Motus Mentis

In a recent USA Today opinion piece, the East Bay Democrat congressman Eric Swalwell proposed a mandatory government “buyback” of what he calls “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons” — i.e., ordinary semiautomatic rifles with scary-looking external features. (A gun “buyback” is when the government takes money from you in taxes, then gives you a little of it back in order to take your guns.)

On Twitter, a member of the gun-owning public suggested that this would be conducive to civil war. Mr. Swalwell replied that this would be a “short war”, because the government has nukes.

I’ve been hearing this silly argument for years from my liberal friends: that the Second Amendment is obsolete as a bulwark against tyranny, because the government has overwhelming military power. To make such an argument against a fundamental, Constitutionally protected right requires not only a typically unreflective combination of arrogance and moral flabbiness – should we really defend only those rights that cannot be opposed by powerful bullies? — but also a solipsistic (and equally typical) ignorance of history, particularly military history, and of traditional American culture. There are so many errors in the argument that one hardly knows where to begin.

We should be grateful, then, to Mr. Larry Correia, who has written a characteristically excellent post demolishing this nonsense in all its particulars. (Thanks also to the indefatigable “JK”, who sent us the link.) We’ve linked to Mr. Correia before; with the possible exception of John R. Lott, it’s hard to think of anyone who writes more effectively on gun-control issues.

The essay begins:

Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback””which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it””and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.

And everybody was like, wait, what?

Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.

See? That’s way better.

A piquant sample from a bit farther along:

A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder”¦ But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody. And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.

Speaking of ugly, do you really honestly think that you’re going to be able to kill people because they disagree with you, and they won’t hit you back where it hurts? While you’re drone striking Omaha Nebraska you really think that the people who live where all the food is grown, the electricity is generated, and all the freeways and rail lines run through, that some of them aren’t going to take it personal? And that they’re not going to use their location and access to make life extremely uncomfortable for you?

The most valuable part of Mr. Correia’s essay is his attention to what is almost always overlooked when this topic comes up: the numbers. For example:

Okay, so let’s say Congressman Swalwell gets his wish, and the government says turn them in or else. And even though the government has become tyrannical enough to send SWAT teams door to door and threaten citizens with drones and attack helicopters, rather than half the states saying fuck you, this means Civil War 2, instead we’ll stick to the rosiest of all possible outcomes, and say that most gun owners comply.

In fact, let’s be super kind. Rather than a realistic number, like half or a third of those people getting really, really pissed off and hoisting the black flag, let’s say that 99% of them decide to totally put all their faith into the government, and that the all-powerful entity which just threatened to kill their entire family will never ever turn tyrannical from now on, pinky swear, so what do they have to lose? And a whopping 90% of gun owners go along peacefully.

That means you are only dealing with six and a half MILLION insurgents. The entire active US military is about 1.3 million, with about 800,000 reserve. Which is also assuming that those two Venn diagrams don’t overlap, which is just plain idiotic, but I’ll get to that too.

Let’s be super generous. I’m talking absurdly generous, and say that a full 99% of US gun owners say won’t somebody think of the children and all hold hands and sing kumbaya, so that then you are only dealing with the angriest, listless malcontents who hate progress”¦ These are those crazy, knuckle dragging bastards who you will have to put in the ground.

And there are 650,000 of them.

To put that into perspective, we were fighting 22,000 insurgents in Iraq, a country which would fit comfortably inside Texas with plenty of room to spare. This would be almost 30 times as many fighters, spread across 22 times the area.

And that estimated number is pathetically, laughably low.

Enough excerpts. Go and read the whole thing.