Owlish Mutterings

You Say You Want a Revolution?

I'm guessing most, if not all in the Life Liberty Property group believe that the Second Amendment talks about an individual right to own guns, rather than a state-sponsored militia owning guns. If you disagree with this, why not go over to Eric's gun posts and scroll down, starting with the Tianmen Square pic? Thanks.

So, anyway, my thought is that the Second Amendment speaks to an individual right to own guns, and this right expands to a right to armed revolution in the event our government gets completely out of whack. Implicit, of course, the possible consequence of painful death for you and your loved ones in the event you fail.

So my evil mind starts thinking, what would it take to stop a widespread, armed revolt? Not a pitiful little "high school students take to the hills" revolt like Red Dawn, nor a "greedy crooks try to hold on to power with outside support" revolt. But a true, from the ground up, "Congress just passed a law requiring sperm collection and castration of any male over 15???" revolt.

You start with trying to spread the idea that any law the government passes must be followed, and those who don't are evil criminals. Check. You push the "it's all for your own good" idea, and "The Government knows what's best." Check.

You starve your populace because a group of people just at the edge of dying of starvation can't revolt. They're too busy trying to find food, and too susceptible to bribes. Hmm, not there yet. So, you want to take as much food production away from Mom and Pop operations as possible, and giving the responsibility to corporations or better yet the government. So you need land grabs. Kelo. You need to stop as much individual food production as possible, so you require people to have green lawns instead of crops growing on their house plot. This country has some of the most productive land on Earth, so you either need to reduce productivity [stop insecticide use, stop fertilizer use, stop better crops use] [working on it] or you need to export food, saying it's "excess" or "required for humanitarian purposes." Better yet, get the UN to say it's required for humanitarian purposes.

You need information. You need to know who has argued in support of the rebels publicly. You need to know what households are buying more food, that might be supporting more people than they are telling. You need to be able to monitor not only landline telephones, but also cell phones, email, and other forms of Information Age communication [getting there] [or you block Information Age devices entirely]. And blogs? Either try to reduce their influence by dismissing them as rightwing reactionaries, or monitor them, block certain words from being used, and immediately take into custody or kill anyone who goes over the line. This will reduce the rebels' ability to organize, and reduce or eliminate popular support.

And those pesky guns. Well, you need to reduce gun ownership as much as possible. You need to be able to confiscate as many guns as possible, and to do that you need to know where they are. So have strong registration laws. Make it difficult for people to have access to guns, so ban concealed carry laws [not there yet], and have requirements that make it impossible for a person to defend his /her family when our troops break into his house [like, the firearm must be locked up, with the ammo locked up in a different location]. [needs work]. If a rebel takes out one of your men once in a while that's no big deal, but you really don't want one guy taking out ten of your men, so try to call anything more powerful than a BB gun an assault rifle and ban it.

Of course, even if the rebels have some guns it's no big deal if you have armor able to stop the bullets.

You need good weapons for crowd control for the inevidable food riots, if nothing else. Tear gas is always a good standby, but wouldn't it be nice to have something that was more certain and more painful? They may riot once, but not twice.

You need the military, or at least a large fraction of it, on your side. Wouldn't it be nice if your opposition party started making comments seemingly designed to piss off the military?

So, what am I missing?

Hat tip to the inspiring countries of North Korea, Zimbabwe, Iran, and China.

Posted by Owlish at June 30, 2005 11:19 AM | TrackBack