic to it. I just have no use for it, impartially. Because it has no realpolitik utility. Here's why:

This is not 1776. So seriously: Anyone who's being drawn to the banks of the Potomac because the the conviction with which the puppet-masters leading the Patriot/Libertarian movement have been telling them fairy-tales has led them to believe that in reality it's remotely possible for patriots bearing small firearms to fight a revolutionary war against the U.S. government and win is living in a childish fantasy world.

This is also not a situation in which, like Solzhenitsyn, you're speaking of a past hypothetical, and therefore have no reason to be mindful about the security of your communications.

And the reason I mention that is that it's never too soon for anyone who hopes to be a serious revolutionary at some point in the future to learn that there's not much they could do to ensure that those hopes will never be realized than openly announcing them on a public message board does.

On the plus side, if you happen already to have done that, you probably don't have to worry about any state reprisals in connection with your choosing (or having already chosen) to exercise your individual right to purchase a licensed firearm. Because not only is there not much that you could do with it on your own that would be any kind of a threat to them, you might eventually end up doing them the enormous favor of joining some organized underground armed resistance movement that they didn't already know about, thereby leaving a nice trail of breadcrumbs for their infiltrators to follow.

There really wouldn't even have to be any kind of gun purchase, licit or otherwise, for that to be true, as a matter of fact. Because from a federal law enforcement perspective, the only thing that has the potential to be enough of a threat for indications of it to be worth paying attention to is: The formation and/or joining of organized resistance groups. Whether armed or unarmed.

Individual gun ownership by itself is manifestly not something that they really give a shit about, one way or the other. If it were, they'd have done something about the ease with which virtually anybody who wants to buy a gun can do so a long, long time ago.
______________________

That said, it should go without saying that political revolution is violent. Lots of people die in the course of them. Some if not all of the revolutionaries do inevitably have to keep, bear and use arms to attain various tactical goals from time to time. And maybe all the time. Since that inevitably involves some very seriously consequential costs as well as some very seriously consequential benefits, arms and the use of armed force are obviously both very serious considerations in a political resistance context.

But guns alone don't make a revolution. And gun ownership alone doesn't make a revolutionary. Any more than lawnmowers or chainsaws would. Because they are, as you say, tools. Nothing more. Tools for killing, commanding or coercing other unarmed and/or less-well armed people into cooperating with the wishes of the gun-wielders, to get specific about it.

So I'm still wondering on what reasoned basis concentrating your political energies on a demand for unrestricted open-carry rights advances any populist political cause. Is I guess what I'm saying.

Still looking forward to the explanation, too.

[compared2what?]

And as long as we're on the subject. As far as political resistance goes:

Same principle expressed above goes double for all the rank and file members of the Oath Keepers, Tea Partiers, and other assorted gun-toting and/or gun-loving quasi-militia movements; for all grass-roots level members of the adjacent flank of Ron Paul's die-hard constituency; all rank-and-file members of the NRA whose political inclinations fall in the same part of that general spectrum; and -- basically -- all the rank and file members of every other loudly defiant organized group that's big enough or well-funded enough or publicly visible enough to have national name recognition stature in a mass communications medium. Emphatically not excluding the internet.

Because barring the unlikely event that some break-away faction from any of them developed enough populist-level power to form an economically self-sufficient, autonomous, independent, self-directed force that made its own plans and generated its own talking points without reference to or guidance from the canonical authorities back at whatever central office the millionaires at the top were working from, every single one of them is led and governed by establishment figures whose private interests are contingent on staying on the good side of the angry corporate godheads on whose patronage and protection their power depends. None of whom want an empowered, prosperous polity telling them what to do. Or even having any say about or knowledge of what they do.

Which is not to say that one of those groups might not prevail, eventually. And whether they do or don't their power is definitely on the rise now, as it seems likely to continue to be for the foreseeable future. Especially if they don't have to do much more than throw some Second Amendment pixie dust into the eyes of their followers to persuade them that waving their guns around means they have any more power now than they will under the Generalissimos who'll be running the show if the military coup d'etat they're unwittingly supporting succeeds.
___________

No political resistance in which the momentum is initiated by an authority figure and flows from him or her in a top-down direction ever has or ever will benefit the people. That's not political revolution. It's a political coup.

You've got to do it without any assistance, support or guidance from Daddy. That's just how it is. Objectively.

So please. Take a moment to look around a little at any part of the world at any point in time. Then adjust for anachronisms. I absolutely guarantee that you won't be able to overlook how unerringly true the distinction I just made is. There are no exceptions to it. It's not possible to make any. It's just part of what you have to work with or around, and that's that.

[Nordic]

C2w, I'm not sure I understand your question which I believe is being asked of me.

I will say this. I do not support the gun-toting idiots gathering on the banks of the Potomac. They are being manipulated, they are taking somebody's bait, and they are railing against a "threat" which only exists in their scared, poorly-functioning brains.

I'm not talking about revolution. I'm talking about self defense and I'm also talking about perceptions rather than reality.

People tend to be polite when they think the other person might be armed. The cliche of "a well armed society is a polite society" is actually true.

But I don't worship guns, like so many of these idiots. Guns are just tools, like I said, like chainsaws, electric knifes, or stapleguns. I would be just as likely to kill an intruder in my house with a hammer, a crowbar, or an axe, as I would with a gun. I'd rather go at them directly, in fact, I think it would be more satisfying in many ways, but let's face it, the weapon of choice in such a close-quarters would be a sawed-off shotgun. Do I really want to own a sawed-off shotgun? Not really, no. But do I want any potential intruders to think I might have one? Sure! And that goes for any government assholes that might decide they need to start rounding up "dissidents".

Lately I've been reading about the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and how they treated the intellectuals and the writers there. It's scary stuff, and it could happen here.