Paratus

Gun Control Alternatives

I'm here to talk about GCA. No, not the ancient Ground Controlled (Radar) Approach that instrument pilots could rely on to bring their airwagons into the airpatch during inclement weather, I'm talking Gun Control Alternatives.

Over at Rivrdog Central, in this post, I discussed why the door for new gun control action by Congress is suddenly wide open. Never wanting to abandon a constituent voting bloc (and the (D)onks do a MUCH better job of loyalty to objectives than does the GOP), the liklihood of new gun control initiatives is now bordering on a certainty.

Last Fall, I advised readers to finish up completing their personal weapons collection. I said then that I didn't trust the (D)onks, who were then campaigning on a no-new-gun-control platform.

I was right, and now there is a end-gun-shows bill in the House and also a new AWB, and they will likely pass. The gun market thinks they will likely pass, because the prices of certain semi-auto weapons, stable all last year, have now risen. If they pass, President Bush will probably NOT veto them. The reasons he won't are that he previously said that he would sign an extension of the AWB which sunsetted two years ago if it came to him, and the new fact that  as the dust begins to settle on the early campaign trail, the three most likely contenders for the GOP nod for POTUS are ALL gun controllers.

The NRA will put up a valiant effort, but the handwriting is on the wall for me.

The Second Amendment is going to take a body blow, this year. In '09, REGARDLESS of which party wins, it will likely take MORE body blows.

I don't know about you, dear readers, but for me, the assumption that we will be in a shooting civil war BEGINS with the death of the Second (or the First, for that matter).

It goes this way, and now the gloves are OFF and it's bareknuckle time: The Second Amendment exists, in fact, was written to insure, that the ability of citizens to remove their government NOT BE INFRINGED. The Second was meant as a threat to Big Government, or Overbearing Government, or whatever you want to call the sorry excuse for Constitutionality that we now have in Washington, DC. The Second was meant to always be there to remind the Federal Government to do the basic job and go home when it's done.

The Second Amendment was meant to prevent exactly what our Federal Government has become.

The Second Amendment  did not do it's job as a threat to big government. Rather, I should say that too few people ever thought of using the Second Amendment for what it was designed for (to assemble a Militia and, if necessary, remove the Government). Because the Second was NEVER exercised (it has had fewer cases on point than any other Amendment in the Bill of Rights), like any other unused threat, it's effect has diminished over time, and the Second now languishes as simply a debate topic, and has been nullified almost to the point of death by legislation over the past 70 years.

People, the Second Amendment still lives! It has NOT been repudiated in any official or binding manner. It also lives in Spirit, in the minds and pens and yes, the GUNS of those who, like your blogger, KNOW that it WILL be called upon to fulfill it's original purpose.

OK, OK, fine talk, you say, but how does this change things. Talk changes nothing, action is required.

We must be prepared to act to not only DEFEND  the Second Amendment from further depradation, we must be prepared to USE the Second Amendment for it's original purpose, that of arming the Militia.

Into the present.

There will shortly be legislation making the easy and legal acquisition of militia-suitable military small arms difficult, if not impossible. It is important to use the last minutes of the window of availability for the acquisition of a suitable, modern, semi-automatic military rifle. At this point, I am abandoning my distinction between military RIFLES and military CARBINES that I have discussed earlier. The acquisition of suitable handguns is also advisable, and of course, the acquisition of magazines for both handguns and rifles/carbines is a MUST, as these will be banned very soon. Handguns are nowhere near as important as rifles, not only because of their limited combat range and effectiveness, but because in the very strictest of interpretations of the Second, only officers and some non-commissioned officers (NCOs) are normally armed with handguns, but ALL may be armed with military rifles.

There are currently no bills for acts to restrict the supply of ammunition for military weapons, but the prudent militia member ALWAYS considers a source of ammo for his/her weapon to be of the highest priority, so acquire more than you need, and be prepared to acquire more when the time comes to do so, by having a rifle/carbine that uses the same ammo that the Standing Army uses, or by having reloading equipment and supplies to make more ammo.

This is the advice for TODAY, and maybe for the next two or three months that it will take for the next attacks on the Second Amendment to be formalized.

This advice is not enough for a prudent planner of conflict, however.

We must look past the implementation of restrictions on militia weaponry, to conflict preparation IN SPITE OF THOSE RESTRICTIONS.

If you acquire just one weapon, and the forces of the government seizes it, you are an unarmed militia member, for the moment anyway. Assuming that the government doesn't seize YOU along with your weapon, you could still be of use to the militia, especially if you had another weapon which did not get seized.

I recommend the acquisition of at least TWO militia-suitable military rifles/carbines. Three would be even better. You don't want to get to the point where you are the nail that sticks up, i.e.: you are maintaining a militia ARSENAL, because if you do, you will be the first to have those weapons seized and probably yourself with the weapons. Of course, dispersal means dispersing the ammunition also, and such spare parts for each weapon as you have and will need. Don't forget, even if you have your military battle weapons already, the distribution of parts for them are likely to be banned as well, so just assume that the implementation of restrictions as in HB 1022 are TOTAL BANS. Making such an assumption will save you the trouble of having to find bootleg parts for your weapons.

The acquisition of multiple militia weapons means nothing, of course, if you keep them all in one place where one action by the government can seize them all. Let's make their job a little harder, and ours easier: store your weapons in different locations, preferably within a day's drive of your most likely place when the militia is called out. Dispersing your weapons will likely mean trusting someone else with them, or getting VERY creative with dispersing them about your own property. You need to form those trusting relationships NOW, so as to let time test them before actual events test them.

OK, you've followed all this advice above, and actually have broken no CURRENT laws in doing so (another reason for doing it NOW). What do you need to do to continue your preparation?

1. Practice with your weapons. If you can report as a militia member ready for combat, you not only are much more valuable to the militia, your preparation will pay off in being designated as a leader, because there will be a lot of militia members reporting with NO preparations whatsoever.
2. Have your "kit" ready to go. Read the archives of this blog, I've covered this subject extensively before, especially here (start at the bottom of the stack).
3. Have yourself in some level of physical fitness. Combat is physically and mentally stressful. You don't know if and/or when you will actually go into combat, but if you have to, you want to be able to have your body carry you through, and especially you want to have your mind sharp and in focus on your militia job.
4. Plan with trusted friends. Your responsibility under the Militia Act and your duty as a citizen do not necessarily involve you being in a position of leadership in the militia, but if you have leadership qualities, of all the times you will have used them before, your responding to a militia muster will be the penultimate test, but also the penultimate reward for having those talents.

A muster of the militia to defend the Constitution may not be a formal event, with announcements over public media (in the current state of the media, they can be counted on to REFUSE their duty to broadcast details of a militia muster). In fact, it will probably be clandestine, with a word-of-mouth announcement. It is likely that the muster will have some way to authenticate it so that you may be sure you are being called up into the militia, and not marching into a trap. As the size of the militia grows rapidly, it's disposition will become more formal, if all goes as expected. If things DON'T go as expected, you will have to decide whether the clandestine operation of a militia fills YOUR definition of proper militia duty. The government can be expected to say that ANY militia duty, or bearing of militia arms will be unlawful, seditious, treasonous and just plain not nice, and their words should have some weight in your decision, but not all the weight.

So, the last instruction for your preparation checklist is to get educated. Educated on politics, because most politicians are predictable, as you have discovered by reading these blogs. Educated on military custom and procedure. Educated on survival. Educated physically. Educated spiritually. Even educated religiously, if that's your choice.

If you get all this education and the militia is never called out to perform it's ultimate duty, you have still improved your value as a citizen, by a huge amount. If there are enough like you, military action to restore the Constitution will not be necessary, because as reality-educated citizens, the militia, properly formed and "regulated", is THE ONLY force that is strong enough to overcome all the evil that lurks in the hearts and minds of the politicians who would destroy our Constitution and culture.

When is the beginning of the end? Part Two

In first post in this series, we talked about anti-gun strategies of the Left and their possibilities for enactment. We talked of the neccessity to pick out the tipping point, or "The Beginning of the End".

There is a rip-snorting (well, at least for yours truly) discussion on this topic going on over at Random Nuclear Strikes, in this post. The discussion opens with a fine article by Phil, and some very cogent questions are being asked and (hopefully) answered in the comments.

My link takes the place of writing Part Two of this series, so go and read.

Now.

The hour is getting late.

When is the beginning of the end?

Welcome back. I haven't posted here in several months because I've been following the principle of simplicity, and for a while, decided to put all my eggs in the one Rivrdog basket.

I've gone back to the old idea, and decided to re-energize this blog for it's original purpose, that of preparation for conflict, and more narrowly, internal civil conflict.

Events of the past few months, and especially of November 7th, have indicated a need for a different preparation. Over at Rivrdog, I've talked about arms preparation fairly often, urging the stockpiling of arms and ammunition against a changed legal background for acquiring it.

I talked about that preparation while using the assumption that only the sale of arms and ammo would be restricted. Of late, I've been reading some rather severe what-ifs in regard to this legal picture. These folks wonder what would happen if POSSESSION was restricted.

"Oh, My God", you exclaim. "That can't happen", you protest. "Against the Second Amendment", you ALL agree.

I'm sorry, I DON'T AGREE.

Dangerous streets, and training for them

First it was the attack at a Seattle Jewish Community Center, then the Jihadi vehicular assaults by another self-avowed terrorist in San Francisco, and now, back in the Tacoma area, an attack by armed goons (mouthing lefty garbage) on a soldier in uniform.

Two things: if that troop's commanding officer had any balls, he would issue orders to his command to not leave the base unarmed. According to my Dad, who served here in the CONUS during the Depression, this happened a few times on a few posts (and commanders also urged their non-coms and officers to obtain civil permits and pack heat when off base). Then he would issue sidearms to those trained to use them, and rifles to the rest. If he has a few MPs sitting around, he might put them in an armed Hummer or Stryker vehicle and have them do a few patrols of the bad parts of town. He won't have that grade of 'nads, though, because he would be countermanded by some Pentagon general officer, and his career would slide to a halt.

The second thing is that there seems to be an escalation of violence in the West and Northwest that may call for an escalation of civilian armaments carried by those who may properly do so.

For example, I normally carry a 9mm compact pistol as my walking-around piece. Lately I added a second clip to my walking-around TOE. I am considering upgrading the Kel-Tec P-11 europellet dispenser to a .40 S&W full-frame Glock, or perhaps my 1911A1. Pain to carry them, since that calls for a full shoulder rig, and the overclothing to conceal it (sportscoat when in polite company, and golf jacket when casual). When winter comes, I can sling my folded Kel-Tec sub-rifle under a heavier coat, but that gets me out to the absolute end of the weapons spectrum.

This San Francisco attack particularily bothers me, because it is so easy to copycat. In these United States, a simple fact of the culture is that most people drive. In these Western cities, a lot of us drive pickups or sport-utes. Any of these vehicles can repeatedly jump curbs, and make perfect weapons for maiming and killing lots of civilians, as happened in SFO. I EXPECT there to be copycat incidents. I would be surprised if there weren't. In my area, there is currently a rash of injury and fatal hit and run vehicular crashes, mostly against pedestrians and bicyclists of all ages. The perps don't seem to fit any Jihadi profile, but the attacks are happening anyway.

To me, this calls for some training.

Training in disabling an automobile by killing it's driver.

This type of weapons fire is VERY risky, since it usually can't be performed from behind cover (with a pistol anyway), but rather the shooter must get as close to the perp vehicle as possible, and direct a LOT of gunfire through the driver's side of the windshield, if in front of the vehicle, or through the driver's window and door, if to the side. The shooter MUST NOT fire through the passenger side, unless he/she can make sure that that seat is not occupied (unless the car is obviously full of assault-minded perps, in which case everyone in it is a legitimate target).

This is not the type of shooting we do normally, at the range or in real life. It is not the ideal type of shooting to do with a handgun, either. A carbine or assault rifle or shotgun with slugs is much more suited to this level of force application.

Generally, any person who uses a vehicle for assault may be presumed to have committed assault with a deadly weapon, which USUALLY permits firearms fire to end the assault and prevent more assaults. You need to look this up in YOUR state. Of course, an armed citizen is ALWAYS permitted to use deadly force to protect the lives of others that citizen may reasonably believe are in mortal danger.

Now that we've done our legal homework, some practice is in order.

At the range, you will need a firing line where you can move laterally while shooting, and a variation of the rules to allow you to practice lateral movement and firing. Set up an 18"X18" target at 10 to 15 yards. Your objective will be to hit this target with the entire contents of your weapon in the shortest time possible. A shot timer would help, but a training buddy would be better (your range rules would probably require range-officer supervision for this type of shooting anyway). When you get reliable enough standing in one place (my standard would be 90% hits in 4 seconds for a single-stack magazine, or 7 seconds for a double-stack), you need to practice opening fire, then moving at least ten feet sideways and firing again. If, by some miracle, you can set up a moving target (running deer type) at your range, set it for a 4-to-6 second exposure.

Accuracy counts, as does target observation while firing. If you are shooting at an assaultive vehicle with a trained driver, he will be ducking below the windshield level as the bullets come into the car. He wins those encounters if you do not cease fire immediately and wait for him to pop back up into view. If you are shooting through the car door, the very minimum round that will do the job is a NATO 9mm, and they are iffy. For this, you need .357 magnum hardball or it's ballistic equivalent. This type of shooting is what .357 was designed for. The .45ACP or 10mm are also fill this bill, but you have to have a penetrating bullet in the hulls. Hardball at least, FMJ-AP if you can get it. .40 S&W should do OK in hardball, but I've never actually tried it on a car.

Remember also that this type of target is not a Mozambique drill. You ALWAYS empty your weapon at a vehicle with a driver in sight. In this type of vehicle shoot, you almost always find, when successful, a dead perp from ONE of the MANY rounds fired, you never know which one is going to end the perp's assault.

Preparation for this type of shooting should remind you that you need a reload, and the ability to properly reload under combat stress. It won't do you any good to force that driver to end his vehiclular assault on someone else, only to have him redirect his attention to YOU, and you have an empty gun.

We face increased threats, but can carry on our lives without interruption, if, and only if, we spend the time and energy to prepare for the new threats.

Preparing for Clandestine Operations

So far, we've decided that armed conflicts during the collapse of the Constitution and it's culture are inevitable. We've decided that we are going to fight to maintain/restore the Constitution. No choice there for me, I've sworn to do that several times. We've also surmised that we may be opposed by various usurpers of un-Constitutional authority, WHO WE ARE NOT GOING TO IDENTIFY IN ADVANCE, for the obvious reasons that to do so comprises a substantial step towards preparing an armed rebellion (if, indeed, those who we would fight are in authority. There is every chance that they wouldn't be, but would be adopting a mantle of authority that they improperly assumed). There is also the significant possibility that the conflict would be started by armed criminal gangs which pre-existed the emergency that set off the conflict. We are familiar with those gangs: they are the race-based gangs like the Crips, Bloods, MS13 and subsets of drug-distribution cartels and "posses". They are all evil to the core and armed to the teeth, and have never been properly suppressed by governmental authority. I see them as opportunistic.

As we saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, these gangs made use of the civil emergency to try to establish more "gang turf", mostly at each other's expense, but they were extreme in their use of firepower, even engaging the National Guard in firefights. The government did an ineffectual job of combatting the gangs, with the predictable result that after the city was dried out, they ran rampant in orgies of murder and looting.

Take the social upheaval of Katrina in New Orleans, and apply it nationally in any of several scenarios  for a national emergency. The battles with the street thugs will have to be fought, and neither the local policing agencies nor the National Guard or even Federal troops will have any success against the gangs, simply because their rules of engagement prevent them from taking effective and decisive action.

Citizen militias, on the other hand, if appropriately trained and briefed, are quite capable of dealing decisively with the street gangs. Decisively as in terminating their operations, with great prejudice.

It occurred to me that considering the tactics to be used against such gangs is not improper, since such operations would be in the Constitutional interest, and the only Government interests to be injured are the egos of the police and National Guard commands which will be shown up to be ineffective and not adaptable to those circumstances of conflict.

Success against the gangs, and seizing the opportunity to eliminate them as a social and criminal menace will go a long way towards re-establishing the concept of citizen-militias, and re-establishing the idea that it is the citizens' job to keep their neighborhoods safe, not the government's.

Let's set a scenario.

Tactics for the coming Conflict

“There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change. It is to use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wound, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time.”

“Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

-Lt. General George S. Patton.

Now we look at what we will have to do in the field to win the armed conflict. Rather, we will look at how the LEADER of a fighting team will deploy his people to accomplish his goals.

What are the goals going to be? I refer again to Gen. Patton's advice above: kill people. When you KILL the enemy, you remove them from the field of battle, forever. If you "create casualties", you only do that temporarily.

Your first assignment is rent the fine movie "Patriot", which came out about 6 or 8 years ago. That movie shows the use of tactical surprise and ambush to good advantage, but it also shows a huge advantage in the Colonials' STRATEGIC thinking. That was to decimate the British officer corps, early on in the conflict. British troops were never trained to operate in small groups, and the direct leadership of their officers was required for them to operate at all. The Colonials quickly learned to kill the officers first.

Our FreeFor groups are going to operate the same way that the Colonials did. We are going to decapitate the leadership of the enemy. That will be Tactical Principle One.

Tactical Principle Two will be to never attack offensively without planning, gathering intelligence and briefing the tactics to be used. FreeFor fighters don't shoot from the hip OR the lip. When we take the field, we will be as sure of tactical victory as we can be.

Tactical Principle Three will be Avenue of Escape. In the coming conflict, the FreeFor will, initially, be few in number. If we take the field and immediately get defeated in detail, it's all over, and we might as well not have taken the field in the first place. We want to make a difference. We will be trying to force a return to the Constitution, and to do that, we will have to apply persistent force successfully over time. That means that we can't be suicide squads. Suicide squads have their place in asymmetrical warfare (unequal sides fighting), but we don't have the luxury of them, and probably couldn't put enough people together to generate much victory by their use, anyway. No Jihad for the FreeFor. ALL our missions will have a planned result of getting the fighting forces properly disengaged, either at the successful outcome of battle, but also if unsuccessful. We plan to live to fight again.

Tactical Principle Four will be Standard of Preparation. When we plan for a team operation, the members of the team will be prepared to carry it out successfully. We won't be planning any half-assed attacks "just to bloody their noses". We aren't going to risk fighters to make a statement. We will risk fighters to kill enemy, preferable enemy who count bigger than most.

Let's recap:

• Tactical Principle One: Decapitate the leadership of the Enemy.
• Tactical Principle Two: Do not attack without planning, gathering intelligence and briefing all.
• Tactical Principle Three: Avenue of Escape.
• Tactical Principle Four: Standard of Preparation

Your second assignment is to commit these four principles to memory and be prepared to explain them IN YOUR WORDS.

Who is the enemy? I am not going to tell you that at this point, because to do so would be a "substantial step" towards a criminal law violation. Make no mistake about it, when the FreeFor teams take the field, we will be considered outlaws. The government we are trying to change will try to change us by putting Prison Blues on our backs at the least. When the time comes, it will be morally right to assume that risk. IT IS NOT MORALLY RIGHT TO DO SO NOW. All we can do at this point is assume that the forces we will be fighting with will represent our government which will have gone horribly off it's Constitutional track. We may also be fighting elements that the government actually fights (or should be fighting) now, such as street or terror gangs.

So, for our goal of getting ready for this conflict, we will have to look at how those forces would be deployed against us TODAY, as well as make some educated guesses as to how they might have changed by the same process that took them horribly off their Constitutional track.

How does government project power now?

They do it two ways, by edict and by direct force. The edicts are the laws given to us by lawmakers and Executive orders and by judicial order. We currently obey those laws, because it is our duty as citizens to do so, and we still follow all the rules of citizenship. The government can project authority by direct force, that is, by having agents go out and force the will of the government on us. This method is only supposed to be employed when the first method, acceptance of rules and orders, fails.

We have all seen examples of government force that was applied too soon. Waco and Ruby Ridge are examples that come to mind. My evaluation is that this sort of force will become increasingly common, and it will actually provide a tipping point for opening of hostilities against the government. There is degree to consider, though. The question for us is to fix a reasonable point in our minds as to when the use of government force against citizens has become excessive enough that rejecting that force and countering it with our own becomes a moral imperative.

Currently, we have the luxury of freedom of expression, although the mere fact that I express these ideas puts me on some watch list, I'm sure. While we have that freedom, it behooves us to discuss and debate where the tipping point will be for us. It also behooves us to assume that such a tipping point WILL COME, and prepare for the conflict that comes after.

This series will continue.

Planning and Equipping for the shooting Culture War

The previous article in the Shooting Culture War series tried to lay the politico-economic background for  a Shooting Culture War. In this article, I look at getting started fighting it. I've actually been writing this series for a year and a half now, starting in November '04. Now I try to tie it together.

This is the heart of Paratus.

In the opening article of this series, we looked at some political scenarios that might lead to a shooting culture war. We'll now assume one has started, and we have the choice of actively fighting on one of two sides that have made our city a battlefield.

For the sake of brevity, we'll call the "white hat" side the Freedom Forces, or FreeFor, and the "black-hat" side the Opposition Forces, or OpFor.

It's obvious which side you'll be on, since the OpFor is split into two parts, the Government, which we all thought used to be our friend and ally, but which now has made despotic attempts to control everything and allows no free assembly, no free exchange of communication and above all, has began systematically entering homes and businesses and confiscating firearms and ammunition.

The other half of the OpFor actually wears black hats. They are the now-armed rabble of youths you used to see on the evening news, protesting President Bush's foreign policy. They have fulfilled THEIR dreams by following all the radical advice on IndyMedia, and have been burning businesses and houses in nice sections of town, such as the suburb that you live in. They zoom around in their noisy little cars, four in a car, with whatever guns they have managed to steal, and gasoline bombs. The cops won't go after them, especially since one of the brighter gang leaders lured six two-man police units into an ambush and killed every one of them two days ago.

Some trusted friends and neighbors have come to you and said that they want to set up neighborhood protective committees to replace the protection that they were supposed to get from the cops. They seem to look up to you as a leader, perhaps because in your conversations with them, you predicted this complete breakdown of order.

What do you do? How do you organize? How do you operate a FreeFor unit without outside support? How do you defeat the government's searches and arrests of anyone caught with firearms (the turn-in deadline was last week, and you didn't turn all your guns in)? Above all, how do you SURVIVE?

The answer is Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C-cubed-eye).

You have to have a unified command for your unit. That's easy, you say, you are going to be the commander. Not so fast. If you are commanding a two to five person squad, you might be the only commander, but what if your unit grows? What if other units want to fight under your standard?

Control means exactly that. You give the orders, and they are carried out. You get reports of them being carried out. YOU LEAD YOUR PEOPLE.

Communications is also simple. Ideally, you have redundant communications capabilities. You might have two different types of radio tranceivers, for example. Communications is not without it's hazards though. If you communicate wrong, the OpFor might be able to pinpoint where you are, and ambush you. If you don't communicate, fearing the above, you can't maintain the unity of your command. It has to be done correctly.

Intelligence means information. You get word of an OpFor gang cell operating within your fighting area. Is that intelligence any good, or was it planted to lure you into a trap? The QUALITY of intelligence is always on your mind, not just the flow of it.

C-cubed-I is very basic, but the Government will be using it to fight you, and even the black-hat gang leaders will use it to a degree. You won't last long, nor will your unit, if you just pull everything out of your ass.

PLANNING AND EQUIPPING FOR PROPER C-CUBED-I

For the purposes of this scenario, we will consider that you are leading a small unit of five, including yourself. You know everyone well, and they know you. There is no need for uniforms, so your uniform standard is whatever clothing is suited to the weather, and is in subdued colors that don't contrast with the area background. If some of your troops don't have enough clothing kit, you will scrounge for them. You all have decent footwear. This article goes into the basic kit.

You all are armed. Unfortunately, there is a large variation of armaments amongst the five of you. Most everyone joined your band before the house-to-house disarming searches began. You had the best idea, and when the cops came to demand your weapons, you gave them all up. That is to say, you gave up all that were in the house. The cops did NOT have any purchase records with them, so they missed almost all of the weapons you have been procuring for the past few years. They got a couple of old revolvers, a shotgun and two 22 rifles. They got ammo for those weapons. What they didn't get was the three sets of pistols/pistol caliber carbines, the two battle rifles and the 12-guage pump gun. You had hidden those off the premises, together with ALL their ammo, a minimum of 250 rounds per firearm. When you set it all out, you could actually equip 9 people, but the guy who brought his old .257 Roberts varmint rifle with ONE box of ammo probably doesn't count.

You had a food plan, and have enough for your band of five for at least a month. When you told the others where to meet, you told them to bring non-perishable food, so you have plenty.

You have communications: three laptop computers, which will be used only for their internal programs, as the OpFor Feds have controlled the internet already, 6 FRS/GMRS radios, 2 Marine Band handsets and 4 CB radios. Not bad. When you develop your Comm Plan, you will have the equipment to communicate with. You DO bear in mind the fact that all these different frequencies will be monitored by the OpFor Feds, so you resolve to immediately develop a rudimentary and changeable code system for major references.

The five of you are together, in one place, for the first time. Everyone wants to get out in the field, and start making a difference, and you appreciate that, but you are determined to REALLY make a difference when you strike, so you tell them that you aren't going to rush into things.

First you have to evaluate your people and see what they're made of. Can they shoot? Can they take the separation from their families, especially with the knowledge that if they are identified, their families might be interned by the Feds? Can they take the physical hardship and personal deprivations that are standards of any guerilla fighter? You have to know this, because when you go out on that first operation, if it goes badly, your fighting days are over, at the very least.

Second, you have to identify your target(s). Initially, you are going to avoid confronting the military. You are going to concentrate on hitting the little bands of armed OpFor anarchists, none of whom will want to stand and fight, and ALL of whom can be counted on to not fight predictably. In fact, the only thing that you CAN count on will be the elusiveness of your quarry.

In strife-ridden third-world nations (which the US will have become in this scenario), there is a lot of quid-pro-quo between the ruling juntas and the various guerilla bands. Frequently, the government will "use" war between guerilla bands to weaken the guerilla forces that vastly outnumber the forces of the juntas. Several recent examples of this strategy are still playing out in Africa. So, the Government may very well leave us alone, hoping that the FreeFor and the black hats will attrit each other out of the game, leaving only the sheeple. We have to be ready to take advantage of any such leeway. At the same time, any time the OpFor Feds think that they can take out a FreeFor unit with minimum casualties, they will go for it. They will have to show a certain success rate to get the sheeple to stay with their program. That means no free lunch, and even if our unit is not being actively hunted, that can't lead to complacency. We have to be invisible to ALL OpFor in order to guarantee success.

In the next article, we will start to look at tactics, and training for them.

Preparing for the SHOOTING Culture War

The basic premise of this post is that there WILL be a "hot" civil war in this nation, and it will be a Culture War. At some point, and the evidence is mounting that it will be sooner rather than later, the Left will abandon their gradualism in the subversion of the culture, and just go for the brass ring. They will actually try to chuck out the Constitution, or major facets of it such as the Second and Fourth Amendments.

When they do, they will be opposed. By armed folk like myself who KNOW that the only way this nation can survive is under the principles with which it was founded 230 years ago.

The coming conflict WILL be a conflict of survival for defenders of Constitutional Democracy, just like the first civil war was to the agrarian South.

I don't want to get into historic parallels between the coming conflict and the Civil War this time out, although that might be appropriate for later discussion.

What I want to do here is to get readers in the frame of mind to fight for their Constitution, win the war to keep it intact, and have no regrets afterward.

If readers accept my premise that there WILL be war, their first question will probably be WHEN.

That's the toughest question to answer, but I have a scenario that shows it beginning as early as next year. Here's how:

• The Democrats win big in the Congressional elections this fall, taking both House and Senate.
• They decide to press an immediate agenda to take the country Socialist, knowing that they have to hit fast and hard to do it. They will have a completely-ineffective President as their only opposition.
• President Bush, who obviously wants to go down in history as a President who never used the veto, ignores the few remaining conservative voices and signs legislation to ban all private possession of full-auto weapons, as well as "assault rifles" (without the loopholes this time) and hi-cap magazines, TOGETHER WITH THE WEAPONS THAT CAN USE THEM. Not an import ban, a possession ban with confiscation. Bush will defend the confiscation/ban by saying that "legitimate hunting weapons and non-assaultive personal defense weapons are OK, so the Second Amendment is not sullied by this action."
• The POTUS also signs into law a huge new tax increase, one that cancels the homeowner mortgage interest deduction and imposes a 10% income tax surcharge "to ease the deficit".
• The POTUS agrees to nationalize health insurance, and signs legislation to that effect, "to head off Hillary's bid for the White House".
• The POTUS agrees to Federal crackdowns on "armed militias", and compares groups who practice both politics and marksmanship to be a "potential terrorist threat". He has a bulked-up BATFE raiding homes and gunshops all over the country. The word gets out that if a household has more than a couple of hunting weapons and maybe one revolver, it is potentially an enemy of the state (and that is correct).

OK, take a breath here. Take a sip of that adult beverage, or light up a stogie (or both). Before you say that I've slipped a cog in my gear-train, take my first premise first: could there be civil war to preserve the Constitution? After you have cogitated on that and answered YES, then look at the political premise: could the (D)onks take it all this November? Again the answer is YES, THEY COULD. Some polls have already suggested that it's at least an even chance that one house of Congress will revert to the (D)onks, and if the GOP slide free-fall continues, there's an excellent chance that both houses will go back.

OK, the first two premises are highly possible, what about the next premise: that the (D)onks would want to go for the brass ring and toss major pieces of the Constitution? I don't see any other realistic strategy for them achieving their goal of a socialist America. Events are changing too fast in the world for long-range "Great-Society" type planning. They're not dummies, they know that even if they force a rapid withdrawal from the Middle East, there will probably be war there forever, and an Arab-Israeli nuclear conflict would likely drag us in, so they have to make their hay while the sun shines. They look at the failure of Bush's agenda, which was based on gradualism, and they read the handwriting on the wall: it has to be done so fast that there is no chance of the plan being interrrupted by another political change back to the right.

Then we look at the last part: POTUS Bush's complicity. This is the hardest one to predict, because Bush might just find his long-lost cojones and mount a fierce opposition to the (D)onk plan. He might, but I don't think he will. I don't think he will because he has lost the trail. He doesn't know where he is on the political spectrum anymore, and defending the culture is not a priority with him, as it was, say, with Ronald Reagan.

So, given the nearness of these events, and given YOUR decision to fight on the side of the Constitution (although the wordsmiths of the Left will counter-accuse you of failing to live by your Constitution), what do you do, NOW, to prepare you for the lethal conflict to follow?

Watch this blog. It will show you the way.

Why you keep shooting

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UPDATE: 102006 0755 PDT: A reader who wanted to do further work with this post contacted me and asked for attribution of the story. Since the EllTee doesn't keep attribution info, there wasn't any. I did the usual searches, and found nothing under searches such as "stabbed air marshall". I went to Snopes.com, and did find a reference here. It appears now that there is only a minor liklihood that the slashed individual was an air marshal, but instead, was probably just the loser in some sort of knife-fight.

The point of this post is to teach certain tactics relating to a gun-armed individual fighting an edged-weapon-armed individual. The information in the post is highlighted by the alleged attack on an air marshall, but that does NOT defeat the purpose of the article if the alleged attack on the air marshall cannot be established to have occurred.

I'm leaving the post up, but advising that the details of this scenario will have to be changed from real to imagined.

I don't think it loses too much in making that leap, do you?

H/T to Brandon for the jog about this.

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This is going to get graphic. I'm sorry if I offend anyone by publishing these pictures, but I feel it is the only way to get the message across.

I have sketchy info on this incident. It is an incident where an armed sky marshal encountered a person with an edged weapon, and the sky marshal shot the bad guy ONCE, in the K-5, with his 9mm service weapon (unknown what it was loaded with, but they use an extreme velocity, non-penetrating round like the Glaser while on duty).

The wound to the bad guy was evidently NOT enough to deter the attack of the edged weapon assailant, and he grievously wounded the sky marshal with his weapon (see photos).

I know what you are going to say, that if he had been carrying a .45ACP, the blade-killa would have been vaporized. That's debatable, but immaterial in any case.

The key here is that the sky marshal fired ONE ROUND and stopped firing. He may have been trained, erroneously, to do that, but that's an article for another day. That one-shot non-stop was his error. YOU ALWAYS SHOOT TO STOP, AND YOU HAVE ONLY A SMALL CHANCE OF STOPPING A DETERMINED ASSAILANT WITH ONE HIT, NO MATTER WHAT CALIBER YOU ARE SHOOTING! Sorry for shouting.

I once fired a police practice course with a target I haven't seen since. It was a full-silhouette target, with the usual black silhouette, but overlaying that was a red grid of sub-scoring depending on (anatomically) how vital a hit there was. The spine, only one inch wide, counted ten, certain areas in the head (brainstem, etc) counted ten, the heart was a smallish ten zone, but you would have been surprised how much of the area within the usual "K-5" zone was as low as a 3 or 4. We fired a couple of courses at these targets. The first one, we were told to just fire our usual concentration on the K-5. We did, and we got scored.  With 25 rounds, my per-round average was about 3.4  That meant that with one round hit to the K-5, I would have a 34% chance of totally disabling the goblin with that round. Not healthy for me. A different mathematical formula was employed to take in 3-round groups, and my score shot up to over 70%.

Now, we fired  another course on a fresh target. This time, we were told to concentrate our fire centered & vertically in strings of 3-5 rounds (6-shot .357 revolvers). We evaluated the targets after each string. My strings went up into the 90s! I was getting 2 or 3 spine hits in each string, by thinking I was tring to shoot out the assailant's spine. This is a well-known pnenomena called "instinct-targeting", where you think of the actual microtarget you want to hit within the general mass of the silhouette in front of your sights. You think it, and you hit it. It takes a lot of practice. I actually took an instinct-targeting course from a shotgun master from Georgia once, and over the course of a day, he trained me to hit ever smaller moving targets until at the end of the day, I went to the skeet range, and broke a perfect 25 (never having broken more than 14 before).

Instinct-targeting, combined with firing multiple rounds, will turn a 9mm or even smaller caliber weapon into a guaranteed stopper. Your goal should be to develop a double-tap, in which you hit the spine with both rounds, then a single round to the head of the then-falling goblin, in which you are microtargeting his center upper teeth. That will get you the brainstem. Most "Mozambique" technique shooters shoot for the spot between the eyes, but if you hit it, you get the outer brain, and your only damage might be that the goblin won't be able to recite poetry to you as you have destroyed his speech center. You want to destroy the comm-center of the brain, the brainstem, with your head shot. The other danger of a high head shot is that if you hit the upper skull, you risk no penetration to the brain at all, even with a .45! If the angle isn't right, your round may just deflect off the skull. By shooting the mouth, you avoid all that. It's an opening waiting for your round, sort of like Luke Skywalker when he destroyed the Death Star battle station in Star Wars 4.

So, just to show you what a good knife-wielder can do to you, if you let him, check these out:

Sorry, you will probably want to put that steak back in the freezer now...

OK, summary time.

One round, especially if it is a low-power, non-aircraft-hull pentrating round, will not stop a determined knife attacker.

It's a known fact, derived from studying hundreds of knife attacks, that if your knife-assailant is within 21 feet of you when he begins his charge, you can probably NOT draw your weapon in time to stop him before he gets to you, WITHOUT DOING SOMETHING TO DELAY HIS CHARGE.

I'm not an unarmed combat master (yes, you are first going to fight the guy unarmed, then draw and kill him with multiple rounds in a situation like this). I've had the training to do this series of moves, however, so I can at least tell you what I would do.

First, I'm going to shuffle my feet into the combat stance, and then blade my body with my gun side away from the bullrushing assailant. I will assume a slight crouch, and raise my left hand to chest level, keeping an open hand (not a fist). I will have my gun hand lower, at waist level, with a karate fist, and tensed to strike.

The assailant will get to me in 4 strides if I stand and wait, but I'm not going to. I'm going to give ground, if possible at a 45 degree angle away from his line of charge. I will take combat shuffle-steps backwards on my toes, about a foot backwards at each step, but maintaining my crouch and upper-body balance.

Sometimes the first step of a knife-wielder's bullrush is a feint. I will watch for this, and if he stops, I will draw and begin firing with my gun. If it isn't, and he keeps coming, I will prepare to parry his first thrust with my left arm. The parry will be inside to outside, a forceful contact of my forearm upper surface with his forearm inner surface. If I'm forceful enough, I may just disarm him with the parry-strike. If I do, I will step back two steps, draw and fire my gun as he gropes for his weapon. He will be in a crouch trying to pick up his weapon, so the angles of fire are not optimum. Center of upper mass, empty the weapon, try for a head shot on the last round.

If I don't disarm him (probably won't), I will at least have interrupted his prepared chain of knife moves,  and he will recoil to reset before striking again. This is my opening, and maybe the only opening I will get. I have a decision to make: Do I strike a focussed fist blow with my gun hand, or do I shuffle back two steps and begin a draw to fire my weapon? Open targets for the fist blow would be the Adam's Apple or the underjaw or the face, depending on how it presented itself.

If I strike the fist blow, I am committing myself to unarmed combat against an edged-weapon assailant. Risky for anyone below the 3rd Dan, it seems to me. I will go for option two, shuffle back and fire. The shuffling back is the key here, as I have to move backwards and not trip, then draw and fire while moving backwards. YOU NEED TO PRACTICE THIS IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE IT AS A PLAN!

The military and some dojos teach a third option: After executing the parry, you roll the parry-arm into a grab of the knife-wrist, lock the assailant's arm straight, then strike a downward chop with the other hand to disjoint the elbow. The assailant cannot maintain the weapon and WILL drop it (unless it's a finger-hole weapon, of course). Choices of fully disabling the assailant vary from that (think K-Bar).

I've practiced that move a few times, in fact, did so in the most recent training I've taken, about 4 years ago. I do not have confidence enough in my ability. I won't use the option. To get good enough at it, you have to have superior grip strength, better-than-average upper body strength, and lots of practice with the focussed chop blow required.

This technique with close-in bladed-weapon assailants is designed to return tactical control of the fight to you, and give you enough time to finish the fight with your gun. It has a large leap of faith in it, and one that most carry-permitted people haven't though of, that of the REQUIREMENT to engage the close-in  knife assailant with unarmed combat BEFORE trying to engage with the firearm.

If you have time to shoot first, you MUST keep firing until you see the assailant fall, not do a "golly-gee, I shot him, why is he still charging?"

This slashed marshal bought his own misery. He bought it with faith in his draw and his "disabling" bullet. He bought it with his ignoring of the rules of the combat he found himself in. His superiors may have paid for part of it by their stupid, politically-correct insistence on the ineffective bullets and their insistence that he shoot ONE round, then stop to evaluate. I've heard that as policy for skymarshals, but don't know for certain. If it's true, this incident should spark some change, but I'm not holding my breath.

H/T to the EllTee, still thinking like a warrior.

Wear it! - Your clothing kit

So far we have looked at what you will shoot with when the S.H.T.F., what you will eat out in the field to keep you going, and gear to carry your gear.

Today, I'll look at what to wear. The choice of clothing for combat is a very serious business. The US Army maintains a clothing laboratory at Natick, MA (in Ted Kennedy's back yard) just for this purpose, and it is a serious lab. A few years ago, I attended a conference on cold-weather survival medicine and the keynote speaker was the general who ran that lab. He briefed us on some of the work and the facilities under his command.

Combat clothing for the Army is a uniform. That is, it's all alike, because the Army wants all it's troops to look the same. I'm not going to go deeply into why, it would take pages, but it is, at the same time, a good idea and a bad idea. Good for the Army, bad for the FreeFor. We want to be able to blend into the civilian population, so we're not going to have uniforms. We will have "kit", that is, our clothing will have similar functions, unit member to unit member, but it won't look alike. If it turns out that we need specialty gear, say, for snipers, a "Gilly" suit, we will acquire that.

The team members will bring their own clothing kit when they report. If you hunt a lot, you may already have some very superior kit. If you don't, read on.

Let's look briefly what clothing has to do for the soldier.

It has to protect his/her skin. Unlike animals, humans don't come with a protective fur coat (or leather hide). If we are going to get down and dirty in Mother Earth, and we WILL be doing that, we need to protect our skin from the dirt and abrasion. The best clothing for us is designed to do that.

It has to keep him/her warm and dry or protect from the sun, whichever is the case. I assume that I'll be operating in this corner of the country, so protection from the cold and wet is important to me.

It has to be durable, since time spent repairing or replacing clothing kit could better be spent fighting.

It should be easy to clean. Clothing MUST be kept clean as dirt is abrasive and wears out the fabric. No dry-cleaning-only fabrics allowed. They may look swell, but that's not what we're after here, and GQ will never publish an article on what the well-dressed FreeFor troop is wearing. We won't have a "Class-A" uniform to look swell and parade in. When the FreeFor gets to the winning position where we could have a parade, we will just go home.

There is one easy answer to the above requirements, and that is outdoor work clothing. Run down to JC Penney and pick up the Fall Big Book catalog, or go to their web site. Look for the work clothing sections. There is an amazing variety of clothing there. Basically, the outdoor work clothing falls into two categories: cold weather and warm weather. You will need some of each, because the one thing we can't do is command the weather to be to our specification when we fight.

I recommend coveralls. You may like overalls with shirts, or even belted trousers/shirt combinations. Whatever you want, it is available. If you aren't familiar with clothing construction, you will see fabrics rated in ounces. That's ounces per square yard, and it is a measurement of how sturdy the cloth is. You may see thread-count mentioned. Generally, the more threads per inch, the tighter the weave and the sturdier the cloth. Sturdy is good. Open weave, or "airy", "breathable" "lightweight" are not good things in get-down-and-dirty clothing.

Footgear is another thing where you can vary your purchase widely. You can go for military gear, new and used, or you can go for work shoes/boots. Either will do. One note: if you have a need for wide shoe sizes, you won't find them in military foot gear. If you have fat feet, or your feet swell, the military won't take you, so they have no need for providing for extra-wide footgear. In good footgear then, you can go military from a surplus store, or outfitter like Quartermaster, or you can go for police tactical footgear (it's about the same as military, but with more variety in styles) or you can go to work shoes/boots. If you can walk miles in slip-on boots, get them. The world's armies marched in them for centuries, and only in the last hundred years have worn lace-up footgear.

These purchases are not going to be cheap. here's a list:

1. Winter coveralls $140 to $200 a set (you need two sets minimum)
2. Summer coveralls $60 to $80 a set (two of these, also)
3. Bib overalls are cheaper with winter going for $120 to $140, but then you have to buy separate tops, and good fleece sweatshirts or heavy outdoor shirts are $30 to $50, so you don't save anything from coveralls.
4. Pants and shirts ARE cheaper, but to adapt that type of clothing for winter use, you have to have more expensive coats and thermal underwear.
5. Winter coats are not cheap. A decent Carhartt coat is about $80 to $120, depending on the length (with coveralls, you can get by with the short coats). Lighter summer jackets are about half of that.
6. 6" work shoes will run you $135 or so, and the more desirable 8" are only a few bucks more, so get the 8".
7. Police tactical boots run from just under $100 to over $200, and surplus military boots will be in the $40 to $60 range, for new.
8. Socks are very important, and you will need boot socks that have very good cushioning in the toe and heel (usually all along the sole as well). These set you back $10 to $15 per pair, and you need 5 or six pairs.
9. Add in some hats. A winter, insulated billed cap, a summer ball cap, and a knit (watch) cap are the basics. You will pay about $50 to $70 for all three.
10. Get a large duffel to put all the clothing in. You won't be humping that duffel, it's going to stay in the rear area, so forget something a Sherpa porter would use, just get a surplus military duffel bag or two, or go to the luggage outlet in your local outlet mall and buy whatever looks sturdy and huge in capacity. No wheeled luggage, it doesn't stand up well to rough trucking. This duffel will set you back $20 to $70, depending on how fancy you want it with pockets (pockets are useful, but not required).

A word on sizing things: Get it to fit you now, and leave room for some clothing under it. On a winter mission, you will start out fully dressed, but if the mission involves urban fighting, you might be spending some time indoors, and you might have the opportunity to strip down to your lighter clothing that you wear under the heavy outdoor stuff. Realize also that your rucksack has to fit over all the heavy outdoor kit, so take it along when you go to buy your clothing kit.

A word on camouflage: maybe. That's a cop-out, I know. If the fighting becomes strictly a field matter, we will probably adopt camouflage later, but I'm not starting out in it. BTW, heavy outer clothing can be spray-painted with patterns to camouflage it after the fact of need for camo is established, if it is bought in a neutral base color, so keep that in mind when selecting the colors of outer clothing. Blue, which winter clothing is available in, is a poor choice for this reason.

To sum up, you clothing kit will cost you as much to set up as your weapons, and maybe more if you are a fanatic about the best kit available. Freedom is not cheap, either.