I was going to write about the case of Army Lt. Colonel Robert Bateman, who’s become a bit of a mini-celebrity on the left for coming out espousing a very draconian raft of gun control laws.
But Joe Doakes beat me to it, and did it with style.
Joe’s piece is below the jump.
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Here’s an American Army officer stationed in England explaining why the American government should disarm its citizens. This is a perfect example of why coups always start with the colonels – they think they know so damned much but inevitably, know so very, very little.
Where to start? First, let’s get rid of the “militia” idea. Lt. Col. Bateman thinks The Founding Fathers wanted state militias to have weapons, not individual people, and that weapons should be used solely in defense of the nation or hunting. In other words, the Founders never intended citizens should have a right to use arms to throw off an oppressive government. That would come as a surprise to Patrick “Give me liberty or give me death” Henry, a Founding Father who wrote and spoke at length on this very subject. Bateman’s analysis is directly at odds with the historical record.
Second, Bateman says the “militia” is the National Guard belonging to each state, so only they can have weapons. Except the National Guard was nationalized by Richard Nixon and now is part of the federal military. Every 9th grader knows the Founders proposed the Bill of Rights to limit the power of federal government over the lives of citizens. If Bateman’s analysis is correct, the Founders must have believed that giving all weapons to the federal military while disarming citizens somehow would restrain the Federal government?
No, Colonel, the Founders weren’t insane, they knew from first-hand experience that notion was idiocy. British General Gage ordered his troops to confiscate weapons owned by colonists living in Lexington and Concord, which is why Paul Revere was riding around warning his neighbors “The British are coming!” The battle between government troops and armed citizens at North Bridge was The Shot Heard Round The World that kicked off the American Revolution . . . a battle fought precisely, intentionally and explicitly to prevent the colonial government from enacting the very citizen disarmament policies Bateman now says the Founding Fathers intended the Constitution to impose on us. That’s utter nonsense.
Third, Bateman relies on the Cruikshank court’s 1876 interpretation of the Second Amendment without mentioning that case predated the Incorporation Doctrine and its reasoning was set aside in Heller in 2008. He also wants to limit arms to muskets and shotguns which ignores the Miller holding in 1939 that the right to keep and bear arms extends to military grade arms. Basically, Bateman wants to set aside 150 years of development in the law since the Civil War. No, worse than that, Bateman wants to set aside the Founding Fathers’ own words and revert to Colonial English law, where only government armies could have firearms to suppress citizen protests. He’s a modern-day Redcoat. I have no doubt Lt. Col. Bateman would order American troops to fire on American citizens gathered to protest the government, as did his intellectual predecessor, King George III, and calmly explain that he needed to destroy the village in order to save it.
Fourth point: Bateman’s ideas might make sense if we could eventually make America one giant gun-free zone. But how are we going to keep out foreign guns if we can’t keep out tons of narcotics and millions of illegal immigrants each year? Replacing legal domestic guns with illegal foreign guns doesn’t seem like much of an improvement and I can’t see how it will result in less gun violence. A ban only works if you can enforce it. Can we?
Is it politically possible to create a truly gun-free zone within this country? Say you start at Snelling and University in St. Paul. Send troops with metal-detectors and explosive sniffing dogs to search every building on that block and confiscate every firearm. Now you’re ready to move to the next block moving toward Hamline University but wait – what prevents a guy living on the just-cleared block from bringing in a replacement gun?
Are you going to station troops all around the block to search every person, every car coming in? Stop and Frisk all Black men and college girls living in the neighborhood? Where is Jesse Jackson while this is going on? Where are the sexual harassment lawyers? So you’ve cleared two blocks, or ten, or a hundred, or maybe the entire city of St. Paul – how many troops are tied up in keeping the sterile zone sterile?
Suppose you cleared all illegal guns from all of Minnesota and want to keep replacement guns out. We have 1,500 miles of border, none of it fenced. A guy carrying a backpack full of pistols could walk across the border anywhere. How many troops do you need to station along all four borders to keep Minnesota sterile while you’re clearing Wisconsin, figuring one sentry every how many yards, and how many sentries working shifts to provide round-the-clock coverage, plus backup personnel for sick days? How will you provide MREs and drinking water to all of them, and how many latrines must you dig? The wind chill today is -22F and you need thousands of troops standing guard along the state border. Pup tents? Camp fires?
Who’s going to inspect every car and truck coming into the state?
Seriously, Colonel, have you never met a logistics officer or a quartermaster? It’s completely impossible to impose a sterile zone on an entire liberal democracy the size of America. The airport, the elementary school, the courthouse – those are annoying enough and cost enough.
There’s no way you can expand that to cover an entire nation. We lack the people, the money and the political will. And that fact guarantees the day after your disarmament law takes effect, it starts to lose effect, as legal arms are replaced with illegal arms used by illegal owners to commit illegal acts of gun violence. And that guarantees your plan will be as big a failure as Prohibition, the war on drugs and the war on illegal immigration.
Fifth point: Bateman is willing to take my gun from my cold, dead hand by making it impossible for my sons to inherit. Plainly, Colonel, you’ve never worked as a Probate Lawyer. Heirs don’t report cash in the underwear drawer, Mom’s wedding ring, or Dad’s hunting rifle, they simply walk off with them. The only time you see those items in a probate proceeding is when there’s a dispute between heirs. Bateman makes the same mistake that Prof. Bellesiles made – he assumed pioneers reported assets as we would. Since nobody in pioneer days listed Daddy’s hunting rifle as a probate asset, Bellesiles concluded nobody owned hunting rifles.
The correct conclusion is exactly the opposite: so many people had hunting rifles they weren’t considered significant enough assets to list. Instead, everybody in the family knew Daddy’s rifle was promised to someone and that person simply took it from the house after Daddy’s death.
Depending on inheritance law to prevent private transfers is guaranteed to fail.
If you’re going to get my gun, Colonel, you’re going to have to go House to House to do it (see David Bellavia’s book of the same name). The Army and Marines had a hell of a time taking Fallujah, one pissant city in one pissant country where good ole boys dislike Americans only because we disrupt the Sunni-Shia killing. You start sending American troops to kick down American doors in American cities and I suspect the dead National Guardsmen will begin to pile up in a hurry. Your profession is violence, Colonel? Good, because you’re heading to a war zone: Detroit. Chicago. East St. Louis. New York City. Los Angeles. Lotta doors to kick, Colonel. Lotta unhappy people who already live in a culture of violence, know the geography and are used to surviving there. Watch your backs, troops.
Sixth point – if you treat ordinary citizens as the enemy, you turn them into guerillas. Bateman’s plan allows Jim Bob Redneck to keep a hunting rifle with 5 rounds while Bateman’s National Guardsman has an M-4 with 100 rounds. But suddenly the National Guardsman has a hole in his forehead and Jim Bob has a hunting rifle with 4 rounds plus an M-4 with 100 rounds. And now every National Guardsman becomes a mobile sporting goods delivery person wearing a great big target, same thing that happens in any guerilla war. Plan on assigning even more troops to guard your supply depots and supply lines, Colonel, and plan to lose plenty of them when citizens band together for raids, all foreseeable consequences of your plan to save our freedom by destroying it.
It’s plain to me that Lt. Col. Bateman hasn’t thought his plan through completely. It’s impossible to implement and that makes it guaranteed to fail. The scary thing is wondering whether he’s too stupid to understand the defects in his plan, or even ask if they exist.
The Founders understood that a standing army was a great threat to a free people. They’re talking about you, Colonel. And this article is why.
In line with Dear Leader’s desire to “lead from behind” Lt Col. Bateman is the quintessential example of rear echelon thinking. Doubtless he will be promoted to Brigadier General by the end of Dear Leader’s second term.
The good news is that Bateman is fairly atypical of the average member of the standing armed forces.
David G,
Which is why he got a big spread in “Esquire”.
Joe Doakes nailed it with this one.
Yes, Bateman; by all means come and pry my weapon from my cold dead hand – just don’t order your men to do it for you! Apparently, he missed a significant portion of his military training; i.e. the whole Blackhawk Down thing in Somalia.
A few years ago, I read about a study that was done as part of a conspiracy theory thing. The conspiracy was this; in conjunction with the U.N. the lefties have built a well equipped army of mercenaries, largely from China and North Korea, with some Islamic militants thrown in for good measure, that would be used against American citizens to disarm and control us and/or move as many of us as possible to FEMA concentration camps. The mercenaries were required, because the people behind this conspiracy, estimated that 97% of even our most gung ho service men and women, despite that whole “enemies foreign and domestic” thing, would refuse direct orders to fire on fellow Americans. Of the remaining 3%, 2.5% would refuse after the first incident. The elitists final fear is that our whole military machine would become militia and displace them.
Col. Bateman’s article was a political piece written for a political audience: his superiors and the Commander in Chief. The only reality he’s concerned with is tickling their ears.
Here’s a reality that the estimable Mr. Doakes misses, though: door-to-door confiscation won’t take place in the ‘hoods. The Orcs are happy to let these elements kill each other endlessly. The door-to-door searches will start in the suburbs and exurbs where the people are more conditioned to obedience, likely don’t know their neighbors that well, the houses are farther apart and it is harder to organize ambushes and resistance, and less cover. When New York started its confiscation campaign last month the forfeiture letters didn’t go to the people already flouting the law and illegally possessing weapons, it went to the law-abiding and more reflexively compliant, people who may have been assuming/hoping “it can’t happen here” and thinking they could somehow stay off the radar.
Lessee….colonel….last stop before “general”……President Obama has canned a BUNCH of them…..think he might be sucking up for a promotion? Survey says…YES.
And should he ever have the misfortune of leading troops into battle, I pity the troops whose leader apparently has forgotten that gun control in Vietnam did NOT apply to the Viet Cong.
Amid the gungrabbing fervor Obama started early last year (before he became the top liar in the country), I have heard discussions among co-workers and neighbors regarding house-to-house searching and all agree they’d take action as soon as they saw it happening on their street. Also, I don’t have to wonder how many military and cops would take their M4’s, ammo and bodies and distribute them among their fellow Americans, leastways not down here.
There are people, I know some personally, who have stockpiled tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. I’ve seen some private gun collections that would make Patton smile. Disarmament isn’t gonna happen, at least not without a bloodbath the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1861.
Any military officer worth his salt knows all of this, in his advocacy, Lt. Colonel Bateman displays his utter hatred of his fellow Americans. He should be summarily dismissed.
I suspect that Bateman’s looters would have even a tougher time in America’s rural areas; attempted seizures there might resemble a real-life reenactment of American vs. English revolutionary war battles, right down to the “whites of their eyes” and other non-traditional fighting tactics. Those citizens may not win, but they won’t go down easily and without inflicting substantial damage.
I agree that Bateman is just an old soldier who doesn’t want to “fade away.” By currying the favor of his superiors’ superiors, perhaps he can jump a few layers of military bureaucracy and be brought in to the dear leader’s political fold, which fortunately seems politically and philosophically at odds with dear leader and his crew. I hope he succeeds. Once he becomes one of them, his usefulness will be negated, and he’ll be lucky if they let him lick envelopes and make coffee runs.
The man is a disgrace. John Kerry would be proud of him.
People are going to stand up to the door-to-door unreasonable search & seizure actions? You mean, the way they did in Boston after the marathon bombing when body-armored “police” riding in battlewagons went up and down the streets, making citizens come out of their homes with their hands over their heads, ostensibly so the troops could look for terrorists? You mean like that time?
And sure, the American para-militaries won’t fire on U.S. citizens; not like the time when they ventilated the truck of two women who were delivering newspapers – even though their vehicle looked nothing like the terrorist they were looking for.
The government pays these folks, gives them lots of cool toys and weapons, then turns them loose to do battle with whoever the government labels a “terrorist” – whether a lone bomber or another country – maybe even a group of legislators who hold up a budget. You can shoot anyone as long as you think they’re a terrorist.
Today’s Boston; it aint Patrick Henry’s Boston NW…that’s for damn sure.
Right on cue: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/us/sheriffs-refuse-to-enforce-laws-on-gun-control.html?_r=0
That’s good news to read what the sherrifs – elected officials closest to their constituents on a day-in, day-out basis – are doing. They are an effective breakwater, but likely not enough to stem an anti-liberty tide. Reading the comments that accompany the story shows how ignorant and eager so many people are to stamp out resistance by any expedient means.
“The scary thing is wondering whether he’s too stupid to understand the defects in his plan, or even ask if they exist.”
He’s probably not too stupid, but he’s confident his target audience is.
I’m convinced that the “weekend warrior” they might send in will have a belly full of their non-sense in very short order and turn against the oppressors. At that point the useful idiots will be pretty tied up trying to figure out who is left to guard all the toys that have been accumulated. Likely when they’ve been relieved of their cache those same toys will be used against them with extreme prejudice.
Althouse notes that today is the 240th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party: http://althouse.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-people-should-never-rise-without.html
The rebellious act led to punitive, coercive Acts from Parliament against the Massachusetts colony that fanned, rather than dowsed, the flames.
Nightwriter is probably right that the households in Mac-Groveland will be easy to sterilize but those in Frogtown and North Minneapolis will not. And he’s probably also correct that Liberals don’t seem to care about dead Black children in the ghetto, as Mitch pointed out in a related post. Doesn’t mean we should let idiocy go unmocked.
You’re right NW, some of those comments are pretty scary. The one where the woman says “I’m sick of hearing about the second amendment” really got me.
People wonder why our country is so divided…it’s because we have a lot of citizens that hate America, and long for Amerika.
Eff ’em says I: Molon Labe
People wonder why our country is so divided…it’s because we have a lot of citizens that hate America, and long for Amerika.
Much more on that subject – possibly the week after Christmas.
Idiocy should be mocked and exposed – and resisted. No arguments from me there. I’m just saying that when the crackdown comes it will start with those easiest to intimidate, and the higher the profile the more effective the example for the others. Hell, in Mac-Groveland the neighbors will likely stand open-mouthed and point at the home of the gun-owner like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the authorities move in.
Hell, in Mac-Groveland the neighbors will likely stand open-mouthed and point at the home of the gun-owner like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the authorities move in.
The motto of Mac-Groveland: he totally had it coming.
The motto of Mac-Groveland: he totally had it coming
Not like that nice Sarah Jane Olson.
The “light” Colonel either has a ‘sugar daddy’ 2 or 3-star that will keep him moving right along into the White House Military Office, or the USA warriors I know will make sure his next assignment is USA (ret). I’ve read a bunch of thought pieces by my Army bro’s who are red-blooded patriots. It’s a shame that the only things seen fit to publish by national media are written by weasels.