[TheForge] coffee and guns OT OT OT and long... I highly recommend you hit DEL now. You've been warned. :)

[Andrew Vida]

ries wrote:

> The police accuracy figures in the USA, by supposedly trained officers 
> who must qualify as often as monthly, are unbelievably bad- I think hits 
> are less than 30% from LESS THAN 20 FEET!

	I've shot with and around a lot of cops.  They are generally the worst 
marksmen I have met... and have by far the worst muzzle discipline of 
anyone I've ever seen.  There are, of course, exceptions.  I actually 
saw a range officer kick a Watchung cop out because the cop just refused 
to stop pointing his pistol at people.  Conversely, I have shot with a 
lot of "amateurs" who'll shoot your right nut off with their .38 snubby 
at 100 yards.  There are hundreds of thousands of highly proficient 
civilian marksmen in this nation, perhaps over a million.  For 
marksmanship, the armed forces cannot even begin to match the civilian 
pool.  I'd be very surprised if the ratio were less than 20:1 in favor 
of civilians.
> 
> The simple fact is that in real combat situations, in real world 
> situations, people panic, throw up, go catatonic, and freak.

	For a while.  Then they adapt, both soldiers and civilians alike. 
Those who do not, die.  There are a lot more of "us" than there are of 
"them".

 > Trained
> people. Experienced people. And they often miss, no matter how good they 
> are on the range.

	This is true on all sides.

> Weapons break. In combat, everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
> And this is with the entire might and force of the US military supplying 
> you with the industrial output of the greatest nation on earth.
> 
> Its silly to think that average americans, with a couple hundred rounds 
> of ammo, no matter how pure of heart, pose any kind of a real threat to 
> an actual military.

	The truth is, neither you nor I have any clue as to how such a 
confrontation would shake out.  Combat is inherently non-linear.  The 
craziest things happen.

> Every historical instance of a halfway successful guerilla insurgency 
> always features outside support, money, and arms.

	This may be so, or not, but none of those involved the citizens of the 
USA against its own government.  In this respect, the USA is almost unique.
> 
> But the most offensive, and wrong, part of this whole idea, is the 
> concept that there is an "us" and a "them", and that the US government 
> is some kind of alien entity that WANTS to run roughshod over us, if 
> only we didnt have all those mini 14's.

	Well, they do.  It is not necessarily some evil conspiracy of the 
Illuminati.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Many 
people believe that shoving socialistic health care down the throats of 
those who do not want is (that would include myself) a justifiable act. 
  FDR had to threaten people with prison time if they refused to take 
their welfare checks because the people of this nation were cut of a 
somewhat different cloth than they generally are today.

	Those on the religious right want to put women into prison for 
terminating unwanted pregnancies... some even for using birth control. 
The intention is good - the result is something less so.  Much less.

	Many in favor of banning private ownership of firearms feel they are 
striving to make the world a better place.  They have no compunction to 
shove their opinions of what is right down the throats of everyone, 
welcomed or not.  They have no compunction to see their dogs forcibly 
confiscate our arms.  They have no compunction to see you go to prison 
or even forfeit your life for refusing to toe their line.  They are, 
after all, RIGHT and you are WRONG.

	Some of the animal rights fools would see anyone treating an animal in 
a way they do not approve of go to prison.  Some would see you in prison 
for eating animals.  Yeah, I have actually spoken with such people. 
They are serious about it, too, and are fully convinced that their truth 
is the only truth.  No shady conspiracies there.

	The global warming crowd wants to see everyone forced to give up all 
manner of practices and means for living because their truth is 
absolute.  No illuminatis or freemasons lurking there, I suspect.

	The Catholic church would take over the world in a second if they could 
get away with it because they know they possess the only truth.  Many 
Muslims would do the same.  We could go on down the lengthy list of 
classes of people who would shove their good intentions down the throats 
of the rest of us because they want the world to be a "better" place. 
This is demonstrably non-viable.  There are several thousands of years 
of human history that conclusively prove that forcing the 
one-size-fits-all method of living on those not interested in the flavor 
du jour leads to disaster that grows in proportion with the size of the 
population imposed upon and the degree of threat employed.  The only 
method that works even marginally well is to live and let live, but 
there is always some group of yahoos who think hey know better than the 
rest of us.  You want to speak about offensive?  I'd say that is plenty 
offensive.

	How will you feel when some environmentalist asshole manages to pass 
legislation that puts you out of business?  Forget the arguments of 
likelihoods... it is irrelevant.  You could just as easily be in a 
business that will be targeted by those who know better than you do and 
who will apply ANY force necessary to prevent you from doing what you 
do, up to and including putting you in prison or even killing you. 
Would this be acceptable to you?  What if you were a drug dealer?  I bet 
you wouldn't be so happy about some things in that case.  "But that is 
illegal and criminal" I hear you think.  Illegal, sure... criminal? 
Says who?  Some body of schmucks who have no legitimate power to declare 
such things as crimes?  They can declare anything a crime, given enough 
supporting evidence for justification.
> 
> Thats just silly. The US government is US- it is average americans.

	MOST of it is, but not all of it.  If you believe that GW is Joe 
Average, I would really like to sell you a bridge between Manhattan and 
Brooklyn.  It's a beauty. The highest echelons of power are NOT occupied 
by average Americans.  Quite the contrary.

> MY OWN MOTHER was an elected official for most of her adult life.
> I have met politicians. And they are just like you and me- some nice, 
> some nasty, some smart, some dumb.

	But the access to the means that some enjoy is NOT ordinary and those 
privileges are not always used in ways I consider acceptable.
How about our esteemed Federal Reserve?  How is it that a privately 
owned bank controls the money supply of the most powerful nation on the 
planet, and in violation of the  Constitution no less?  Why will they 
not disclose the ownership?  I've asked - I've been turned down, and I'm 
not alone.  "Give me control of a nations currency and I care not who 
makes their laws", or some such.  That was either Rothschild or Jacob 
Schiff.  Having control of currency is tantamount to having the nation's 
balls in your hands.  That is DE FACTO government. Are these ordinary 
Americans?  Are they even Americans at all?  And if they are private, 
then they must be profit motivated, whether in terms of money or power. 
  That raises some rather uncomfortable questions as to what their goals 
are.

> Our system works because of its inherent checks and balances in the 
> constitution and judicial system.

	Not always.  There have been cases where collusion between the 
executive and the judiciary seemed pretty obvious.  Still may not have 
been so, but some believe that in politics there are no coincidences. 
Personally, I am suspicious of political coincidence.

> Both of which are mostly run by smart people who actually care about 
> what they do.

	I agree on this point.  But one has to bear in mind that there has been 
a great concentration of power into few hands.  Bush winked his asshole 
at the congress and the courts for the first six years in office and not 
nearly enough people had the pair to stand up and tell him to step off. 
  Big election baloney... Democrats take over and they still have their 
lips firmly glued to GW's asshole.  What do you call that?  Smart people 
doing the right things?  One could not be held to blame entirely for 
thinking that maybe there was some hidden agenda afoot.

> Who could make more in private industry.

	For the people in positions of REAL power, token fortune is no 
temptation.  The man on a mission doesn't divert his eye from his goal 
for the sake of a dollar.  Bush is a batrillionaire, as are all his 
reach-around buddies.  If we assume that they are cause-oriented, then 
MORE money holds no sway over them.  Besides, there will be plenty of 
opportunities for doing that on the lecture circuit.  CAUSE ORIENTATION 
explains most of what we see that is otherwise perplexing.

> Yep, there are crooks and thieves, just like in any field.
> But by and large, our country runs pretty well.

	In many ways, I agree.  In some, I do not.
> 
> There is no big government conspiracy to screw you, if only you didnt 
> have a shotgun behind your bedroom door.

	Not in the traditional sense of the conspiracy nut, I agree.  But 
conspiracies of good intent can be every bit as damaging, and perhaps 
more so because often there is nothing to hide.
> 
> You been watching too many movies, dude.

	You wish. :)