Choosing sides

[Aesop]

Yup.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" becomes dismaying when you realize you have more common cause with outlaw bikers, gang-bangers, and the ACLU than with the idiot suburbanites who keep electing the jacktards and slobbering over the jackboots.

Like dobermans and the military, I want the police (local, state, and federal) to be diligent, strong, honest, loyal, and scared spitless of the rolled up newspaper to the nose if they misbehave.
What we have are what happens when they're only diligent and strong.

They are becoming the anti-matter that the Third Amendment was seen as being irrelevant to.

[HTRN]

Outside the northeast, west coast and urban islands you're looking at less than 25% at worst and 0% at best.

I used to think that, but Officer Harless and his varied "interactions" with the public..

I fear your worst case numbers are a bit low..

[Netpackrat]

Outside the northeast, west coast and urban islands you're looking at less than 25% at worst and 0% at best.

I used to think that, but Officer Harless and his varied "interactions" with the public..

I fear your worst case numbers are a bit low..

I think that less because there is a guy like Harless out there, than because of the fact that his fellow officers in his department didn't have enough of a problem with what he did, to keep them from donating their accrued paid leave to him while he was suspended. Or because of the fact that he was successful in getting reinstated to the force.

[rightisright]

Well, we have the original stateside jackboots here: The NJ State Police. Almost every one of them I have had the displeasure of interacting with over the last 30 years of my life has been an in-your-face douchebag. Friends and acquaintances report the same. I have no problem envisioning them mounting .50 cals to their MRAPs and tearing apart homes of gun owners... no need for entry teams.

The suburban police are a different story. They are a mixed bunch. Not too many are shooters, though. As farm and field give way to sprawl, there is less room to shoot and hunt here... thus, less shooters in general.

[Termite]

Location, location, location.

Good point.

I think such a order originating from D.C. would cause a "Balkanization" of sorts between states/regions of the USA.

Again, the US military is the wild card in all these scenerios. Will they or won't they, and if they won't, will they also relieve POTUS and his staff from duty, along with the federal alphabet agencies attempting to carry out such an order.

Additionally, the military itself maybe fractured; part for and part against.

[Aglifter]

I suspect the military might stay out of it - using posse comitatus as a fig leaf, precisely out if the fear of what could happen if the command fractures.

[Netpackrat]

Well, we have the original stateside jackboots here: The NJ State Police. Almost every one of them I have had the displeasure of interacting with over the last 30 years of my life has been an in-your-face douchebag. Friends and acquaintances report the same. I have no problem envisioning them mounting .50 cals to their MRAPs and tearing apart homes of gun owners... no need for entry teams.

The thing to keep in mind, is that when police surround a place like that, the vast majority of their attention is focused inward. So, while the first few guys are probably screwed, the tactics in which the police have trained are not likely to remain viable for long.

[Aesop]

Hopey Dopey has spent the last five years ruthlessly purging the military of conscientious and principled general officers (if you haven't noticed, you aren't paying attention).

I don't think they'll stay out of anything; I think the top heads will issue orders, and then it'll turn into a dog's breakfast when everything breaks down and goes to shit, and more than a couple of divisions experience some rapid unplanned command changes.

I've read plenty from those currently on active service, including here, but they all exhibit the same normalcy bias: they (foolishly and short-sightedly) assume the same uninterrupted chain of supply and unreserved home support they experienced while in SWAsia, when in reality, they stand every likelihood of finding that not much outside the tourist section of D.C. will be considered "the Green Zone". Some who'd like to jump in will find out they can't even adequately defend their own bases, and will hunker down to a diet of MREs hoping for relief from "somewhere", and others will simply say "Yes sir!" and then proceed to defect, coordinating with local authorities or becoming same in short order.

And then we all live in Bosnia for anywhere between 5 and 80 years, assuming everyone else on earth is content to sit back and watch the fracas.
Notably, the last time we had a civil war, we didn't have 10,000 nuclear weapons hither and yon, nor 50% of our first-line military forces deployed overseas.

And the forces we do have, top to bottom, would be hard-pressed to control as much as merely federal property (not including forest and national parks) and the loci of state and local government.

For reference, L.A. went from order to anarchy in less than 4 hours during the riots, and that was without any specific targeting of the police or city government per se.
Imagine that on a nationwide scale, then tell me how the master plan is going to work, short of using WMDs on population centers, and machinegunning people en masse. As any number of people have observed, once someone abandons living inside the law, they are completely outside it, in every way. It's the same for a guy who robs a stagecoach, or a government that goes off the rails. Americans aren't good little Germans, and aren't by nature the type to sit still for the sort of things they'd have to tolerate once it becomes clear that the line has been crossed, and the government is not only rogue, but homicidal.

One rogue cop with one rifle shut half this state down for a week.

Imagine 100, let alone 10,000, pissed off shooters in one or any state who weighed their chances, and decided they had nothing to lose and everything to gain, and just decided it was open season on The Man, and no bag limit.

No one, least of all me, wants to go there.
But the level of evil by design, and malicious stupidity exhibited by the other side in equal measure suggests the rendezvous is becoming inevitable.

[Precision]

Well, we have the original stateside jackboots here: The NJ State Police. Almost every one of them I have had the displeasure of interacting with over the last 30 years of my life has been an in-your-face douchebag. Friends and acquaintances report the same. I have no problem envisioning them mounting .50 cals to their MRAPs and tearing apart homes of gun owners... no need for entry teams.

The thing to keep in mind, is that when police surround a place like that, the vast majority of their attention is focused inward. So, while the first few guys are probably screwed, the tactics in which the police have trained are not likely to remain viable for long.

If 10-20 of us had clandestinely shown up to Waco at with ill intent, the outcome would have been VERY different. Call it an external counter attack, the Fibbies would have been in deep shit. Each shooter takes out one guy with lots of brass on his sleeve and the S really Hits the F. Of course the Fibbies get heavy reinforcements, but the shooters are gone way before that.

The next time it isn't so easy, but the die has been cast. They need to look in and out and that takes way more people. Not to mention if the first counter attack is successful, there will be others.

[HTRN]

The NJ State Police.

I knew someone who went through the initial training, but had to drop out due to medical issues. The stories he told.. They deliberately weed out certain recruits because they wanted a certain look in that uniform.. The training sounded less like that of a cop and more like that of a Marine Basic..