We are trained for the wrong fight. But, to be fair, it was impossible for us to predict this fight and is impossible for us to win it under the current situation
I read Miguel’s post We are trained for the wrong fight, and the post at The Silicon Graybeard and what was copied from American Partisan.
I must be very careful with how I address my conclusions.
First of all, to be fair to our community, we trained for the wrong fight because I don’t think any one of us could have predicted the situation we are in now, it is somewhat unique in history.
We in the gun-owing, concealed carry, and Second Amendment enthusiast community saw basically two threats:
Primarily, the threat was from criminals. These people were muggers, home invaders, armed robbers, maybe rapists, who would do us harm for personal gain or pleasure. They were individuals or maybe a handful of people at a time. We knew that some minimum level of competency would be sufficient to substantially increase our chance of victory in a violent encounter.
We were bolstered by the fact that most of us lived in areas with castle doctrine and/or stand your ground. Despite the circus that was the Treyvon Martin trial, there was a certain amount of assurance that if someone kicked in our door at 2:00 am with a knife, and one of us was forced to shoot the intruder, such a cut-and-dry case was not one we had an overabundance of fear for legal repercussions.
Politically, our biggest fear was politicians who banned guns and the police would carry out the confiscation order.
While there was a political element to riots (i.e., the motivation for the riot being something political) the looting and violence within the riots we had seen in the past was criminal chaos. The defense of Koreatown by Korean store owners was our worst-case scenario. The police in LA eventually cracked down on the Rodney King rioters, the National Guard was brought in, and the politicians in charge (even the Democrats) understood that they had to maintain order.
What we are seeing now is very different.
This is CW1.5, only one side is a war. The riots are not criminal chaos. The other side is employing irregular guerilla forces. Antifa is a militia that has been battle-hardened over the last 100 days of continuous combat in Portland. Veterans of Portland have traveled to other cities to train and equip local guerrillas in other cities.
That has done this with the tacit or explicit support of local Leftist politicians.
They have, very, very carefully tuned the violence dimmer switch on their side and are holding it at exactly the right spot for the which puts us at our weakest.
That is the reason I said this is CW1.5. They are clearly engaged in guerilla combat against us. But, they have held back on the worst violence enough to maintain a facade of still functioning civil society. They are using our own law abidance against us.
Consider the quote:
Me and three of my buddies were in Portland this weekend, got attacked by Antifa. There’s a Twitter video with millions of views on it. They ended up on Hannity and Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro etc., of us getting beaten with bats and rocks the size of cantaloupes thrown at us, getting spit on etc. We were all carrying pistols as well. Opportunity, ability and jeopardy, we were in a deadly force situation and we could easily articulate the use of deadly force, but they had pepper sprayed us. They were using industrial strobe lights on us, etc. We couldn’t PID our target and what lied beyond it, They did a great job of taking our situational awareness away, it was fucking incredible.
Now later on the author says:
Bottom line, man, if you had ever given me a scenario like this and said hey, you’re sober, and you have a gun, and somebody is hitting you with a bat and throwing rocks at you that could kill you or put you in a coma, you try to get away but they cut you off with a convoy of vehicles and the assault starts again. They impede your movement and beat you with bats…
Would you shoot?
I’d be like, yeah what fucking planet are you from?
But in all the training that I’ve been through my life, I’ve never been in one where in the first five seconds of the scenario you’re blinded with a strobe light and sprayed with pepper spray…. That changes everything. They were throwing these rocks from 15 feet back in the crowd, you couldn’t see who the fuck through it, etc. things like that…. It’s just a good talking point for guys that carry concealed, but you need to think through all these different scenarios.
This guy is a combat veteran. I can’t believe this is the worst scenario he’s been in while he’s armed. The thing is, he is coming at this from the mindset of a guy carrying concealed, prepared to defend himself from a mugger, where every single round he puts down range he is accountable for.
He’s applying CCW ROE to a combat zone.
Had those been insurgents in Iraq, his ROE would have been different. Lighting the street up with belt-fed covering fire until an A-10 can fuck the other side’s day up is totally acceptable.
That is why I suspect that so many of us are screaming inside our own heads with our skin crawling.
We know the other side is at war with us but we cannot be at war with them. As long as local police still exist, George Soros funded Leftist prosecutors still have authority, and the courts are functioning, we can’t flip the switch to “kill fucking everything.”
They can hit people with bats, they can throw rocks, they can blind with lasers, and prosecutors will drop all charges against them. We take one shot after getting hit in the head with a rock and kicked in the face, and we find ourselves being prosecuted for first-degree murder.
One line from Silicon Graybear’s post stood out at me:
I also know that in the last hundred years, regular armies have fared poorly against insurgencies like this; regular armies are built to fight regular armies, not guerilla armies on their home turf.
That’s not entirely true. Regular armies have done very well against insurgency, it just requires tactics that we civilized people find distasteful. Ask the Germans how they dealt with insurgents. There are whole cemeteries filled with civilians executed to root out one insurgent in a town. We were doing well against the Viet Cong until Americans saw a picture of a little naked Vietnamese girl running down the street covered in Napalm and we stopped burning whole villages to the ground. The Soviets were known for poisoning wells in rural Afghan villages.
I’d also add that there are many of us here that have read “What I saw at the coup.” We have the ability to be an insurgent army on our own. Unlike what happened in that piece of fiction, our government is still effectively functioning, and the judicial system in those areas is very much in enemy hands. But again, they have not pushed the situation to the point where we can invoke Rule 308. The tipping point in the story was the murder or disappearance of hundreds of our side. So far there has only been one confirmed political casualty, the shooting of Aaron Danielson. All the other homicides associated with this social unrest can be attributed to random criminal violence and not direct political violence.
Antifa has us right where they want us. Applying enough force to make us fear for our lives, using tactics that compromise our ability to defend ourselves while being law-abiding concealed carriers, but not enough force to flip our switch to “it’s on.”
Right now it seems like they have the ability to hold us here in this uncomfortable position for as long as they’d like. I truly don’t know how or when this will end. I know it can’t go on forever. What I do know is that never in a million years did any of us expect that we would be the victims of collusion between Leftist government and Leftist guerrillas.
