BRAVO ZULU!!! check six...
Posted on 01/07/2013 6:54:35 AM PST by Travis McGee
Excellent job Matt.
Hello! It’s been a long time. Wow. That’s hard to comprehend, yet I’m not surprised. It’s almost like that poor Marine that took his Grandfather’s shotgun down to Mexico.
It makes me wonder how much time we have left, I hadn’t heard any of this.
Stay safe, we still have to get together for that Guiness.
bookPING
yeah...that program is far under the radar here in the People's Republik because Annapolis knows damn well that what they are doing is wrong and they don't want the national attention...when is the last time that a politician or a State Police agency did not engage in a little SSP regarding their gun initiatives? (Shameless Self Promotion - it's a term we coined in the squad room for our brethren that wanted to climb the dept's political ladder)
the whole national debate has all my LE friends here spooked...they know exactly who each third is and don't want to have to make hard choices
interestingly enough, most of our CERT guys fall into your third...which gives me some hope
ping
Good article, keep it up.
Your right, it is different now. Vastly. I just returned from over 2 hours in municipal court. I stood around for over 2 hours waiting for the bad guy to show up for his trial. Well, he didn’t show. But I was able to talk to one of our retired guys that thinks like I do and a deputy.
We started filling the deputy in about the genocide in the last century. His eyes started to glaze over and he said he didn’t know much about it. Clueless. And the way he was talking I could tell he wasn’t on the same page, but we did get him thinking about what happens when guns are confiscated.
And I found out that an anti-gun officer I’ve been talking to for awhile went out and bought himself an AR last week.
It has happened before, we’ve been blessed for so long that it hasn’t happened here. But now I think people are realizing that it very well could happen here, and very soon.
3B’s
For years at our place military veterans were given preference for being hired. Now the emphasis is on young guys with college degrees.
I saw a quote by Schumer saying he loves veterans but if those veterans come back from the Middle East with PTSD they should not be able to own a firearm.
It worries me that veterans, who, for the most part would be more Pro Constitution/2nd amendment, are being passed over now for college graduates who are more likely to be heavily influenced by communist group think, anti 2nd amendment.
Those ladder climbers are the worst back stabbing snakes on the face of the earth.
Another excellent and timely essay. Thanks, Matt, for your tireless efforts.
You’re still in NYC, right? Print out an extra copy and drop it by Mike Bloomberg’s office.
Good, just in need of a 1-page summary which can be handed out to those disinclined to read thru to the climax, something which could, well, follow Martin Luther’s example.
I’d maybe just pass out this part:
So what’s the matter with gun registration?
To say that Turkey did not enjoy a smooth transition from being the seat of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, through World War I and into the modernist Ataturk era, would be a massive understatement. In those turbulent times, ethnic Turks, Muslims composing the vast majority of the population, considered their Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, to be disloyal and treacherous.
In 1911, a national gun registration law was passed in Turkey, with no apparent ill intention beyond increasing public safety. In 1915, during the Great War, these gun registration lists were used to disarm the Armenian and other Christian populations. Army battalions cordoned off entire towns and did gun sweeps. Once disarmed, the official state violence visited against the Armenians ratcheted up to murderous levels. Typically, on town-wide sweeps, all of the men and boys were taken away by the Turkish soldiers, never to be seen or heard from again.
Only after these Armenian “enemies of the state” were disarmed and completely helpless to resist did the final step begin: the officially sanctioned, ordered, led and conducted wholesale “deportations” of the Christian minorities from Turkey. These “deportations” were in reality forced marches into fiery deserts, accompanied by pervasive sadistic cruelty comparable only to the Japanese “Bataan Death March,” and the less known but much more deadly death marches of the last surviving Jews in Nazi hands as the Red Army closed in on Germany.
Three decades earlier in Turkey, rape, roadside torture sessions ending in death, and the entire worst catalog of human abuses were standard procedure while the Christian Armenians were being marched into the deserts to die of thirst, hunger, exposure, and sheer brutality. The stragglers who could not keep up with the columns being force-marched without food or water by Turkish soldiers were killed with bullets, bayonets, swords and even crueler means (for sport and variety), until the columns were no more and the missions were complete.
Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half of the two million Turkish Armenians were murdered, along with a half million Christians of other sects. The rest escaped from Turkey in one of the first great diasporas of a genocided people in the modern era. There is no need to build gas chambers or slave-labor gulag death camps in a country with ample deserts. In Turkey there is no Dachau or Auschwitz to memorialize the dead, just bones scattered in the sand and rocks a century ago, a model of efficiency that Hitler might have envied. (The Turks deny to this day that it happened, just as some deny the later Nazi holocaust.)
But even after conducting this first modern mega-death holocaust, with diplomats and reporters covering the genocide with daily wire reports, Turkey was not expelled in disgrace from the community of nations. There was no Western boycott of the new Turkish state. Adolf Hitler noticed this 20th-century indifference to genocide, and so did Lenin and Stalin and other despots. After the horrors of the First World War, the West had little gas left in the tank for do-gooder intervention just because some ethnic minority or other had been wiped out in Turkey.
A new low standard had been set. A nation’s leaders could commit genocide against a despised minority, murder two million living souls in full view, and the world would not give a good damn. It was an important lesson for future dictators, leading to even greater mass murders under the Nazis and Soviets. And the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists learned another crucial lesson from the Turks: national gun registration laws could be passed easily in the name of dubious “public safety,” and the registration lists could be used later to disarm selected minorities and then subsequently to arrest, deport, and murder them by the millions after they were helpless to resist.
In the Turkish case, only a small clique understood the true purpose behind the gun registration and gun control laws of 1911. If average Turks thought about the gun laws at all, they probably believed they would actually lead to greater public safety, as advertised. That was also generally the case with the Russians, Germans, Chinese, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Rwandans, and all the rest who were required to register or even turn in their firearms for “public safety,” and who accepted the demand at face value as a “reasonable” gun control measure, to their later regret.
American liberals who would like to see the Second Amendment torn out of the Constitution as a problematic relic of a bygone era generally do not know—or pretend not to know—this well-established historical pattern. But American Constitutionalists, who are more often than not students of history, understand the pattern very well.
So, directly behind the insane faces of contemporary villains like Loughner, Holmes and Lanza, we see the smirking faces of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, tyrants who did not murder individual victims by the fives and tens, but entire populations by the tens of millions . And in each case, these national genocides were preceded by gun confiscation that was made possible by national firearms registration laws sold to a gullible population in the name of “public safety.”
(Interestingly, during the bloody French Revolution’s “Great Terror” of 1793 to 1794, it was the “Committee of Public Safety” who condemned tens of thousands of French men and women to the guillotine or other forms of summary execution without trial. After previously being disarmed, of course.)
I like the delineation of lines at the end. Forget the history, forget the rationale, forget trying to sway others ... all comes down to “here’s the line; cross it and bad things will happen. Please, for all our sakes, don’t go there.”
100%.
I know what you mean about one-page summaries. In govt and law firms, “gisting” a complex theme is a prized and needed art form. Everybody learns differently, and I try to aim for most of the ways I can reach. That’s why I make the images like the one posted back around reply 30, with the four Chinese photos, about AK-47s. Perhaps most Americans today won’t even read a one page gist paper, even if it’s very well written. And I’ll try to do that too. But we all do what we can. The more who resist the “1-2-3” plan because they know the tune already, the better. The new Soviets are betting on a very high % turned in, and low resistance.
BRAVO ZULU!!! check six...
God, I love that woman.
Well written as always, Matt. I’m going to be more succinct about things. The Yellow Line is when everything changes for me. I won’t wait around for “LE” (God I so despise that term) to kick in my door.
I’ll be visiting the people who make the “yellow line” decisions. And I ain’t Santa Claus....
You raised your son well.
Leadership and organization is absolutely necessary.
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