...in which I discuss the somewhat irrational fear of a police state developing in the USA, those MRAPS, and the relevance of whether or not the Department of Agriculture has any need for submachine guns.
One of the more common concerns making the rounds today is over the militarization of the police. There are good solid arguments both for and against the sale of leftover military vehicles, weapons and body armor to state, local, and county Law Enforcement agencies.
My personal opinion is that a decision has been made somewhere, by someone, that a good way to make use of the tons of military surplus generated by our ongoing involvement in the middle east would be to provide it at cost or free to domestic police agencies. As opposed to mothballing it in a desert or warehouse to rust. Secondly, I think that the powers that be, on all sides of the political cage, have seen the writing on the wall.
All it takes to incite civil unrest and rioting these days is for a sports team to lose... (Reference the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup Riots)... OR win... (Michigan State riots after getting an invite to the rose bowl in 2013... UConn beats Kentucky 60-54.. just to name a couple.)
Imagine what will happen in the inner city when the EBT cards stop working... or when the fake money creation employed to KEEP them working eventually makes food so expensive that they are rendered functionally useless. Imagine, even, what will happen if someone DOES manage to elect someone with the balls to even ATTEMPT to avoid such a catastrophe by tightening the restrictions on the endless supply of government freebies. Those on both sides of the aisle who have attempted to buy votes with tax money for decades have now painted themselves in the corner. There is no way out. A storm is inevitable.
...Or perhaps our overtaxed power grid goes down for a week or so, due to some terrorist group, foreign or domestic, figuring out how relatively simple it is to cause that. People turn in to animals when they lose power for a week. We saw it with Katrina. We saw it with Sandy. We will see it again. Trust me.
Anyway, my point is, riots are more and more common. Civil unrest is more and more common for more and more stupid reasons. I am not going to undertake a discussion of why this is the case, though I have plenty of opinions on that. It is simply a reality that Law Enforcement Officers are going to have to deal with. If they aren't thinking about riot control in the near or distant future, they should be.
...and I, for one, don't have a problem with them having the tools to deal with it... especially if it is army surplus that is just going to get junked.
Now... let me tell you why the police are NOT getting the gear.
They are not coming to disarm America or enforce a police state.
To understand why I can say that so confidently, lets just look at some numbers.
I am sure the numbers have grown a bit... but... there were, as of 2008, roughly 765,000 State, Local, Municipal, University, etc. LEOs in the USA with arrest powers. Add on the federals, (120k give or take) and you get the number 885,000 people who can arrest you in the US.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf
Big number, right?
OK... lets add the military for giggles. There are 2.26 MILLION (and change) of them.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/03/137536111/by-the-numbers-todays-military
Now we are up to 3,152,000 or so.. lets throw in the 240K of the DHS in too and whoever I might have missed.
OK... so lets call it 3.5 million people. Lets also pretend that there are NO conservatives or second amendment guys amongst them. (Laughable... particularly in the military... but play along with me.) Lets also pretend there are no overweight donut-eating desk jockeys who have never pulled their gun on anyone... or old men who couldn't outrun an earthworm. Lets just pretend for a moment that they are all statist thugs out to get your weapons... they are all competent and in the physical shape of navy seals. They are coming for your weapons.
Now lets look at the other side of the scale.
There are somewhere between 270 million and 310 million guns in the US. A gallup poll, (and polls are particularly inaccurate with this issue) in 2010 found that 43% of households reported owning a gun.
So... lets take the lower end of the first number and 43% of our population of 314 million. That gives us 135 million people owning 270 million guns.
So our imaginary disarming force is outnumbered. roughly 40 to one by armed citizens. 20 million or so of whom are military veterans. (Many of those are older.. but not too old to share tactical knowledge, btw.)
...but who are we kidding? Almost every LEO I personally know is a second amendment conservative guy and Obama has never had much more than 40% approval in the military on his BEST day. To cut the number of our imaginary disarming force in half would be overly generous.
...but I am feeling generous. So... lets say that 1.75 million armed tough guys tried to..
oh wait... I forgot to figure in the fact that many of those guys are desk jockeys who couldn't kick the door down of a dollhouse....
Lets say that 1.5 million armed tough guys try to disarm 135 million gun owners.
They would have to go door to door. (what else are they going to do? bombs and tanks are off the table when I am surrounded by statist hippies in my neighborhood.) And that is also pretending that 100% of the force is dedicated to disarmament... and all the other criminals took a few years off to give them the time....
So lets start with me. They outnumber ME in any case. Lets say I go home and the police have driven up in their fancy MRAP and done a no-knock raid on my house and gotten my measly couple of shotguns. OK. Busted. You got me coppers. Throw me in jail. Fine me. Whatever.
As soon as word gets out that the police are going around disarming people. One of two things will happen. In the crazy over-the-top scenario.. the MRAP would be pinned down and everyone in it dead by the end of the night. In the other over-the-top scenario... the officers involved would get off work and go out in to their community and never be able to sleep securely again knowing that they and their family are marked by gun toting crazies.... they would slowly get weeded out until the ones remaining would be terrified to go in to work and be seen in their uniform. There would be no little league baseball for THEIR kids. They would be marked men, unable to go out in public.
but those are the total over-the-top, breakdown-of-society scenarios... that would almost surely not happen.... What would more likely happen is, that, everyone who heard that the cops were driving around disarming people would simply "disappear" their weapons overnight. Within three days the no-knock raids would be done on houses empty of weapons. The weapons of course would still be retrievable within an hour or so.. but they wouldn't be in any obvious place. They would hear story after story of how they had been stolen mere nights before... or "lost in a canoe accident in British Columbia last May"... or "sold to a guy on craigslist" (complete with phony craigslist ad just in case they check)
The most likely "disarmament" scenario would result in a massive failure with nary a gunshot fired. Weapons will be buried, and hidden, (never on site but never more than an hour away). I could hide a weapon where it would NEVER be found (unless they tortured me).. and WITHOUT EVEN TRYING I could hide one where it would take a thousand man-hours of work to find it. Then they would get to go looking for the next one. (One down... 274,999,999 left to go...)
Metal detectors and imagers could find some of them... provided they could be used on every square inch of American soil and wall at the same instant. which is impossible. If they swept every inch of... say... a national forest looking for buried weapons and then moved to another one... people could go bury them in the one they just swept. They would have to check every building... every abandoned barn. They could NEVER find more than 10% of the hidden weapons in a hundred years of round the clock work.
So... We have established that 3.5 million armed law enforcement and military personnel is nowhere near enough to even keep themselves alive.. much less disarm and impose a military state... on a nation of 314 million people with 275 million privately owned guns who are noncompliant.
This is the illusion of control that these people have. The government... the law enforcement personnel... only have power because the majority of the populace allows them to have it. This is as designed. It is the entire reason for the second amendment to the constitution.
It is also why we as Americans have trouble even comprehending the atrocities of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or Guevara. Because it simply COULD NOT happen over here... The electorate of the United States could completely eradicate our entire government before lunch if we ever felt the need to, and nothing could stop them. That wont ever happen... but it wont happen precisely because it COULD happen.
The only true control America, as a collective group, has over it is what it has always had. Self-control.
I do not fear the number of .40 caliber cartridges that the department of agriculture has on the shelf. I am only concerned with the number of hostile trigger fingers. I don't care whether the guys coming to do a no-knock raid on my house to take my guns do it in an MRAP or in a cruiser. Unless I am the first guy in the country to get hit, I will greet them with a smile and tell them to "feel free to look around... I have been unarmed since the horrible incident where all my weapons were stolen from my back porch while I was cleaning them. Aren't you hot in all that body armor? You guys come back soon. Good to see you again Rick. Tell the wife I said Hey."
That is what would happen if your government tried to disarm you. A few statist weenies would comply... but the enforcers would be mostly ignored and/or beclowned. (At least if they are lucky.) MRAPs and body armor and selective fire weapons will not help them in the least to disarm a population that outnumbers them a thousand to one. The only thing they can hope for is voluntary compliance... and I believe they will find precious little of that.
So stay vigilant, but don't freak out. If you want to, continue to stock up on ammo before they decide to tax it at twenty dollars a cartridge. That stuff keeps for a hundred years and is simple to hide. Buy it now. Maybe come up with YOUR plan for making your weapons and ammo disappear if they need to some day... but use your head and don't worry about a true "police state" just around the corner. Not here. Not any time soon.
Your government is like a five year old child stamping their feet and warning you what will happen if you don't give them another cookie. Give them the cookie if you want to. But don't confuse that with true power. YOU, the American population, have that... and you can thank the second amendment. When the government has more guns than the population at large... THAT is when horrifying things happen. That isn't our situation. Not. At. All.
NOW... here is where it gets scary, though.
This same tiny police force that keeps everything kind of tidy around the edges? If civil unrest ever breaks out nationwide... they aren't going to be able to do anything about it. It doesn't matter what the reason is. Ongoing power outage. People start to get hungry. EBT cards stop working for a month. Inflation goes nuts. The stock market crashes. Or if someday a cop actually DOES shoot a completely innocent kid. The cubs win the pennant. Anything. Many of them will simply go home, take off the uniform, and worry about protecting their OWN wives and kids.
I hope that it never happens... but fear the day if the riots come, GOD forbid, to every big city in the country at once. I have valid constitutional concerns about the blurring of the lines between the police and the military that seems to be going on... but I have to admit that on THAT day, I will be happy that the thin blue line that holds it all together at the edges has a little more than a Crown Vic and a sidearm.
That being said... there are VERY valid reasons to oppose the militarization of the police. Give a man a hammer and he starts looking for nails. Give swat team gear to every policeman and all the sudden they are doing no-knock raids with guns drawn on people for credit card fraud. There is a pretty good spike of that nonsense that has showed up recently, and it is absolutely inexcusable. This article is intended for those who fear a massive conspiracy/crackdown by the "gun grabbers", etc, as well as a general discussion on the difference between actual power and perceived power.
-S
