{"id":25284,"date":"2014-04-24T00:01:49","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T05:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25284"},"modified":"2014-04-23T11:32:15","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T16:32:15","slug":"beyond-civil-disobedience-lies-a-second-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/04\/24\/beyond-civil-disobedience-lies-a-second-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond civil disobedience lies a second civil war"},"content":{"rendered":"

A short quote posted at KA-CHING!<\/em><\/a> led me to this very alarming blog post at Taxicab Depressions<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Mr Wheeler replied, \u201cThere is certainly no shortage of guns and corruption in Central America. If you have the means to smuggle a ton of cocaine, you can probably smuggle a ton of guns, too. But this was easier\u2026 the Justice Department and the ATF made the contacts and set up the networks, told the gun shops to cooperate, so all the Mexicans had to do was send in a straw buyer, make the purchase, and move the weapons south of the border.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cThese people aren\u2019t very smart\u2026 there are something like 300 million guns in America, and they have a robust shelf life. Even if all gun manufacturing stopped tomorrow, there would still be an abundance of guns in America for decades. The only way to disarm Americans is mass confiscation, and I feel pretty certain that would spark a civil war. I know several gun owners that would rather fight than give up their guns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Wheeler said, \u201cOh, I know dozens\u2026 perhaps hundreds that feel the same way. I really don\u2019t think confiscation is something you need to worry about, because it will never work. There are simply too many of them, and too many people have guns that there is no record of. A confiscation program would only piss off the most dangerous people in America\u2026 the people who would shoot back. You are correct, a mass confiscation would provoke a civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cWell, you are a military man\u2026 what would that look like?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheeler said, \u201cWell, it wouldn\u2019t look like the first Civil War\u2026 no lines of men standing in ranks and shooting across a field at each other, no \u201cNorth and South\u201d or sharply defined state lines for friendly and enemy territories, at least, not in the beginning. No, it would look more like Iraq or Afghanistan, with house to house fighting, IED\u2019s, snipers, small factions and independent militias operating on their own, refugees streaming away from battle zones in all directions\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the first question to ask is who would the combatants be? I mean, the Army isn\u2019t going to just roll out onto the street in tanks on day one, so my guess is that it would start out as a police action, with Federal agencies like ATF and FBI taking the lead, supported by local law enforcement. But once people start shooting back, they would have to ratchet things up, do things like institute curfews and roadblocks, and they would eventually try to press the various state Guard units into service. That\u2019s where it all goes squirrelly, because both local law enforcement and the Guard will be riddled with people who support gun rights, regardless of what laws the politicians pass, and they won\u2019t be crazy about having to police, and maybe even fight against, their own people. The Governors may well object to the state Guard units being activated and may not wish to cooperate\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it is not clear to me how many LEO and Guardsmen would remain loyal to the government and how many would join the \u201crebellion\u201d. My guess is that both sides would be riddled with defections, informants, and spies. But what if, say, the Gulf states like Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida secede, and they take control of all military bases and equipment, and you suddenly have gone from an insurgency with rifles to a breakaway nation, or maybe several breakaway nations, armed with fighter jets, drones, tanks, and a navy? Whoo, buddy\u2026 now all bets are off\u2026 kiss posse comitatus<\/em> goodbye. This would be the ugliest thing this county has ever seen\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked him several \u201cwhat if\u201d questions and let him riff on them\u2026 I just let him talk and wargame out the Second Civil War, there in the back seat of my car as we drove to the airport, and he painted a picture of horrific death and destruction. Once this conflict started, even the best-case scenarios he described sounded truly grim. He seemed to believe that civilian casualties would be extremely high, given how much fighting would centered in and around large cities, and that food would be used as a weapon, causing famine and starvation on a terrifying scale. Booby traps, IED\u2019s, rampant bombings, drone strikes, snipers, local-level assassinations, mortars and shelling, death squads (both government and rebel), reprisal killings, torture\u2026 it sounded more like the Middle East than middle America.<\/p>\n

Wheeler got quiet for a few moments, and then he said something that I will never, ever forget.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people are playing with matches\u2026 I don\u2019t think they understand the scope and scale of the wildfire they are flirting with. They are fucking around with a civil war that could last a decade and cause millions of deaths\u2026 and the sad truth is that 95% of the problems we have in this country could be solved tomorrow, by noon\u2026 simply by dragging 100 people out in the street and shooting them in the fucking head.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A short quote posted at KA-CHING! led me to this very alarming blog post at Taxicab Depressions: Mr Wheeler replied, \u201cThere is certainly no shortage of guns and corruption in Central America. If you have the means to smuggle a ton of cocaine, you can probably smuggle a ton of guns, too. But this was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[465,84,5,13],"tags":[650,49,112,98],"class_list":["post-25284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas","category-government","category-military","category-usa","tag-civilwar","tag-guns","tag-organizedcrime","tag-police"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6zO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25285,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25284\/revisions\/25285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}