The Autistic/Libertarian Way of Losing

Eric Raymond recently came up with an interesting calculation:

That means that in order to stop attempted gun confiscations dead on a purely force-on-force level, only one in 317 American gun owners needs to remember that our first American Revolution began as spontaneous popular resistance to a gun-confiscation order. Only one in 317 American gun owners need to remember their duty under the U.S. Constitution as members of the unorganized militia – “the body of the people in arms”. Only one in 317 American gun owners need to shoot back.

If you click on that, meander through the logic of it, as well as the comments, you'll notice this is roughly equivalent to a conservative demonstrating why he is incapable of conserving anything. Of course, it becomes more and more clear over time that anyone with principles has been repeatedly taught, pestered, and even brainwashed into accepting the idea that you can't force your principles on anyone. Like the idiots who pop up and tell us that Jesus wouldn't like whatever it is Christians are supposedly doing...

If you are fond of some of these subjects, people will generally accuse you of being political, but most on the right are not political at all. We often argue that politics is not the right sphere for so much of life, precisely because we aren't political. Often, we are talking policy; everybody else is political. We are surrounded.

Indeed, the inclination to avoid politics is so strong- hey, we'll still win if 317 people are individually surrounded by a heavily armed superior force and some or all of them die, because even if they all die the backlash will be tremendous.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to bank on a posthumous win. We need to figure out a way to neutralize the political people and effectively end this era where there's legislation about everything, even your toilet. The idea of a law about guns should be completely alien to people in this country, in no small part because the Constitution obviously doesn't allow all the crap that has already been written.

There's also the issue of fighting back against the infiltrators, the surveillance, etc... I think counter-surveillance at a local level is necessary to keep bad actors at bay.

Not that this doesn't suck. I don't want to engage in politics. Nor is it particularly easy to figure out who and how to collaborate with in order to get anything done. I can see the temptation to assume a handful of atomized gun owners can make a difference, since it is so damn hard to make a difference now. But if they ever got to the point where they were trying to take the guns- they've got time, superior firepower, surveillance, and at least some names. And it's worth it to remember that they could have picked David Koresh on the sidewalk in town rather than be major idiots and try to hit the compound.