The Next Civil War Will Not Break Out Over Guns

The next American civil war will not break out over gun confiscation. As much as I myself love firearms and enjoy the freedom we have for now, I myself am not willing to die for the right to own firearms. Rather, what I am willing to fight for is other freedoms, so eloquently put by Thomas Jefferson as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well the safety of my family. When those most basic elements of individual humanity are marked for destruction by the government, then I will use the right-of-last-resort to fight for what’s mine.
 
The sacrosanct right Mr. Jefferson also articulated, that of rebellion against tyranny, dovetails perfectly the with the purpose of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not about hunting; it is about killing totalitarian politicians and the police/soldiers they send to enforce their tyrannical edicts. In the 18th century, it was shooting at the British Army, but today it is assassinating politicians, bureaucrats, and party flunkies as much as it is resisting by force of arms police/military snatch squads and search teams.
 
Blowing away politicians, even the ones you hate the most, is not a good thing. For one thing, it will encourage whoever the “other side” is to do the same thing or begin other deprivations in retaliation. Government will certainly enact strict measures to control the situation or punish the rebels as soon as some legislator or congress-critter gets sniped from the woods. If you think being disarmed because the cop knows you have a CCW is bad, imagine being subjected to a totally unwarranted search because the cop knows you own guns.
 
Second, a world where peaceful politics doesn’t work is not the kind of world we live in. For most of us, we quietly acquiesce to things like long red lights on lonely streets late at night because out of respect for the law than the fear of a crash or traffic cop. That kind of order is preferable to most of us than the chaos of an uncontrolled intersection in India. Similarly, none of us want to live in a banana republic where if the mayor gets to wild and free with, say bike lanes, the car dealers whack half the city council.
 
I doubt many people here care if a few politicians get it between the ears. Political assassination on a scale larger than the act of a random, disturbed weirdo always results in blowback. Widespread political violence always results in other savagery. Northern Ireland, Sarajevo, and Rwanda are good examples were there is no fine line between political violence and interpersonal religious/sectarian violence. If a crazy liberal kills President Trump and conservatives retaliate, Antifa hits the streets while the right-wing militias follow behind.
 
Radical gun control initiatives, the kind that make Michael Bloomberg cream his sheets at night, almost always follow on the heels of a tragedy of some sort. Take 2013 and the Sandy Hook massacre for instance, or California’s 1989 Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act after a dumb creep shot up a schoolyard. Political assassinations would be the perfect ammunition for nearly any Congress, even weak-needed Republicans, to roll gun ownership back to what some Fudd in Pennsylvania would approve of.
 
After the Scalise-Republican congressional baseball assassination attempt, neither violence nor gun control went anywhere because Republicans knew it was a lone nutjob and the rest of leftist America wasn’t ready to do that kind of thing. Give the non-crazy leftists motivation like whoops, Trump won again or something and the slow media-fueled radicalization will give some hope-deprived or otherwise emboldened leftist reason to be successful next time. It could stampede minority Republic-cucks into caving on gun control as well, but what is certain is that in near future, political violence will be seen by a non-insignificant number as appropriate.
 
Now let’s talk a little about scenarios and timing. In 2020, no matter who wins the presidential election, it will be contested and half the country will not accept the president and possibly not even Congress. This happened in 1860 with the election of Lincoln. At some point, someone will get stupid over something and create the catalyst mentioned one paragraph above. With America’s faith in democracy finally totally shattered, political violence will be increasingly looked to, first as a way to vent frustration and weaken one’s enemies, then as a means to control the direction of society and government.
 
Government will still exist, even if executives and legislators are getting nothing done other than the finger from their constituents. Police and regulatory agencies will still function fairly normally and so will the IRS. It’s not an anarchists dystopia yet. At this point, it will be clear that there is no voting our way back to normal; only through increasing violence can one side exert political control.
 
During all this, the economy is faltering. People are being evicted and doing everything from committing crimes to feed their families to shooting up loan offices after a foreclosure. While political violence is going on, the financial markets will inevitably crash again, correcting the horrible mistakes of pre-2008 that merely ignored the roots of the problem. At some point, we will see riots over empty EBT cards, no welfare or social security checks, and a host of other issues. No one is going to want to work or deliver goods into a riot zone.
 
As I said before, almost no one is going to throw their life away merely over guns. Even with harsh restrictions, we bury them, we build homemade machine guns in our garages, and carry even if it’s now illegal. We do what we have to in order to survive. It is not until we face an existential threat, such as many Jews faced when the SS and Gestapo came knocking, that violence is worth the risk. As many of us believe, it is better to die fighting than to live as a slave. Only when one looses everything is it acceptable for the rational man to rebel.
 
As Mr. Jefferson said, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” We are far more willing to try and make the best of things than resort to the total upheaval and gamble that is insurrection. But desperate men will turn to desperate measures. Again, for the reasonable man, that is simple self-preservation and self-discipline in practice because he knows that seldom does anything good come violence.
 
Nonetheless, violence is sometimes necessary for survival, even if it is to survive the crushing weight of a dark, authoritarian future. Not seeing 1984 become reality is worth dying for, but even so, it is the timing of when to fight that is crucial. Once again, Jefferson says “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” one is permitted to rebel. 

In the 1770s, America began to resist when Parliament and King George made life extremely difficult and expensive for the colonists. The Declaration of Independence lists these abuses. Though far from being forced to the brink of survival, colonists were essentially denied all the protections of being an English subject, leaving them in a bureaucratic nightmare of taxes, fees, and permission. The bar for rebellion then was much lower than today because many of Congress’ complaints are perpetrated on Americans today.
 
Now as some have been saying to themselves since the first paragraph, the war of American revolution began in 1775 as the British Army marched to confiscate stores of gunpowder and weaponry from the Massachusetts militia. The British had gone too far because they knew if the troops were taking away the guns, then with Parliament deaf to their cries, there would be nothing left to stop far worse crimes by the Crown. With no militia to stop them, General Gage could have rounded up John and Sam Adams and other influential patriots, destroying the nascent Continental Congress.
 
So though the Revolution began over a gun confiscation raid, it did not begin for that reason. Likewise, we fought the Civil War over slavery (not to free the slaves), but a host of other reasons like agrarian vs. industrial economies and Southern pride combined and compounded to lead to war. In the 21st century the civil war will be over existential issues; the attack on the traditional American way of life, a rejection of socialism, the invasion of the Third World, and survival in a regulatory and economically depressed nightmare.
 
The actual catalytic event is unknown, it could be a gun confiscation thing. All I’m saying is that no one is turning out for battle when Assault Weapons Ban 2.0 is passed. One blogger remarked that the Left has a variety of actions in regards to political violence; a “knob” that ranges from protests to riots and murder. For those on the right, we are disposed to suffer, calling the Right’s responses a “switch” with two settings: “vote and Shoot Fucking Everybody” [emphasis added]. You get the point. Conservatives don’t throw public temper tantrums or do stupid shit unless we have lost or are on the brink of losing everything.
 
In 1775, Massachusetts was on the brink of losing everything in the sense of political reform. In other times and places, the people had lost all political power and had everything, in a metaphorical sense, taken from them after years of tyranny. In both cases, there wasn’t much more to lose and everything to gain. In December of 2018, running out and playing revolutionary will only get you killed/jailed and if it goes national, will cost the rest of us the remaining few comfortable years we have left.
 
I don’t know about you, but I want to enjoy the time I have with my family. I have vacations to take, places to see, things to do, and stuff I want to buy. Few of us are ready to stand guard over our meagre backyard garden on a cold, wet night because the starving neighbors are going to come over the fence. A dangerous, hungry future is what civil war and the coming turmoil will bring. The natural course of events will lead us to war without anyone’s help.
 
As I said before, the political world will go haywire. We might even be at war with Russia or China. The economy will crash before or as a result of all of this. Political violence will lead to Left/Right and racial warfare full of shootings, bombings, and no-go zones like Northern Ireland. Many of us will live in a police state. During all of this, the reasonable and prudent man will choose to suffer as long as his family is safe, fed, and his guns tucked under the stairs are still there.
 
Conservatives do not engage in political violence until they have everything, or nothing left, to lose. As demoralizing as it is to watch our rights, freedoms, and way of live disintegrate, I’d rather live in a liberal California on steroids than live in something closer to The Walking Dead. I have a duty to protect my family and that duty does not involve starting today’s Bleeding Kansas for my own self-satisfaction. The majority of us “woke” gun-toting, liberty-minded folks will also bide their time.
 
If you don’t know now, you will come next election, but there is no voting our way out of this. The tax and regulatory burden will increase, the economy will tank, the government will hate you more, and crime will go up, all while some invader from the Third World takes a figurative or literal dump on your lawn. Then it just keeps getting worse as you’re struggling to make it day to day, financially, physically, and mentally. No hope is on the horizon.
 
Imagine that during the 2022 midterm elections, polling places are being bombed while the lines of voters outside are being sniped at. The county clerks’ offices are stormed and ballots burned. Winning or rival politicians are killed. Eventually, it begins to filter down to attacking political gatherings, rioters attacking union picket lines, or simply murdering one’s neighbor for voting for the other guy. Gangs of angry urban minorities fan out into the suburbs intent on robbing and looting for food and the things they were promised. All the while the DMV needs you review your social media and browser history to renew your driver license.
 
Now to make it worse, imagine you are hungry—starving—victim to criminal predators, sectarian violence, and in the midst of all of this, prey for whatever military/security force exists. The government is openly corrupt. The police harass you and do nothing to stop the criminals, all the while racist gangs terrorize your family. Maybe one day they do come to confiscate the guns of Trump voters because too many Democratic voters in roving gangs are being shot.
 
So no, the civil war isn’t going to start over gun control. It’s too niche of an issue for the average person to do the unthinkable and throw away everything over. Hell, most people who own guns are no more “gun people” than people who own cars are “car enthusiasts.” What faces us is a political, demographic, and economic nightmare that will drag us all into its swirling net before we find ourselves at war with each other. Just because all the components for a cake are in the cupboard, one doesn’t spring into being. Only once all the ingredients are in the bowl, mixed, and put under heat does the baking begin.

Required reading (quoted above): Monster Hunter Nation, THE 2ND AMENDMENT IS OBSOLETE, SAYS CONGRESSMAN WHO WANTS TO NUKE OMAHA