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NcongruNt wrote:I believe your illustration is somewhat flawed.

Making the assumption that Republican = Pro-Gun and Democrat = Anti-Gun is a generalization without true merit, IMO. Political opinion covers a very large spectrum of issues of which RKBA is a very small part. I know oodles of people who vote mainly Democrat that are pro-gun and believe in the RKBA. Your map also does not take into account the independent vote, which is proportionally greater here in Austin (and some other locales) than in most parts of the state. Also, your example cites the 2004 election, in which there was serious disapproval of the Republican candidate, which still exists and is even greater now than it was then. Just because someone votes against a Republican candidate that they have no faith in does not make them anti-gun nor a through-and-through democrat (again, I believe the assumption that Democrat=Anti-Gun is wrong). I have family members in the Midwest whose gun collections would dwarf most of the members' collections on this forum (except maybe El Gato ), but have been lifelong Democrats. They are very involved in politics on a much more local level, and as has been pointed out in this thread, that is where the real changes happen. Another example that demonstrates that this is not simply a party issue was one of the amicus briefs filed in the DC vs. Heller case, where large numbers from both sides of the aisle in Congress expressed disapproval of DC's strict anti-gun laws. Belief in the Second Amendment doesn't fall as starkly across party lines as you may believe.

Of course it is a simplistic assumption, and yes, you're correct that there are a few very strongly pro-gun Democrats in office. I've alluded to this in other posts, and in one of my more recent posts, I gave my observation that liberals in Austin seem to have an independent libertarian streak, which would make them more sympathetic to gun rights than, say liberals in San Francisco. Senator McCain (AZ), a Republican, has not been as good on gun rights as has been Senator Jim Webb (VA), a Democrat, for instance. That being said, if you look at where most of the anti-gun legislation attempts have originated in the past 40 years or so, you will find that they originated from within the Democratic party. And, since the 1960s, conservatism in general has been better represented by the Republican party than the Democratic party - at least until more recent administrations, since there are some strong arguments that the Republican Party has shifted more toward the center/center-left as the Democratic party has shifted further left.

To the extent that the Republican party better represented conservatism than did the Democratic party during the past 40 years, that is the extent to which gun rights tended to be better represented by Republicans than Democrats over that period. Of course there have been exceptions on both sides. And that is the value to me of that map. Republicans took a beating in the 2006 congressional elections, and Democrats now hold a majority in both houses of Congress. However, I'd be willing to bet a box of Federal Gold Match 168 grain .308 SMKs that a 2007/2008 map of the same kind as the 2004 map pictured here would still reveal that Republicans (who tend to be center/center-left) still hold more counties than Democrats (who tend to be center-left/hard-left); and that the blue counties would still be clustered mostly around the large population centers of the west and east coasts, and from the great lakes down the Mississippi river valley. So yes, the gun rights debate does not always fall starkly along party lines, but party lines is a useful tool for determining trends; and the trends seem to show that Republicans (as a group) tend to be more supportive of gun rights than Democrats (as a group).

Also, I think that (again, differentiating between individual voters, and party leadership) that the reason that the Democratic party had backed away from gun rights confrontations in recent years is because, the last time they got behind gun-control, they took a beating at the polls. Even so, they are growing in confidence, and look for some serious gun rights challenges to come up if we get a Democrat president at the same time as we have a Democrat majority in Congress.

At least, that's how I see it.

boomerang wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:In fact, I would go so far as to say that the single most dangerous thing being done to this country by the left is the effort to fragment us into a bunch of smaller victim groups. Divide and Conquer. As long as We the People tend to think of ourselves as an amorphous mass of Americans, an attack on the rights of one of us is an attack on the rights of all of us. But when the left succeeds in getting people to think of themselves first as [name your race], or [name your country of ethnic origin], or [name your gender], or [name your sexual preference], and as Americans second, then it is easy for all the other groups to ignore sociopolitical sins committed against one group, because those sins don't directly affect (in their minds, anyway) any of the other groups.

They're balkanizing America. It's an important step in their plan to turn the USA into a Third World country.

I would only disagree to the extent that their real goal is to turn it into the (socialist) European Union. They don't want "Third World," because that would require that they get their shoes dirty and grow some calluses on their hands.

DParker wrote:

- providing that the lightly armed group is properly motivated, and the heavily armed group lacks the political will to prevail.

I think that's the most compelling part of your argument. But I would take it a step further and suggest in this case that lack of political will would be so extreme as to prohibit the action in the first place, rendering the remainder of the discussion moot.

It may be moot, but it's sure fun arguing, isn't it?

The remainder of your post is snipped, as I'm in complete agreement with it...and pointing that out isn't nearly as much fun.

Oh, and...yes...extra points for the composite metaphore usage.

DParker wrote:While I agree with you that such a thing is far from likely to ever happen, I don't think your calculations above - even though they're essentially accurate - are all that meaningful given the extreme disparity in the *type* of weaponry employed by the military vs. private citizenry, not to mention the lack of combat training possessed by the latter.

WOLVERINES!!



Seriously though, and meaning no insult to anybody who served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war era, but I think the Vietnamese put paid to the notion that a lightly armed, and less well trained force can't defeat a heavier armed and well trained force - providing that the lightly armed group is properly motivated, and the heavily armed group lacks the political will to prevail. Similarly, Afghan resistance to the Soviets proved the same thing. Lightly armed insurgents in Baghdad successfully proved that lightly armed troops carrying Molotov cocktails can knock out an Abrams Tank in an urban environment. Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's relatively lightly armed militia prevailed against a much more heavily armed and MUCH better trained American and multinational force because of lack of political will. The gun grabbers simply can't muster enough national political will to prevail in one fell swoop in Congress and force through a national gun confiscation. They just can't. If they could, they'd have done it 40 years ago. There exist otherwise liberal Democrats who are pretty decent on gun rights; and the majority of Republicans wouldn't support it either; and there simply doesn't exist a Congressional majority with enough steam to force through a national gun ban, particularly a large enough majority to force one through by overriding a presidential veto.

Consequently, such tactics must necessarily be restricted to the local level, and that's why it would never succeed in Texas, except possibly in Austin, and even in Austin the liberals tend to be libertarian enough to not want government squashing them.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the single most dangerous thing being done to this country by the left is the effort to fragment us into a bunch of smaller victim groups. Divide and Conquer. As long as We the People tend to think of ourselves as an amorphous mass of Americans, an attack on the rights of one of us is an attack on the rights of all of us. But when the left succeeds in getting people to think of themselves first as [name your race], or [name your country of ethnic origin], or [name your gender], or [name your sexual preference], and as Americans second, then it is easy for all the other groups to ignore sociopolitical sins committed against one group, because those sins don't directly affect (in their minds, anyway) any of the other groups. It is exactly that effort to reduce our collective self image to our particular subgroup which is what makes it possible to incrementally erode our individual gun rights. If half the households own guns, it means the other half doesn't. Of the half that don't, some are somewhat favorable to gun rights, but just never got around to owning any themselves, and the rest are either neutral on the subject, or they hate guns. The the gun haters don't see anything wrong with attacking gun rights, and the neutrals don't care because it isn't upsetting their particular rice bowl. We have become a nation of politically and constitutionally apathetic people, and national interest in any given issue depends upon whose ox is being gored. (Nice use of multiple metaphors, wouldn't you agree? )

Anyway, I'll concede that there is always a slim possibility of such a national calamity. Anything is possible; but a lot of things are extremely unlikely; and I put a national gun confiscation here in the US in the latter category. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I've always been a "glass is half full" kind of guy.

That's just my 2¢.

Calabash-kid wrote:New Orleans and Katrina. There will be an emergency that will be the excuse just like New Orleans. How many of those people fought the police when they came?

Jerry

What happened in New Orleans was an extremely localized phenomenon. Many of those people in New Orleans historically viewed the gummint as their savior and the sole answer to all of their problems - including their income problems (or rather, the problems they didn't have as long as the gummint kept sending them welfare checks). They did not view government as a pesky but necessary evil, so they are all too glad to comply. They were not - at least until after Katrina - conservatives. Look at the people they kept electing to public office down there. Those elected leaders represent the spiritual and moral soul of pre-Katrina New Orleans - former Governor Kathleen "I will NOT ask a Republican president for help" Blanco, Mayor C. Ray "School buses? We don't need no stinkin' school buses" Nagin, Representative William "I keep the bribes in my freezer" Jefferson.

Post Katrina, a social conservative, Bobby Jindal, has been elected as Governor. He's far from perfect, but he is also far from the Blanco mold. For you Ron Paul fans, Jindal has an A rating from Gun Owners of America, Paul's favored gun rights organization. With a governor in office who shares Ron Paul's views on gun ownership, I seriously doubt you will see another gun grabbing attempt in Louisiana as long as he's in office.

Katrina was a large scale emergency, crossing state boundaries, but different locales responded differently to the crisis, and the gun grabbing wasn't state wide in Louisiana, it was just in the vicinity of New Orleans. It is important to note that, in neighboring Mississippi, where Katrina related damage was nearly as severe, there were no gun grabbings, and there was no whiny insistence on government entitlements, and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour well understood the relationship of local to federal government, posse comitatus, and his responsibilities to his citizens during the crisis. I am also fairly confident that, had Mississippi been saddled with a blistering canker of a governor like Blanco, any order given to LEOs to go forth and confiscate guns along Mississippi's gulf coast would have been responded to by LEOs with a "Heck no! YOU go do it. I don't wanna get shot!"

As I posted previously, the NO gun grabbing effort was an eye opener for the public at large, and I seriously doubt that it can be repeated. It was only successful because it was a localized effort, and even the courts later ruled against them. A national effort to pull off a NO style gun grab would be doomed to failure, and result in a lot of killing on both sides - for which the government would be eventually held accountable. The political fallout from such an effort would likely result in a complete, top-to-bottom housecleaning, if not an outright overthrow, of federal government. A similar localized effort might be successful in San Francisco, but it wouldn't work in Los Angeles, where small business and shop owners confronted "Rodney King" rioters outside their front doors with AR15s, and in some cases engaged looters in full scale firefights. It might be successful in DC, but not in Dallas.

You've all seen the "red state, blue state" map. The map shown below shows a red/blue breakdown by county, rather than by state, in the 2004 presidential election, and it represents a more accurate national distribution of conservatives and liberals than the red state/blue state map. The blue counties are those were a gun grabbing effort might be successful. The red counties (about 90% or more of the U.S. land mass) are those areas where a gun grabbing effort would most likely fail. (By the way, Alaska, which is not colored on this map, came in completely red in actual fact.)

Please note that, in Texas, one of the blue areas is Austin. Please note that Austin is surrounded by a vast sea of red. I don't think Austin is going to try and take away Texas's guns.

I don't think it will come down to that for a number of reasons, not necessarily in this order:

1. The enforcement of such a thing would boil down to the military, cooperating with LEOs.
2. More people in the military come from backgrounds sympathetic to the 2nd Amendment than those who don't.
3. There would likely be large scale mutinies within the military services if they were called upon to do this, particularly if called upon to fire on their own citizenry.
4. Ditto for most LEOs.
5. At the end of the day, it's a numbers game:
   • All military personnel, in all the nation's military services, including active duty, reserves, and units ready for mobilization, number about 1,426,026 at this time.
   • Per the NRA-ILA, the current population of the US numbers about 294 million.
   • If you use 4 people per household as an average (two adults and two children), then that is about 73.5 million households.
   • Also per the NRA-ILA, about half of the nation's households, 36.75 million of them, have guns.
   • The National Academy of Sciences speculates that there were approximately 258 million privately owned guns in the US.
   • If you do the math, that's 258 million guns in the hands of 36.75 million households, or an average of about 7 guns per household.
6. When you add up the numbers, it's a bloodbath, and the military loses if it comes down to it.

Now realistically, most of us law-abiding gun owners would be extremely loath to fire on our own sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters in the military and law enforcement if it came to that - probably to the same degree that most of them would be loath to fire on us. Without that willingness on their part to do it, there exists no way to force the surrender of our guns, as long as we stand united in refusing to surrender them. It becomes a Mexican standoff.

Add to that the fact that, in their blind foolishness, gun grabbers have disarmed themselves, so they have no means of forcing the compliance themselves, even if they can get the courts and the Congress and the president all on their side.

The bigger danger to our rights is their incremental erosion until, piece by piece, we lose them entirely. Vigilance, education, and actively voting are our best defense. That, and a darn good lawyer.