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Not those of us who've been buying guns, but primarily rifles, of military utility in ever greater numbers, starting in the George W. Bush administration.... A
by hga 10y ago
Not those of us who've been buying guns, but primarily rifles, of military utility in ever greater numbers, starting in the George W. Bush administration....
And let me quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The GULAG Archipelago on the general question of "whistling" vs. resisting:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- masonic 10y ago"Not those of us who've been buying guns, but primarily rifles, of military utility in ever greater numbers, starting in the George W. Bush administration" Actually, gun ownership surged during the early Clinton administration in response to his party's push for gun bans and the "Brady Bill".
- hga 10y agoI can well believe that, but as I remember the big surge started after 9/11, when we were told the only thing we could personally do was to shop (support the already crashing economy), i.e. that we were are our own. Quibble: our best numbers come from NICS checks, and they only started in 1998 based on 1993's Brady Bill. E.g. they capture sales of used guns, which the ATF otherwise doesn't have visibility into like they do with new stuff through Pittman Robertson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman%E2%80%93Robertson_Federal_Aid_in_Wildlife_Restoration_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman%E2%80%93Robertson_Fede...). And even that data is getting iffier as more and more people get concealed carry licenses, which generally allow you to skip the NICS check. But, yeah, pretty much every effort, mooted or actual, at gun control prompts us ornery gun owners to resist, generally by buying some of what's under fire, so to speak.