Almost Cut My Hair

 --Obama and Drones, Riber Hanssen

Ranger Question of the Day: 
Must one have a larcenous heart if one
is devoted to America while
believing its government a thief, or is
one simply a hopeless romantic, schizophrenic,
or all of the above? 

Armed only with a rifle,
he quickly made the fascist invader realize
that from now on he would be punished
for every step he took in the motherland 
    --Enemies at the Gates (2001) 

Well, must be because I had the flu for Christmas
and I'm not feeling up to par.
You know, it increases my paranoia 
--Almost Cut My Hair, CSN andY
_____________________

Welcome to Florida, land of human-swallowing sinkholes ("He was my brother, man"), and anguished confusion in a bumper sticker on a Ford-150 truck seen yesterday in Tallahassee:

"Stand for America" was on the man's right bumper; "Don't Steal -- The Government doesn't like the competition" on the left.  Paranoia runs deep.

This was noted while departing for Jacksonville, FL, where Ranger re-visited the gun shop previously mentioned in "Zombie Zoo".  The shop at that time was piled high with cratered ammunition, but this week, nada.  Not a single round of ammunition available for sale, though weapons were flying off the shelves in what was a brisk business day which saw every racial, gender and age demographic.  A gun shop without ammo is a weird site.

Why is something as innocuous as .22 long rifle ammo impossible to find, even at your local Walmart?  Even if every one of us were armed and equipped with ammo and all the squad-level combat gear shown in the gun magazines -- so what?  Does anyone really believe in or espouse insurrection, rebellion or outright war against the government?

Sure, there are the wacko mouthpieces giving vent to the latent frustration of the impotent masses, but they are just that: inert lumpen who shuffle off to work and Costco and grumble about their lot, and consume their poisonous food and obligingly submit to the doctor's invasive tests in order to discover the amount of damage their inert and poisonous habits have inflicted and with which they are complicit.

The thought that these citizens could cohere and rise up is so patently absurd that the gunners should re-think their basic philosophy of why we are armed in the first place.  Even if armed, we can never stand up to the might and authority of both State and Federal government.  Do you think your rifle will trump a Hellfire missile on a Predator with infrared sensors and facial recognition programs?

We are all monitored and tracked, so how would insurgency develop in such an environment?  When elements of our society say that we must "Take Back America", what does that mean?  Are there enemies amongst us that we can neutralize by rifle fire?

There are two views of America, and we must decide what values define our social and governmental structures.  The gun issue is not about guns, but rather the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.  If my government does not trust me to be armed, then they should not expect me to support their right to bear the very same guns that they would deny to the citizenry.

If the government does not trust me to be an honest and law-abiding citizen, how am I to trust the government to be an honest broker.  An adversarial relationship does not encourage health and integrity either of the person or the system.

The days of insurgency and World Wars are over in the developed world.  They are artifacts that may only crop up in the 2nd and 3rd World.  Terrorism will continue in all parts of the world as this is the  tool of the disenfranchised and disillusioned -- groups we shall ever have with us.

This, however, does not describe the National Rifle Association membership, from whose ranks will never emerge terrorists or insurrectionists.  Those who raise its specter are merely bloviators.

Only Militias Need Guns

--Ayeh ... maybe 

Now it is not good for the Christian's health

to hustle the Aryan brown,

For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles

and he weareth the Christian down;

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white

with the name of the late deceased,

And the epitaph drear:  "A Fool lies here

 who tried to hustle the East." 

--The Naulahka,Rudyard Kipling

 ____________________

While gun control mania grips the United States, your government has been busy arming Libyan and Syrian terrorists (Mideast folly: U.S. arms find their way to Islamic extremists):

"[T]he Obama administration decided instead to provide arms, or money or other materiel translatable into arms, to the Libyan and Syrian oppositions through third parties.

"The instruments chosen were Sunni Muslim Persian Gulf monarchies Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates"

In a Catch-22, the U.S. has been opposing radicals for the last decade (in Afghanistan and Iraq), except where we support them (in place of, "Libyan and Syrian oppositions," put, "Islamic militants often affiliated with al-Qaeda".) We want stricter background checks and copious paper trails when selling guns to American citizens, while in the Middle East handing out assault rifles to any open hand claiming to be an insurgent.

We are against anti-government militias in the U.S., while supporting the same abroad in their activities against our once, erstwhile friendly regimes, like Qadaffi's Libya and Assad's Syria.  It's all so 1776, unless one wakes up and realizes what that actually implies.

Our friends and foes alike know one truth: the U.S. speaks with forked tongue.