http://www.willowtown.com/reality/columns.htm

We at war. Wars are fought by ignorant 19 year-olds, lackeys, prostitutes, ignorant idealists and the minority at the top who understand what the real stakes are. It doesn’t matter which one of those pulls the trigger on you. You are just as dead.

If I had all the answers maybe I’d be leading the group of 3 million or so that should advance on D.C., arrest, try for treason and execute all the members of the socialist caucus, then focus on the numerous Marxist foundations based in Virginia and New York City. Then of course, look at who is really funding them.

Americans

Part of the reason we haven’t is that the other side knows and plays the media game far better than our side does. One of my big complaints with NRA is that they don’t really have an overall strategy for media. ILA has a media group, and general operations has a media group, but I don’t think they have any grand vision for trying to change their relationship, and for getting positive stories out there. The Bradys are not afraid to put their bullshit in front of ignorant reporters, who will gladly print it, because it confirms their biases.

Still, our media coverage these days is a hell of a lot better than it was in the 90s, and I think that has something to do with our increasing success. The media is one of those fundamental things that has been killing us. If we could turn it around, that would be the end of gun control. Turning it around is tough though. Michael has done a lot of work with his show in that regard, which is why I’m surprised he doesn’t see the problem in writing a letter to the editorial board of a newspaper which just basically confirms the biases of the journalists.

“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?” (Kurt, the the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is your friend :-).

Thank you–although I feel a bit foolish for not having thought of that myself. Anyway, that is precisely the passage I had in mind.

Thanks again.

A) While there’s long term promise in e.g. “new media” and the Decline and Fall of the MSM, to expect the following will make any difference is fatuous:

“[...] I see no reason for gun owners to provide the media with more tools they can use to create an image of gun owners are being dangerous, and far outside the main stream. In fact, we need to work very hard to foster the opposite impression in the media.”

It doesn’t matter what we say, the media will with very rare exceptions continue to present their narrative. They have after all have shown themselves to be quite eager to make up things out of whole cloth, rewrite letters to the editor, etc. etc. At least Mike’s letter had the advantage of being generally accurate and true, ***as well as morally necessary***, in terms of telling our enemies the consequences of their actions and giving them fair warning.

“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?” (Kurt, the the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is your friend :-).

B) “Bob” is in general not going to speak up for all the reasons outlined above, often for no other reason than that he wants to preserve his job and career. We *might* get his “active support” (say in terms of voting—there are downsides to requiring the publishing of campaign donors names…), but it will be silent except to a trusted few until “it’s clearly safe and at least somewhat popular to do so”.

Peter put it best: “[...] if the gun culture gets shut down before Bob can work up his gumption, just what have we accomplished?”

The thing that most concerns me here is that while our enemies are on the run in the larger scheme of things, they are still focusing on the long term where they can win by aborting the next generations of gun owners.

And a final point about deterrence, one I haven’t figured out how to present in anything less than very ugly ways, which is probably inherent:

Dave: “[A radical letter] could have a solid chance of convincing gun control oriented folks that X law is absolutely necessary as it does stopping them from considering it. Remember they know they aren’t going to be the ones that have to enforce the law in question, so the chances of them being afraid of any trouble resulting from it seems slim to me.”

For that reason, you have to make it absolutely clear they are in this game as well. That such a “revolution” will in truth be that, as ugly as any modern one, let alone our American “Rebellion” (for the French shortly afterwards redefined the term).

I most certainly don’t want the country to get to a point where a slogan like “Have you killed a liberal today?” is popular, but I’d be a fool to entirely discount it.

How we present this ugly “Doomsday Weapon” truth is very open to debate (especially the thresholds, although ambiguity there can be useful), but trying to hide it is unwise and certainly immoral.

Not sure which gets up my nose most, the louder line-in-the-sand types or the “If we’re nice, people wil come to love us,” folks. I suspect both approaches may have a flaw or two.

Tell ya this for true: when we spat, Sarah Brady smiles.

This is our ENEMIES’ term. Using their terms put your ball in their court. They have many terms and phrases they have and still do use against us, but not as many as a few years ago. The reason many of them don’t work anymore is because we started getting in their faces and telling them “NO! You will not do that to us anymore.”

No, you don’t act the same way in people’s faces, well not most of the time, as you do online, or in other forums. But allowing our ENEMIES to set the tone for this war puts them in control. Allowing ourselves to be pacified, toned down, shut up, let’s them win.

I remember well when one didn’t dare mention in polite company what you say ‘ Bob,’ the eternal dumbass sheeple, still hasn’t the courage to say. This has changed, because enough people, not sheeple, have been saying what needs to be said.

We need to get in their faces, the percentage of our enemies who understand they are waging war against us and against human liberty, and tell them “NO, Hell NO!” loudly enough, with the force at the ready to back it up, that they might not try what they plan if their current savior, McCommie or Obamacommies, lies their way into the White House.

Mike’s essay doesn’t help that. Now, I don’t disagree with anything he said in it, just where he said it, but I’m not going to dwell on that issue.

Instead, I have a little story that shows how acting a little more like a “Bob” can help.

Back in 2003 I was working for a rather large international company. It must have been a Friday because I wandered by my boss’ desk to ask what his lunch plans were. The news story of the day was of Scott Woodring. Dude about 50 miles north of us holed himself up in his house and shot policemen when they tried to enter. Oh, and he had ties to the Michigan Militia.

So, with the group gathered ’round his desk he presents the story to us in a “holy crap I can’t believe this shit” tone. One of the guys that worked in a different group than I did piped up, “Well, probably one of those crazy NRA members.”

My boss’ eyes get walnut sized as I reach for my wallet. He’s not afraid, he just knows what’s coming and trying to hold off the laughter. PLUNK! There’s my NRA membership card on his desk.

Now, I’m a pretty quiet guy in real life. I might come off like a blow-hard online sometimes, but that’s just not how I operate in meat space. I speak when spoken to. That kinda thing.

I’m not sure I actually had to say anything after I dropped that card down. I don’t believe I did either. That dude’s view of NRA members just got shattered right then and there. I honestly think he really thought they were all holed up in remote areas of the country awaiting another civil war. But there it was, a honest to God shirt and tie wearing NRA member working in IT not more than 60 feet from him every day.

This was sometime around July of that year if my memory serves me correctly.

Come October I figured I’d be a little bit of a “goof” around the office. Since it was the month of Halloween and my boss had a tendency to snatch Starburst candies from one of my team members that always had a bag of them on his desk I figured I’d make a candy jar of large proportions. Problem: I’m a bachelor at the time and I don’t have a candy dish. Well, I just emptied out an ammo can, cleaned up it up real well, and packed the thing full of candy and set it on my desk.

I remember the dude that made the original “NRA member” comment stopping by one day to grab some candy. We got to chatting and eventually we got onto the topic of how to clean an AR-15. He was from Singapore and served in their military. Seems they just strip off the plastic and toss them all into a big vat of kerosene-like substance when they’re due for cleaning. Good to know.

I’m going go wager that I managed to shatter the “they’re all crazy” stereotype with him.

Fast forward 3 years and I’m no longer working for the same company. My former boss isn’t either. He calls my cell phone to inform me that he’s currently living in Nevada and just purchased a Glock 22. He couldn’t think of anybody that would really appreciate such news besides me. Of course I was rather positive about it and gave him a verbal thumbs up on the whole matter.

I can only imagine the positive response if I’d simply run around the office yelling at people that I’d kill them if they ever tried taking my guns.

So anathema are guns among my friends that when one learned I was doing this piece, he opened his wallet, silently pulled out an NRA membership card, then (after I recovered from the sight) asked me not to spread it around lest his son be kicked out of nursery school.” (My emphasis.)

What we’re dealing with here is FEAR.

The public fear of guns and gun violence. The gun-owner’s fear of ostracism. The government’s fear of an armed citizenry.

It’s all FEAR.

And Vanderboegh, in a public forum, threw gasoline on the fire.

Personally, I don’t think it was more than a popcorn fart. “Oh, look dear, another gun-nut.” The members of government who have PSH over private gun ownership already fear what Vanderboegh threatened. The general public knows that there are extremists in the rights movement and aren’t particularly surprised or frightened – the media has done a bang-up job of making the various “militias” into keystone-kop laughingstocks.

Face the facts: If they were really that afraid of us, would they say and do the things they say and do?

But gun owners have a very real fear of, say, having their kids kicked out of nursery school if anybody finds out they belong to the NRA.

Mr. Bane, I made the same point about Judge Kozinski’s dissent in a comment thread at my own blog. It’s all in how you say it.

I’m absolutely not suggesting we find a comfort zone and never push out that. There’s a big difference between showing people there’s nothing especially scary about black rifles or machine guns, and suggesting in a public newspaper that you’ll kill anyone who dares impose licensing and registration, when that’s not even on the table right now politically. That’s not what Kozinski’s eloquent dissent in Silvera says. Not even close.

There’s no reason to threaten those things publicly when few are seriously suggesting that such a thing is politically feasible. Most people in this country are not prepared to do violence, or even threaten to do violence, against their government for misgivings. That’s way outside the mainstream.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about purposes for the second amendment, including a deterrent against government getting out of control, but I can think of far less brazen means of doing it than “I’ll kill anyone who further restricts my liberties” If you’re going to push the envelops on the the second amendment as a “reset” button, one has to tread very carefully.

I’ll try to answer these together, since you sort of bring up the same thing. I think there’s a difference between discussing controversial topics on a blog, where the audience can be assumed to be largely along the same lines of thinking, and that other people would have to actively seek out to find, and sending something to a newspaper, that a lot of people who are not immersed in the gun culture read. The main stream media are still a lot of people’s primary exposure to this topic. I’m not at all suggesting that we never talk about these topics, or be quiet about them. But I do challenge the wisdom of having a discussion about civil war in front of your average newspaper reader.

I think at some point or another we’ve all suggested we have a line in the sand. I have no problem with that. If Mike V. had said what he said on his blog, it wouldn’t have given any thought to it.

III

First, if I may quote from the Ninth Circuit’s Judge Alex Kozinski’s brilliant dissent on the Second Amendment from a few years back:

“All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

“My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees*. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”

I have been on the front lines of the RKBA fight for a long time, and many times I was neither nice nor friendly. In fact, the reason that I and people like Paul Erhardt, Scotty Moore and others were so successful in media outreach — and the industry is still benefitting from the contacts we made — is that we flatly refused to compromise our beliefs to make members of the MSM “feel” more comfortable…and we won, again and again.

A quick example….when I designed SHOOTING GALLERY, several highly placed people in the industry cautioned me about presenting black rifles, full auto weapons and other “inappropriate” content. You may have noticed that I ignored them. This year, the show won two Tellys, essentially cable Emmys, for our coverage of the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot. Heck, I thought the Hollywood judges’ heads would explode. SHOOTING GALLERY now sets the agenda for the rest of the gun media.

As I pointed out in my blog, we have made great strides culturally, but ONLY because we have largely abandoned the “invisible good guy” image we cultivated for so long. Much of my thinking on media and cultural outreach has been influenced by my interviews with the media strategists of the gay movement…essentially the exception to everything Sebastian stated in his very articulate reply to my post. They started with no “tent” whatsoever with a culture that the majority of Americans were in extreme disagreement with…30 years later, the issue isn’t gay acceptance, it’s gay marriage…a wholesale cultural change perpetuated by a once-despised minority. Hmmmm, how did that work? I thought it was a question worth asking, and I was surprised at the answers…a combination of in-your-face radicalism coupled with relentless backroom arm-twisting.

Tell me about that “tent” thing again…we allied with the Republicans because we embraced that bigger tent concept. We put a President in office not once, but twice. This would be the President that did his best to sell us out on Heller, who has appointed a raft of antigun administrators and who, as near as I can tell, gone to great lengths to pretend we don’t exist. In last year’s battles on recreational shooting on public land I was urged by some of the Powers That Be to NOT take the fight to Washington because it would “embarrass the Bush administration.” We took the fight to Washington and that gave us the leverage we needed to win. That “big tent” doesn’t seem to do us much good.

Do I think we’re on the verge of some “Unintended Consequences” revolution? Of course not. But I have learned somewhat painfully over the years that I do not own a crystal ball. I tend to agree that most personal vitriol needs to be checked at the door…as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a bit less willing to brand people as assholes, perhaps because I’ve been called that myself by so many people.

Michael B

I do not own, have never owned, and do not expect to ever own, a firearm.

But I believe people have a right of defense, of themselves and family and if [questionably] to a lesser extent friends and neighbors.

And i’d rather have a 110lb woman explaining to a jury why she used her CCW handgun to fend off a 215lb rapist than said rapist explaining why he killed a woman rather than take the chance she might point him out in court.

So, do you mind if I consider myself included in “gun culture?”

What we have in all this is a disagreement in tactics. The back and forth got personal, and clouded things up. Naturally you object to folks saying shut up, ( not something I did the few times I posted ) On the other side there was an idea that anyone who disagreed with the notion that nothing is working, revolution is virtually inevitable etc. was essentially a piker, or delusional, or just as much of a problem as the anti gun guys.
Most of the vitriol needs to be checked at the door. We have a common cause, and common political opponents to deal with.

Agreed, and about the only area on which I disagree with Mr. Vanderboegh is his contention (somewhere) that Sebastian isn’t a committed and effective gun rights advocate.

If the main thrust of the gun rights advocacy movement is to politely court the fence sitters, I won’t object.

A few of us are going to play the “bad cop” role to the mainstream gun rights advocacy’s “good cop”–and the two roles can work in a complimentary fashion.

I’m not trying to silence the folks who want to try to recruit the “Bobs,” but we won’t be silenced, either.

III

Yes, and the reason smoking isn’t actually illegal is that the govt. knows that a fair percentage of todays smokers would become just as ruthless and violent to satisfy their habit as other addicts, same reason prohibition didn’t work. Don’t believe that would happen? Ask people involved with POWs in Germany after WWII. Officers, intelligent educated men were trading their wedding rings, and in some cases their gold bridges for a pack of cigarettes. You can get a man killed in prison today for a couple of cartons. It wouldn’t be any different on the streets if they were outlawed.

One of the things gun owners have to do, if they wish to continue to be gun owners is to convince the govt. that one gun law too many could put perhaps 0.01% of gun owners, not in they attics waiting to fight agents for their guns, but on the streets actively hunting govt. employees.
Is it true?
Who knows?
It doesn’t matter as long as it keeps legislators cautious.