The World’s Largest Army
BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 3 months ago
Of course, I agree with one fellow in the comments. Firearms are only as good as the person who owns them. If they’re never intended to be used as a guarantee against tyranny, you may as well not have them.
ARFCOM: He missed the boat on N.C. pistol repeal bill, which has already been vetoed by the Goober of N.C., Roy Cooper.
This goes along with an article I read a day or two ago (via WiscoDave).
The man selling me the pistol puts his finger on a number in a box in the top upper left corner. That number is 2,657. It is 12:30 PM on a Tuesday.
“That’s the number of pistols sold and sent for background checks so far today in California.”
“Two thousand six hundred and fifty-seven guns sold today in California? Really?”
“It’ll be at least 5,000 by midnight tonight.”
“Really?”
“Really. We’ve been seeing between 5,000 and 6,000 a day since January. In California. Seven days a week.”
Ponder that one again. 5000 guns per day in California. Tens or hundreds of thousands more across this land. The gun control horse left the barn a very long time ago. They’ll never get it back in.
On September 1, 2021 at 11:29 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
Re: “The gun control horse left the barn a very long time ago. They’ll never get it back in.”
Firearms technology is mature, and has been for centuries. In less than a decade, Pietro Beretta and Sons of Italy, one of the world’s foremost and most-respected firearms manufacturers, will mark five-hundred years in business. While there have been innovations since that time, and doubtless will be more to come, the basics of how to create a firearm have been settled for some time now.
Ammunition technology was slower to mature, but it too, has come of age. The first smokeless powder cartridges appeared in the 1880s, and have remained effective down to the present.
What this means is that no would-be controller of firearms or firearms technology is going to be able to close that particular Pandora’s Box. The knowledge is out there, it is widespread and the knowledge of how firearms and ammunition work is widely-distributed. How so?
Relatively crude workshops along the Afghan-Pakistani border have for years turned out replicas of Soviet AK-47s/AKMs, assault rifles, using nothing more than some simple machine tools, readily-available sheet metal, steel and other materials, and do-it-yourself gunsmithing. Although these knock-offs won’t win any beauty contests, they work – which is why these ad-hoc businesses remain in operation.
In occupied Europe in WWII, crude submachine guns and pistols were turned out in basement and cellar workshops, heedless of the authorities and bans upon such things. Such make-shift weapons often didn’t work for long, but then they didn’t need to, since the objective was to use them as a means of procuring standard-issue weapons and ammunition from the Germans themselves.
The same process took place halfway around the world in the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands. On the island of Mindanao, stay-behind American soldiers and Marines and their Filipino counterparts made cast-bullets out of lead, made rifle cases out of curtain rods, and scavenged powder from captured Japanese stocks to fabricate ammunition for their weapons, and they also made use of Japanese weapons as well. For primers, they improvised something using match-heads from strike-anywhere matches.
Prohibition movements of the kind enacted by the U.S. government during the era of the Volsted Act and alcohol prohibition (1920-1933), and the later “war on drugs” do not work, never have worked and cannot work. It is a basic and immutable law of economics that when/wherever a buyer and seller of a good or service exist in sufficient numbers and with sufficient demand, they will find a means by which to transact business. If not in the legal, above-board market, then in the black market and underground economy. Meaning that the federal government had the power to change the venue in which business was conducted, but it was largely powerless to prevent the transaction(s) from taking place.
And any ban upon the lawful ownership of firearms in these United States would create the largest and most-profitable black market in history, one whose dimensions would dwarf anything seen in the 1920s-1930s or in the 1970s. And since the mere fact of owning a firearm would be illegal, those arms and ammo would be military-grade. In for a penny, in for a pound.
That’s already two strikes against the controllers, but let’s give them some more bad news: 3D printing and 3D manufacturing are realities of technological life in the 21st century. As are CAD mills and machining equipment. The Feds can bleat and complain all they like about restricting access to the data files required to make firearms in this manner, but – as the tech kids say – “You can’t stop the signal…”
And the foregoing doesn’t even deal with the millions upon millions of firearms already in circulation, or the estimated trillion rounds of ammo for them likewise already in private hands.
On September 2, 2021 at 6:54 am, Frank Clarke said:
@Georgiaboy61: “Meaning that the federal government had the power to change the venue in which business was conducted, but it was largely powerless to prevent the transaction(s) from taking place.”
That is a startling revelation for those of us who never thought about the problem in those terms.
On September 2, 2021 at 6:59 am, Frank Clarke said:
I used to quote 100m Americans, 300m guns, and 200b rounds readily available. Those numbers, large as they are, have quietly crept upwards over the years until now I suspect the true values are much closer to 150m Americans, 430m guns, and 500b rounds, yet here I see estimates that make even those nearly incomprehensible numbers look small. Yes, indeed, the bottle is uncorked and the genie is OUT.
On September 2, 2021 at 8:32 am, Fred said:
The Left street armies are arming and training at a pretty steady pace. Don’t confuse number of firearms for anything approaching a unified national purpose in ownership. Those days are long over.
Not only is the left arming and training with firearms but planning, tactics, ROE, all of it. The normies and “right” are going to get crushed rather handily in the coming war.
On September 2, 2021 at 2:34 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Frank Clarke
Re: “Meaning that the federal government had the power to change the venue in which business was conducted, but it was largely powerless to prevent the transaction(s) from taking place”
You replied: “That is a startling revelation for those of us who never thought about the problem in those terms.”
Well, let’s look at it like this. The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which “banned the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors” –
was passed on 16 January 1919, and went into effect a year later, on 17 January, 1920. Congress passed the Volsted Act on 28 October 1919, in order to establish the legislative and legal basis for the new amendment.
These two actions established alcohol prohibition within the law, and most historians of the period agree that this was the case.
Now, when these legislative-judicial acts were passed, did people who formerly enjoyed consuming alcoholic beverages suddenly just decide that they didn’t like beer, wine and spirits? Well, perhaps a few did, but it is probably safe to say that most did not. The federal government may have made it a lot more-difficult to get a cold beer, but that doesn’t mean that plenty of people didn’t still want one.
And it is upon this fact that vast smuggling, bootlegging and other similar actions in the black market and underworld began. By government fiat and artificially-created scarcity, the price of a glass of spirits or a bottle of beer just shot up ten-fold, perhaps more. Anyone who could supply illicit booze and slake those thirsts, was going to get very rich very quickly.
Joseph P. Kennedy, for example, the scion of the Kennedy political dynasty in Massachusetts, amassed his fortune as a rum-runner, which is to say by illegally smuggling bootlegged wine, beer and spirits. That’s not all: The mob, which is to say the Sicilian-Italian mafia, were not created by prohibition, but they seized the opportunity it presented to grow vastly in power, size, scope and wealth. So much so that it took the F.B.I. another half century to shove that particular monster back into its cage.
Where bars and taverns and liquor stores once existed, speak-easy establishments now plied their trade. Namely, more-or-less clandestine, secretive hangouts in basements and cellars where those who enjoyed alcohol could consume it around others of the same preference.
Governments find prohibition movements so attractive not because they know how to prevent illegal-illicit transactions from occurring, or that they even care to do so – but because they create work for so many arms and agencies of the government. Essentially, the left hand stirs up trouble and the right hand combats whatever problem or difficulty it is.
A sort of self-licking ice-cream cone which assures the drones in the federal government always have a ready-made excuse for demanding bigger budgets for things like the F.B.I. and Dept. of the Treasury (hence higher taxes or taxes on more things), and everyone from the President on down to your local Congressman can turn to you, the voter, and say with a huge (if possibly insincere) smile on their faces and say: “See all of the wonderful things we’re doing to protect the public?”
The myth thereby is perpetuated that the government is there to help, when job one is really to expand the scope of their powers, the size of their budgets, and the public perception that they’re “the good guys.” So, that’s where we get the legends of figures like “Elliott Ness and the Untouchables,” when in reality, the government was largely powerless and incompetent to the gargantuan task of policing prohibition. That didn’t matter, as long as there were periodic high-profile arrests and raids sufficient to keep the illusion going.
Thus proving yet again that “The business of government is government, and business is good!”
Finally, after more than a decade, the con began showing its age, and even its former supporters began favoring a repeal of the 18th amendment and rolling back the Volsted Act, both of which were done in 1933. But the changes in the size, scope and power of the federal government remained.
Oh, and the gangster era more-or-less “created” by alcohol prohibition, and the resultant violence, were then used by FDR and company as the pretext for gun control in the form of the 1934 National Firearms Act. See how that works?? Slick, very slick.
And most of the voters were none the wiser of the fact that they’d just been duped and conned on a massive scale. Oh, some bright folks and observant types unraveled the mystery and put the puzzle together later on, but by then it was too late. The damage was done. By the time most folks began to cotton to what had happened, Frank Delano Roosevelt and many of his cronies – were already dead-and-buried.
Ole Uncle Frank never knew Rahm Emmanuel, but I bet he knew his favorite saying, about never letting a crisis go to waste.