Virginia Flashpoint #1

From Reader Mike C comes this email:

Like many Virginia voters, the speed at which the combination of the legislators and governor moving to the Democrat side and the pending legislative session yielding draconian gun laws and possible door to door confiscation caught me by surprise. Politics up to this point has been a bit of a genteel affair, with the Dems and Reps making small changes one way or another and the pendulum swinging slowly this way and that.. until now. As I’m sure you have heard, it’s about to get real here.
So to summarize what I’m sure you already know, they are set to pass gun control laws outlawing evil black guns, any pistol that holds more than 9 rounds, any shotgun that holds more than 6, and similar magazine restrictions on rifles. Apparently it will be a felony to own any of these. Most counties including mine have passed resolutions saying they will not enforce such laws. However, for my purple county, the board of supervisors will turn into a Democrat majority in January and that resolution will be overturned. Since the new laws will not grandfather in previously purchased firearms, it will have the immediate effect of making millions of lawful gun owners instant felons. If that doesn’t make your blood run cold, nothing will.
How does this affect me personally? Well, as perhaps you may recall from previous discussions, I have never liked pistols much as I never was very good with one, even though I was a competitive rifle shooter as a young man and qualified and carried a 1911 in the army. That, coupled with living and working in the pastoral suburbs means I never felt the need to carry and don’t own a pistol, evil large mag or otherwise. I do own a few bolt action classics in various calibers and a few single shot shotguns that for now are safe from prosecution. Having carried and disliked the M16 during my Army days, I am not a fan of nor own any evil black rifles. However I do have what you would call a standard plinking tool, a semi-auto .22 whose round count in the tube capacity will run afoul of the new law and make me a felon.
While I can stow my felony-inducing .22 with relatives in another state, the question is, should I, and what should / can I do to protect myself and my family from this tyranny where millions of Virginians will now face a midnight knock on the door because some neighborhood informant has clued the Stasi in on our felony possession of a semi-auto .22 (which frankly doesn’t shoot that well, is a pain to clean, an antique, and frequently jams and misfires)?
The rebel in me wants to go to the final gun show of the year (or ever) this coming weekend and purchase a evil black rifle lower, just so I can show solidarity with the black rifle brethren. What if a lot of people did that? On one hand, it would definitely send a message. On the other hand prosecutors across the state would rejoice, because they would significantly increase their conviction rates due to better leverage in plea bargain negotiations.
A friend tells me there is going to be a rally on the 20th in Richmond to let the legislators know how we feel. Having gone that route with the tea party on the Mall and seen it have no real effect, and knowing the new legislators and governor are sufficiently bought and paid for, I know such demonstrations are really just pissing in the wind. I would not be surprised to see Antifa and even neo-Nazis show up just to make the legitimate protesters look like kooks for the media. Worse yet, just like the tea party and anti-abortion yearly protest, these demonstrations will probably be ignored by the media, no matter how many people show up.
The question still remains though, what is the right thing for an average guy to do? It’s all well and good to speak of pitchforks, ropes, and trees, but having faced down apartheid, you know better than most how quickly and devastatingly resistance can degenerate into Sarah Host’s dystopian “blood in the streets”. I fear for my state in this. Worse, the police here will be faced with millions of newly minted, hostile felons. What then? On top of that, with so many new “criminal class” citizens, what will be the real criminal class response against the weakened sheep and hunkered down police?
The best case here is that the police will take no positive action as a result of this new legislation. While there will be millions of new de facto felons, they will only be changed incidental to detainment for other reasons – traffic stops, self defense, 911 calls, divorce fights, and Swatting incidents among them. The only real recourse I see for us is to try to do something about our severely compromised voting system and hope that enough Virginians remain enraged enough to overcome the fraud factor in a year or two. Or move, and a few years after that pen a heart rendering ode entitled “Let Virginia Sink”.
Your thoughts?

Let’s address the low-hanging fruit here first.  My advice:  ditch the unreliable old .22 rifle and get yourself a new one — say a Ruger 10/22 — which has the advantage of being so popular, not to say ubiquitous and which means that (bet on it) that any future legislation will “grandfather” ownership of said rifles.  Also, get a boatload of spare 10-round mags (5-10 would be a good benchmark) in case your politicians ban future sales thereof.  Also, at least a couple thousand rounds of .22 LR in case the fuckers ban purchase of “large” quantities.

In that same vein, let’s talk about getting an Evil Black Rifle (EBR).  Don’t get an AR-15 lower, because these bastards will just include them in the ban and worse, you won’t have a usable gun.  Get a working gun — AR or AK — and if you want to circumvent a magazine ban, get an SKS.  I know, it only has a 5  10-round mag, but you would be surprised how quickly you can load 7.62x39mm rounds with a stripper clip.  Ordinarily, I’d recommend getting a Russian one (as below, with integrated eeeevil bayonet), and not the non-Chinese Type 56 SKS, but if needs must… [sigh]

What’s more important is to lay in not a boatload, but a Carnival Cruise liner-sized load of ammo.

Here’s why I want you to get an EBR:  the more EBRs that are out there in citizens’ hands, the more difficult it would be to pass legislation against them, and even greater the difficulty in confiscation thereof.

If you are worried about doing this (and I can quite understand your trepidation, btw), then you must  get a semi-auto 12- or 20-gauge shotgun, which are pretty much un-bannable because of their ubiquity.  I’ll leave the brand choice up to you, but if there’s a money constraint, Mossberg makes an excellent line of budget guns, such as the 930 or SA-20, for around $500.  (Get the wooden-stocked “sporting” model so it looks less scawwwy to the gun-grabbing assholes.)

Now all that said, I think the Bastard Gun Controllers [some redundancy]  may find it a little more difficult to start their little confiscation reindeer games, if people like this are to be believed (emphasis added):

If the Virginia legislators want to push this issue, it could get ugly. And oh, by the way, plan on seeing the vast majority of the Virginia National Guard become Conscientious Objectors. It will be really hard for them to arrest cops and confiscate guns when none of them will carry the necessary arms to enforce said arrests and confiscations.
How do I know this? I am one of them and will be one of the first to lay down my gun and walk away. I will not be a pawn in a tyrannical game of human chess. Neither will most of the men and women I serve with.

Bravo, my son.  Let’s hope it never gets this far.

And for the rest of us, who live in the United States and not Virginia, California, New York or Illinois, etc., we need to be on our guard, constantly, lest our own states start moving in this direction.  With the constant invasion of fucking socialists from so-called “liberal” states, what’s happened in Virginia could happen to any of us.

Let’s start talking to our local pols, and remind all of them exactly what they’re up against if they even begin  to think of cute little stunts like Virginia’s pols are planning to enact.  Start with the city and town politicians, move out to the county government, and make sure they and the state legislators know exactly where they stand.  Let’s get into their  faces first.

And FFS, join your local 2A organization like the TSRA and such, no matter how ineffectual you think they are, because if their numbers are suddenly swelled by a hundred thousand new (and more fervent) 2A supporters, they will have to change too.  Never mind the NRA for the moment — because this battleground is going to be in your area and in your face, not at the national level;  and to be honest, the NRA is often worse than useless in any kind of local activism.

Sempiterna Sinistra

So the Britishland elections are over, and Boris “The Babe” Johnson has absolutely routed the evil Communists and Europhiles who opposed him (see link for body counts).

Of course, the Left has responded to their loss in typical fashion:

Yup… anyone who opposes them and their Marxist dogma is eeevil, raayyycisss and shellfish.

Kinda like our Lefties Over Here, huh?

Fuck ’em, and the class envy they rode in on.  And to the Stout Bulldogs among my Readers:  wave buh-bye to the EU and their minions:

…and allow me to share some of our favorite 2016 vintage with you:

Good Title

Joel Kotkin, one of my favorite writers (among so many) at the estimable City Journal, has described the “watermelon” (Green outside, Red inside) mindset perfectly:

Climate Stalinism

The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty.  Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda.  They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream.  “Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”

And right there, in that last quote, is the whole game given away.  As Kotkin observes, most people outside the wealthy and academia are hugely skeptical of the whole “global warming / -cooling / climate change” movement because they have correctly deduced that regardless of all those laudable intentions to “save the planet”, the final costs of doing so would be catastrophic for their own livelihoods and prosperity, e.g.:

Imagine what will happen if a President Elizabeth Warren bans fracking in places like Texas, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania;  in Texas alone, by some estimates, 1 million jobs would be lost.  Overall, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full ban would cost 14 million jobs—far more than the 8 million lost in the Great Recession.

Confronted with the abject failure of Communism everywhere it’s been put into practice, all that’s left for these would-be Stalinists is to try to bypass democracy and enforce their control over the population by diktat  — the very definition of Stalinism — using climate change as the fig-leaf.

I’ve written about this topic so often I’m starting to bore myself;  in Maskirovka (2017) and Proper Analysis (2019), to list but two of the more comprehensive posts, I outlined the eco-freaks’ mindset and the (failed) accounting behind the move to curb “greenhouse gases” respectively.  And of course, on any number of occasions I’ve debunked the junk statistics (which Kotkin derisively calls “scientism”) that these Marxists are using to try to give their loony theories some form of respectability.

Make no mistake:  these control freaks and their lickspittle fellow-travelers in the mainstream media are not going to quit.  We’ve already seen how has-been President Urkel’s EPA passed regulations which furthered the goals of the watermelons, stopping or delaying fracking, construction of new pipelines and so on.  Expect the same, or worse, from future Administrations run by Communists of the Warren / Sanders / [insert socialist candidate here]  ilk — which is why these bastards need to be implacably opposed at every turn, whether in local / state government, Congress or the White House.

Now, more than ever, is the time when we need to deny them ever getting their hands on the levers of power because once they do, it won’t just be your guns they come after:  it’ll be your cars, your jobs and your money.

And after they get into power via the much-maligned democratic system, don’t expect them allow themselves to be voted out of office too easily, either.

Under the Communists, the First Amendment will increasingly come under attack (“hate speech”), ballot boxes will get stuffed (by illegal immigrants), and regulations will be promulgated which bypass the legal system.  And if that little shit Beta O’Rourke did nothing else, he announced with absolute clarity these would-be Stalinists’ intentions towards the fourth  box.

I can’t put it any clearer than that.

In the past, I’ve treated Nov 19 (National Ammo Day) and April 15 (Buy A Gun Day) as two separate entities.  That time, I think, has passed.

 

Not that my Readers would need any reminders or encouragement, of course…

Only 70%?

Found here:

new national poll has found that upwards of 70 percent of Americans, if you can believe it, are now fully convinced that the formerly United States of America is on the brink of a second civil war.

While I probably agree with the conclusion, I have to ask the following questions of it, because the conditions under which revolution may occur in this country are quite different, depending on the political philosophy of the would-be revolutionaries.

1)  Which proportion of that 70% are conservatives, which are Marxists, and which are sorta-undecided?

2)  What are the different scenarios, for each respondent group, for a revolution to take place?

Taking the second question first, there are a couple of situations in which a group would say “Fuck that shit” and go for the guns.

a)  Trump is reelected as POTUS in 2020. The Left, having failed to remove him through bullshit Russian-collusion and even-more bullshit impeachment processes, goes to volume 11 on the hair-on-fire lunacy scale, and takes to the streets in the cities (mostly Marxist enclaves like Portland), rioting, looting and causing general mayhem as seen in Ferguson MO a few years back.  Call this the “Antifa” scenario.  While these anarcho-Marxists scream loudly, I don’t see that this would be a credible threat, at least not for long because there aren’t that many of them — maybe a few thousand — and frankly, if martial law were declared (National Guard response), these fools would be squashed like bugs.  Now, even if (say) 50% of that 70% would react badly to Orange Man Reelected OMG!!!, while there would be massive outcries by the mainstream media, academia and other assorted Commies, only a tiny percentage of those would actually start a revolution.  And forget Blacks and Hispanics taking to the streets en masse ;  the Trump economy has given them jobs and income, and the loony-Leftist policies (like rampant abortion, wokeness and high taxes) put forward by the passengers in the Clown Car have disenchanted those two groups, or at least the more-conservative members thereof.  Don’t expect some Black or Hispanic guy who’s been working at a series of new construction sites for a couple years (thanks to Trumponomics) to down tools and join the Pantifa Parade, either in person or in sympathy — and especially not if he actually voted for Trump in 2020.

b)  Trump is defeated in 2020 by one of the assorted Commies in the clown car.  And let’s just say for the sake of argument that there is credible evidence of massive voter fraud by the Commies in places like Texas, California, Illinois, Florida and so on — I can’t see there being a conservative revolution even if we think that voting skullduggery is deserving of it.  (History is on my side here;  the typical conservative response to an unfavorable electoral outcome is to vote in greater numbers the next time.)

Where I think there would  be a conservative revolution is if the new Comrade President immediately embarks on the usual tired Marxist agenda of raising taxes, installing Medicare For All, oppressive ecological policies like bans on fracking, defunding the military  — you know, all those stupid initiatives that would kill the U.S. economy (pace  Venezuela).  That would not necessarily ignite a conservative revolution by itself, but it would certainly make a foundation for one.

So what could trigger a conservative revolution?

Property confiscation — say, when Comrade President and his/her Politburo lackeys appropriate savings accounts, IRAs, “excessive” wealth and so on — would cause a firestorm of not only anger, but resistance.  If you look at all instances in our history where people started shooting government agents, it was in response to property infringement.

And then we come to the Big One, the one that would guarantee a conservative populace to start shooting from the rooftops…

Gun confiscation.  I am pretty sure that the Beto Plan would not only fail, but fail spectacularly, and with massive bloodshed.  Even an incrementalist move towards confiscation of, say “assault weapons” (through “buybacks”) as the thin end of the confiscation wedge would be met with massive non-compliance.  And if the Commies then were to move to coerce compliance, that  would be when the SHTF, in no uncertain terms.

I also think that if the Marxists do take over, and their little Youth Brigades continue to riot — no bets, of course  they will — such riots would increasingly be met by armed conservative resistance.  And attempts by law enforcement to stop the conservatives shooting would end in more bloodshed than I think the authorities could handle — always assuming that the police would obey their orders, that is.  (And that is a HUGE, and so far unknown “if” — ditto for door-to-door confiscation, a.k.a. the Feinstein/O’Rourke wet dream.)

My guess, in the end, is that the “70% of the population” number is correct.  The composition  of that 70%, however, is going to depend on the circumstances.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.

Outcomes

From Kruiser at PJMedia:

When I was pondering the divide between Right and Left in America last week I didn’t go over the thing that may keep us separated forever:  American liberals are now incapable of even seeing political slogans they don’t like without descending into a Sylvia Plath-ish oven-seeking madness.

Oh be still, my beating heart.  If political slogans really could push Leftists into lemming-like mass suicide, I’d want to elevate Trump into President-For-Life.

Capital Flight

I haven’t spoken at all about the situation in Hong Kong before, mostly because there wasn’t much to be said:  (somewhat) free colony opposes colonial power’s aggression, mayhem ensues.

Several people have wondered why the ChiComs haven’t sent in the tanks, à la Tienanmen Square, to crush the waves of protests, but the answer is simple:  Hong Kong provides a means whereby the ChiCom government can move money around the world without provoking too much notice because currency movement in Hong Kong is completely unregulated.  Crush the protests, make Hong Kong just another province (like, say, Jiangxi or Shandong) and that flexibility disappears.

It is, however, a two-edged sword.  What has transpired since the protests began is that capital (money owned by individuals, that is) has been pouring out of Hong Kong and flooding into Singapore — to name just one such destination — thence on to parts unknown.  Which means that if Beijing does finally send the tanks into Hong Kong, they’re likely to find, like Old Mother Hubbard, that the cupboard is bare.  And the flow of  money is truly a deluge:  if you study how many major corporations have been purchased by Chinese-sourced money over the past few months, you’d be amazed.  Even better is that by and large, the corporations being thus purchased are characterized by their cash flow operations — in other words, the Chinese billionaires, canny businessmen that they are, are not just parking their money under an offshore mattress, they’re putting that cash to work and generating a revenue stream.

The ChiComs may not only be running out of other people’s money — they may soon be running out of their own.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of totalitarians.


By the way, you may have noticed that the above is somewhat short of details;  that’s because if I say more, I could jeopardize my several sources who are not only well placed in the area, but who do a ton of business there too and are close to said wealthy people.  One can never be too careful when dealing with Commie bastards.