The Rising

I begin to think the hour is upon us...that it's now or never for America as a free society.

It's generally well known that firearms registration is merely a preparatory measure, to enable the State to confiscate firearms from civilians' hands. Indeed, a moment's thought is all that's required to reach that conclusion, as registration has no application to the prevention of crime or the pursuit and conviction of criminals. Yet in the wake of the Sandy Hook atrocity, Dianne Feinstein is screaming for a national gun registry. Andrew Cuomo wants to compel the registration of essentially all semiautomatic rifles. (Indeed, at one point he threatened to confiscate them.) Similar measures have been proposed in both houses of Congress and are getting vocal support from the White House.

Agendas? Several. But none of them pertain to the prevention or deterrence of crimes such as Sandy Hook.

There is not one example in all of history in which a people who have allowed the State to take their weapons from them have remained at all free. Perhaps that's not as well known as it should be. But:

• An Arkansas mayor has dispatched SWAT-type armed patrols onto the streets of his town, with orders to interrogate peaceable citizens about why they're out and about.
• Government-run schools are trying to brainwash our minor children that "guns are violent."
• San Diego's police chief wants Americans completely disarmed, and says it's achievable "within a generation."
• the Department of Homeland Security wants to purchase 7,000 AR-15s with 30-round magazines...for "personal defense."
• and firearms and ammunition of all sorts are selling so rapidly that manufacturers can't keep up with the demand.

...it would appear that enough Americans know it. Perhaps.

Hearken to Bob Owens about the gun shop he most recently visited:

There were no less than six clerks working feverishly with the dozen or so customers, so I simply stepped to the side and walked the aisles. The cases of ammunition that typically lined the far wall were picked to pieces. There was a 100-round case of .50 BMG, and cases of European shotshells suitable for small game. The .223 Remington, 5.56 NATO, 7.62×39, 7.62 NATO, and 7.62x54R had sold out long ago, along with the bulk 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP....

They didn’t know when they’d be getting anything back in stock, from magazines to rifles to pistols. Manufacturers were running full-bore, but couldn’t come close to keeping up with market demand. It wasn’t just the AR-15s, the AK-pattern rifles, the M1As, and the FALs that were sold out. It really hit me when I realized that the World War-era M1 Garands , M1 carbines, and Enfield .303s were gone, along with every last shell. Ubiquitous Mosin-Nagants—of which every gun store always seems to have 10-20—were gone. So was their ammo. Only a dust free space marked their passing. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Every weapon of military utility designed within the past 100+ years was gone. This isn’t a society stocking up on certain guns because they fear they may be banned. This is a society preparing for war.

Indeed it is.

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The citations above are the sort one would expect to read just before "the balloon goes up." That is, when overt resistance to the myrmidons of the State has been prepared and threatened but not yet actuated. But here in New York state, things are already coming to a boil:

After Democrats in New York rammed a sweeping assault on the right to keep and bear arms through the legislature that failed to exempt police officers from the draconian restrictions, gun owners and even some lawmakers are planning what has been dubbed potentially the largest act of civil disobedience in state history. According to news reports, gun rights activists are urging everyone to defy far-left Governor Andrew Cuomo’s new registration mandate while daring authorities to “come and take it.”

Analysts say the legislation, passed in a frenzy last week in the wake of the Newtown shooting, represents the most brazen infringement on the right to keep and bear arms anywhere in the nation. Among other points, the so-called SAFE Act seeks to limit magazines to just seven bullets, require virtually all of the estimated one million semi-automatic rifles in the state to be registered with authorities, mandate reporting of patients who express indications that they may have thoughts about hurting themselves or others by doctors, and more....

Preparations are already being made for mass resistance. “I’ve heard from hundreds of people that they’re prepared to defy the law, and that number will be magnified by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, when the registration deadline comes,” said President Brian Olesen with American Shooters Supply, among the biggest gun dealers in the state, in an interview with the New York Post.

If New York "authorities" have decided to shrug off such statements, and the objective evidence of their sincerity, they're in for a very unpleasant surprise.

Si pacem vis, para bellum, as the Romans said -- and despite our "progressive" reputation, the people of New York are uncommonly well prepared.

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In an absolute sense, vanishingly few people "want war." Vanishingly few people actually seek to incite or take part in mass lethal violence. Even the most ardent soldier, who claims always to want to be "where the action is," is unlikely to relish hot-lead combat for its own sake; he's far more likely to prefer action, and the sense that he's doing the job he's been trained for, to the tedium of the barracks.

But few of our preferences are appropriately judged acontextually. Certain desserts, Harvey's Bristol Cream, and the pleasures of the flesh excepted, we don't value things apart from the context in which we must find them. That is, we prefer this to that, where either this or that will be forced upon us. In this recognition lies the great danger to which the would-be gun-controllers have subjected America:

We love peace, but not peace at any price. There is a peace more destructive of the manhood of living man, than war is destructive to his body. Chains are worse than bayonets. -- Douglas Jerrold

The rising has begun. It may seem furtive, even bashful, if you aren't attuned to what America's patriots have been saying to one another. But it has begun.

Pray that it won't need to go any further than a show of force.