As a Mason myself I am not even going to try to make a joke about that one…I’ll leave it to others. Although I have never heard of a lodge that you needed an ID card just to physically get into. A dues card to enter the lodge room, maybe, but not the building.
Der Trihs, you are not living in the real world if you really think that rioters would have hundreds or thousands of personal firearms. Yes, there are many guns in this country. But the demographic that is heaviest with the gun ownership does not overlap with the demographic of urban rioters.
Oh, there could easily be riots here. You should have seen Boston after we won the Stanley Cup.
Seriously though, “Americans are passive” my ass. I don’t see them reaching across the whole country, but it wouldn’t surprise me (though it would grieve me) so see the areas most heavily affected by our economy fucking itself say “to hell with it” and rise up.
I think you know where the riots will be…wherever gun laws restrict people from protecting themselves…and wherever those that suck at the govt. teet live.
It’s just a fact.
:rolleyes: Please. Since when has gun ownership prevented violence? If guns were such a magic wand of protection then the cops would have no trouble at all suppressing riots, and they do. And of course you just had to throw in a slam at (a caricatured version of) poor people.
I am with you on this one, Argent. If a riot ever got to the point were the mob violence got to levels seen in Ivory Coast recently, there would be a lot of deer rifles, varmint rifles, AR-15s, M1 Garands, M1As and other potent arms brought out to defend homes and neighborhoods. Middle class suburbia is deep in weapons.
The Koreans in the LA riots had the right idea.
As for the US being next, I don’t see it anytime soon.
It might mean the difference between a few hours in a cell, and a lengthy jail sentence for armed robbery if you get snagged by the cops and as you can tell by the British coverage, lots of video for identification.
Agree, but this is for residential areas. We would probbly see average joe lunchbucket american bunkered down at home, a few supportive neighbors with some ammo can do ALOT to discourage a mob approaching from down the block. Looters don’t exactly have the morale of a ranger company, when a few go down, they will back off and seek softer targets. Commercial areas are tougher to defend as the “folks willing to dig in and fight to defend a walmart” are gonna be few and far between.
One determined looter, especially via fire, can cause hundreds of thousands thousands if not millions of dollars of damage in short order. As a riot ramps up, firefighting resources will become overtaxed, allowing new fires to run unchecked.
I counted three looters shot dead by private citizens. Of course, that doesn’t count how many people were wounded or scared off by armed citizens.
Also relevant, armed citizens acting as security guards accidentally shot and killed two other armed citizens acting as security guards.
One armed rioter was killed by off duty police officers. Do off duty police officers typically carry guns in Europe? They almost always do in the US.
Many of the deaths appeared to be targeted killings. Murderers taking advantage of the chaos to kill people they were already inclined to harm.
Race riots don’t tend to work out very well for the race doing the rioting, seeing as those killed were overwhelming black or Hispanic.
Of course, not all riots are race related or triggered by politics. All you really need is a crowd of people. You don’t even have to piss the people off. People seem just as inclined to riot when their team wins as when they lose.
Here’s a list of riots.
Some of them were politically motivated and some of them involved a disenfranchised minority group. A lot of them didn’t. And plenty of them happened in the United States. Honestly, this idea that “Americans don’t riot because they are passive,” is just bizarre. Firstly, Americans do riot, although I’m not necessarily sure that’s something to be proud of. Secondly, I thought Americans were stereotyped as hyper aggressive, think before you act, violence lovers. Now we’re too passive and peaceable? Make up your minds with the childish anti-American rhetoric, will you?
Only against foreigners whom we’ve convinced ourselves can’t or won’t fight back. Machinegunning a bunch of unarmed brown guys from an attack helicopter is more our style.
Except that Americans commit quite a bit of violence against other Americans, including riots. So your comments about Americans being too passive to riot was completely baseless. It was just some generic anti-Americanism designed to piss people off, that really had nothing to do with the subject of the thread.
Also, if this was true, wouldn’t it mean that you’re completely wrong with your views about private gun ownership? If this was true, then presumably armed Americans would scare their passive countrymen into not rioting or committing other crimes.
That’s where a lot of people headed during the L.A. riots.
And they learned a lesson about waiting periods and such.
Going to a gun shop after a riot has started is like going to the store to buy a fire extinguisher after your house is already on fire.
As of today, not correct. Three men have been deliberately mown down by a car. The fact that no-one has died in the fires is a miracle.
But what no-one here in the UK has an explanation for is why the riots are happening. There a lot of talk about disenfranchisement, poor race relations, lack of communication by the police and politicians with ethnic and socially deprived groups. Clearly, the purpose of the riots are destroy property and to loot. There have been films and pictures of looters queuing up outside shops, and trying on shoes. They seem to see it as a fun night out. They cover all colours and many of them are very young; the youngest arrested person was a ten year old. Virtually none of them have explained their actions by atributing them to socio-economic causes.
So why do they do it? So many people, in different locations. In those areas, for the first three nights, anarchy reigned. There was no police response, apart from containment. The rioters were free to do what they wanted with impugnity. They must have reasons - even if it’s that they think it is ‘fun’ to beat up people, set buildings and cars on fire, and to steal.
The rioters on Bastille Day were going all the way, though. Rioters in the modern era are mostly not interested in trying to actually fight the King (or in this case the Prime Minister / President etc), the thing about something like storming the Bastille is you need a strong nucleus of people willing to die to do it in order for it to work. Enough people can storm anything, but there has to be enough people willing to die.
If a band of rioters came upon a gun shop and the owner was there defending it, the rioters would need a core of people willing to trade their lives to get those guns, because some of them would certainly die if they wanted inside that store.
It’s sort of like that scene from the movie Tombstone where Wyatt Earp has a shotgun and there is an angry group of men surrounding him who want him to release his prisoner. One of the men just says to “bum rush him” but Wyatt points his shotgun at that man and said “either way you die.” It’s Hollywood, but I think it’s a good reflection on human nature, 10 guys can rush and kill 1 guy with a double barreled shot gun, but only if those 10 guys are each individually willing to live with 1/5 chance of being shot and potentially killed. People with nothing to lose or people wanting to essentially fight in some revolution will be willing to do this. The LA Rioters were in it for TVs and to cause property damage, so by and large they would not have been willing to charge a shotgun wielding individual.
Speaking of the French, Napoleon had the right idea on how to handle rioters. While working for the Directorate he used grapeshot on riots in Paris, and very quickly dispersed the mob. When the people riot the only proper response is to use loudspeakers to enact a curfew until further notice, and to inform the populace that helicopters with miniguns will mow down anyone seen on the streets during the curfew. The riots would end very quickly.