Are We Setting A Dangerous Precedent Here?

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you sure about that? I can't imagine the real US military attacking US citizens and taking their guns. I can see the national guard doing it. Then again, think of the Bonus army...

During the initial invasion of Iraq, I commented on the confiscation of weapons from Iraqis whose cars we searched, and contrasted it with America.

One LCpl spoke up: "I don't think people in America should be allowed to have guns! What it we're fighting house to house in Kansas or something and all the civilians have guns? We'd get shot at."

No exaggeration, that's what the kid said.

Don't forget that the US military is virulently anti gun. One could easily assume Sarah Brady was in charge of issuing weapons, magazines and ammunition.

There are a decent scattering of gunfolk in the military, but even in Marine Corps combat units, there are plenty of antis, and the majority are fence-sitters.

Our Battalion Armorer firmly believed that civilians shouldn't own any guns, and was very displeased when I gave donated civilian gun catalogs and magazines to his section during our deployment.

His rationale: "I great up in the barrio in L.A. County, I've seen what guns can do."

Seeing as how we were in a combat unit in-country, that struck me as one of the more absurd (but by no means the most absurd) things I heard on that deployment.

-MV
 
There are a decent scattering of gunfolk in the military, but even in Marine Corps combat units, there are plenty of antis, and the majority are fence-sitters.

Our Battalion Armorer firmly believed that civilians shouldn't own any guns, and was very displeased when I gave donated civilian gun catalogs and magazines to his section during our deployment.

His rationale: "I great up in the barrio in L.A. County, I've seen what guns can do."

Seeing as how we were in a combat unit in-country, that struck me as one of the more absurd (but by no means the most absurd) things I heard on that deployment.

If that's the case, we may be extremely screwed. :uhoh:
 
Local civilians here (at least in Baghdad) are restricted to one AK47 w/ 2 mags per house. No other firearms of any kind or additional mags are allowed. And if the local decides to dispute the confiscation when we search their house (we do many random searches), they are detained.
Well - that explains a lot...

RE: Tallpine's comment probably made tongue in cheek - there's more truth in his statement than most would like to believe.
 
If US troops are sent house-to-house to confiscate guns in America, you can be sure they will do it because they will be told they are fighting domestic terrorists.

My greatest concern over the war in Iraq/Afghanistan is that it is training our armed forces to be an army of doorkickers and guntakers.
 
3: Will U.S. soldiers actually take our guns by force?

Mixed/unknown. A local disaster situation would garner a different reaction
among soldiers than something ordered for the entire country.

4: What about the soldier's duty to refuse to carry out unlawful orders?

Are you talking about soldiers raised from childhood over the last 20 years
who were told "guns are bad", "only the government should have guns", and
"the militia is the National Guard"? The one good thing is that the average
age of soldiers today is 28. There are quite a few of us over 30, almost
40, too. We remember American History prior to the first round of globalist
revisionism. There would be dissention over this order.

5: Would an order to confiscate the firearms of U.S. citizens spark a mutiny in the ranks of the U.S. military?

See the above answer. I suspect in such a scenario there would be more
to worry about than a mutiny among .1% of the population when it came to
the country as a whole.

6: Would military officers - sworn to "protect and defend the Constitution" - actually issue orders to confiscate U.S. citizen's firearms?

I suppose those who feel they are acting under competent civilian authority
would. I'm not sure who would be left among the captains to actually carry
this out in the field since many of them are already voting with their feet right now.
Whether a 44 year old 1SG carries out this order from a 24 year old LT who
just had it emailed to him from a COL neither have ever met would be an
interesting table-top exercise wouldn't it?

7: Would U.S. soldiers actually kill U.S. citizens who refuse to submit to firearms confiscation?

You are not the first to ask this questions. It has been asked before:

45. I would swear to the following code: "I am a United Nations fighting person. I serve in the forces which maintain world peace and every nation's way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense."

46. The U.S. government declares a ban on the possession, sale transportation, and transfer of all non-sporting firearms. A thirty (30) day amnesty period is permitted for these firearms to be turned over to the local authorities. At the end of this period, a number of citizen groups refuse to turn over their firearms. Consider the following statement: I would fire upon U.S. citizens who refuse or resist confiscation of firearms banned by the U.S. government.

Scary, huh? Have a :) day!
 
Would U.S. soldiers actually kill U.S. citizens [...] ?

Well, let's see - there was:

* the War Against Southern Independence

* the war against the American Indians (I suppose the technically weren't citizens until they lost :rolleyes: )

* the military was used to break up strikes at mines in Southern Colorado (I don't remember the details, should look it up sometime)


Anyrate, plenty of precedent already :(
 
Just adding my 2p here:

Insurgents do not wear uniforms. They are not soldiers, this is not a war, though it may look like it. They are criminals, plain and simple. They should not be glorified and given the title of soldier.

Confiscating arms from anyone is always wrong unless:

that person is being arrested (or put into a mental institution, though that is not at issue here)
that person is an enemy soldier who is surrendering (even then, they should lay down their own weapons)

In either case, their arms should be returned upon their release.

Arresting a civillian without charge and holding them without a fair trial is just as bad as confiscating arms.

You do not need to give soldiers trials before making them POWs since they are in uniform. Insurgents in Iraq are not soldiers so trials are required to avoid punishing the innocent.
 
Confiscating arms from anyone is always wrong unless:

that person is being arrested (or put into a mental institution, though that is not at issue here)
that person is an enemy soldier who is surrendering (even then, they should lay down their own weapons)

In either case, their arms should be returned upon their release.

Pretty good points.

We had issues at some points with overzealous Marines confiscating single-shot 12ga shotguns from shepherds and the like. The next time the mayor visited our base he'd bring in a few receipts saying "SGT JOHANSEN CONFISCATED SHOTGUN FROM ABDALRAHMAN 8/15/2005", and we'd hand the mayor the shotgun to be returned.

After a few weeks of this, the local CO defined our policy as "if it's not worth bringing the Iraqi in, it's not worth taking his stuff". So either arrest him and confiscate, or leave him be. Possession of scoped rifle, Dragunov, or explosive devices meant arrest, anything less was okay at 1 per adult male.

And we still had Marines confiscating 12ga single shots and a bandolier of buckshot "just to be on the safe side". One inadvertently confiscated a Browning Highpower at a roadblock: the Iraqis voluntarily declared it, he meant to unload it and pantomime to them to wait until they passed out of the Marine cordon to reload, but he didn't know how to clear it (left the safety on which blocks the slide). The Iraqis got so agitated watching him fiddle with it that they just made "keep it! keep it!" hand motions and drove off as soon as the Marines stepped out of their way. He as an 2d Lt, so I do believe him that he honestly wasn't trying to steal it, and he seemed pretty embarassed about it.

-MV

-MV
 
You know, if I was in a varitable war-zone like Iraq, I would not really care if anyone said that I could own only one gun and two mags for it. I'd stash some grenades and some PDWs.

You never hear anyone telling soldiers to not obtain available weapons while out in the field, and Iraqi citizens never know what's about to happen since they constantly live in a war-zone.
 
You never hear anyone telling soldiers to not obtain available weapons while out in the field,

You're kidding, right? They get told that all the dang time.

I understand that it happened to some small degree in 2003 (though I never saw it personally, but I was w/ an infantry unit that had plenty of its own gear). In all of 2004, I saw maybe eight people that had non-issue firearms. Six of them were on an EOD team run by a GySgt that was a massive gunlover, and let his men carry G3s, Sterlings, and basically whatever they could steal out of the burn-pile. Also saw one SeaBee carrying an AK47, and one Marine Captain who had a FAMAS that he'd picked up who-knows-where.

From what I've heard, in 2005-2006 it's been pretty expressly forbidden to pick up personal weapons from the enemy, and it was certainly pretty rare even before that.

-MV
 
Better yet, I have a pic of YHN w/ the FAMAS. I'll try to upload it tonight or tomorrow, if I can blank out my nametapes. Not that I'm hard to track down or anything, but just in case someone jacks the pic for their personal collection.

Before anyone asks, I never got to shoot it. But I did get to shoot some other fun stuff...

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The precedent has already been set.

While we were watching the Katrina firearms confiscations, I mentioned to my wife how wrong I thought it was to leave people defenseless before armed thugs. She responded that issues like "wrong" and "right" were nicities that were made unimportant in an emergency situation like that. She also made a comment that, if ordered to take self-defense weapons from people, she would carry out her orders, right or wrong. In her opinion, the police and National Guardsmen had every right to confiscate weapons from non-criminal citizens "in the interest of officer safety".

A rough poll of officers I know showed that while a few would voice their displeasure at being given such cocked-up orders, none would outright disobey. The most that could be expected would be those officers in disagreement with the confiscation orders could be expected to try to get out of the actual confiscation duties by finding somewhere else to be...
 
Iraqi's aren't American citizens and aren't protected by the American BOR. Is the RKBA a human right? Yep, sure is, but so the right to keep breathing. I'm perfectly prepared to violate the heck out of that right of I legitimately believe that you constitute a threat to me, and in the interest of my country's safety/interests I'm prepared to have that done at a national level. Omelettes/eggshells; the world's not libertarian lab exercise. Despite the fact that Iraqi is a sovereign country, a decent number of the people in that country are actively engaged in criminal acts, up to and including organized mass murder and working for the overthrow of the lawful government. Until the situation is stable, limiting the armament that individuals have is a function of the same logic that has the police disarming everyone in the house during a raid until they ascertain who's who.

Would it be nice if if the individual right to self defense, with all that that entails, were enshrined in the country's constitution? Yep. It would've been nicer if the Iraqis were forced to accept a purely secular representative democracy, and the Kurds had gotten their own state, but the extant political reality prohibited that. The assumption is that the Iraqis can eventually figure stuff like that out for themselves and amend accordingly. But that's what makes the argument over precedent somewhat curious. The situation in the US is nothing like Iraq. We don't have a foreign nation patroling our streets, we don't have armed sectarian and ethnic strife, we don't have wide and easy availability of medium and heavy weapons (unfortunately), and most importantly we do have a constitution that clearly promises the right to bear arms. Any soldier/police officer kicking in a door here, without due process of law, is clearly violating their sworn duty against the citizens of their country and probably their community. Do violations occur? Again, yep. And it's something that we have to be vigilant about. But at the end of the day, I think it's ungenerous to soldiers, real soldiers, to assume that the bulk of them don't grasp the difference between doing what needs to be done in a foreign country, and doing the same to American citizens. And frankly there's enough militarized police in the US that are learning it as a matter of course, that soldier's training/practices are probably irrelevant.
 
Are we as Americas allowed to keep a FULLY AUTOMATIC AK-47 with 2 magazines? Umm Nope. There is no restrictions on handgun ownership in Iraq. Problem is when we won against the "Military" of Iraq, most of the soldier just went home, and brought their weapons with them.

The America Military and the Iraqi government had nothing to do with this. It was the CPA and Bremer who screwed up. Most Iraqis were ok with the US after the fall of Baghdad. The problem was the CPA and Bremer went against the Bush adminstration and all Military advisors with the idea to disbanded the Iraqi Military, making 300,000 armed and military trained Iraqis unemployed. On top of that they PO all the Sunnis thru De-Ba'athification, making all Ba'ath party members who worked in government unemployed. That is why they moved to restrict weapons and this is why we are still in this Iraq mess.

PBS Frontline did a fantastic piece on this, and you can watch it online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/yeariniraq/ . If you want to know how thing turned from US troop convoys being cheered in the streets of Baghdad, to being hit with IEDs, it is a MUST watch.

I brought this subject up before but it was considered political but not gun-related and was shut down in less than 15 minutes. I should have wrote my thread more like this one.
 
While we were watching the Katrina firearms confiscations, I mentioned to my wife how wrong I thought it was to leave people defenseless before armed thugs. She responded that issues like "wrong" and "right" were nicities that were made unimportant in an emergency situation like that. She also made a comment that, if ordered to take self-defense weapons from people, she would carry out her orders, right or wrong. In her opinion, the police and National Guardsmen had every right to confiscate weapons from non-criminal citizens "in the interest of officer safety".
EEEKKKK!!! Harsh though it may be, I hope you're mentally prepared for the internal conflict you're gonna have should the evil day of confiscation orders come to pass. There is a chance that your wife will not be coming home that day, nor any of the following days.
"wrong" and "right" were nicities that were made unimportant in an emergency situation like that.
That is when such niceties are MOST important, else we are just base animals only looking out for #1, to Hezmana with everybody else.
 
Thank you all for your input. Many of you have raised valid points. As to how widespread these restrictions are, all I know is that at least this portion of Baghdad (south and SW) is this way. But at least I don't have to deal w/ it much longer as we're outta here soon.:D
 
While we were watching the Katrina firearms confiscations, I mentioned to my wife how wrong I thought it was to leave people defenseless before armed thugs. She responded that issues like "wrong" and "right" were nicities that were made unimportant in an emergency situation like that. She also made a comment that, if ordered to take self-defense weapons from people, she would carry out her orders, right or wrong. In her opinion, the police and National Guardsmen had every right to confiscate weapons from non-criminal citizens "in the interest of officer safety".

This is such crap I dont know where to begin. Is she a mindless robot or a thinking intelligent american versed in the Bill of Rights that each LEGAL citizen has?? Does she understand her role? God a lawyer would have a field day with her!!

Emergency situations are NOT an excuse for LACK of judgement.....if anything they are situations where clear judgement is needed the MOST.

As a ICU nurse do I get to respond/perform like that in emergency situations (weapons or not).....HELL NO....nor should I....

more education is needed....


this "in the interest of officer safety" is a joke. Until we see LEO's do the perp walk for things like New Orleans nothing will change the uneducated minds out there. Maybe Lawsuits that drain the Police dept. budget may wake somebody up.
 
I cant belive that the u.s. troops are against any part of the bill of right. i know when I was in the U.S.M.C. we took a survey that included a lot of questions, one was would you help disarm the U.S. citizen of firearms. Something around the mid 80% said no. This was during the clinton admn.
 
The problem was the CPA and Bremer went against the Bush adminstration and all Military advisors
....
If you want to know how thing turned from US troop convoys being cheered in the streets of Baghdad, to being hit with IEDs, it is a MUST watch.

Ah, yes, I can remember that smiling waving good will turning into the middle
finger and the wireless detonator trigger finger while I was there. I think
there's a lot of blame to go around --first and foremost goes sqaurely on the
shoulders of the Iraqi people. There's still plenty left to go around here on
both sides of the poltical aisle.

However, the "Bremer went against the Bush Admin" statement is utter
nonesense. Bremer reported directly to Rumsefeld and was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush himself in Dec 2004. But maybe I'm
wrong, maybe he disobeyed the President and still deserved a medal?

This is such crap I dont know where to begin. Is she a mindless robot or a thinking intelligent american versed in the Bill of Rights that each LEGAL citizen has?? Does she understand her role? God a lawyer would have a field day with her!!

Just to be fair, only about 1% of our population is in the military. I think the
other 99% has more responsibility for keeping our government on the right
path.

i know when I was in the U.S.M.C. we took a survey that included a lot of questions, one was would you help disarm the U.S. citizen of firearms. Something around the mid 80% said no. This was during the clinton admn.

Detail:

46. The U.S. government declares a ban on the possession, sale, transportation, and transfer of all non-sporting firearms. A thirty (30) day amnesty period is permitted for these firearms to be turned over to the local authorities. At the end of this p eriod, a number of citizen groups refuse to turn over their firearms.
The statement that the U.S. Marines were asked to respond to:

I would fire upon U.S. citizens who refuse or resist confiscation of firearms banned by the U.S. government.


( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
No opinion Strongly disagree Disagree Agree Strongly agree

The Responses

Of the 300 U.S. Marines asked this question, 264, or 88% of them responded.

The outcome of the survey was as follows:


Strongly disagree 127 42.33%

Disagree 58 19.33%

Agree 56 18.67%

Strongly agree 23 07.67%

No opinion 36 12.00%

Total: 300 100.00%

Summary of the responses to question 46.

The survey results indicated that 61.66% (42.33 + 19.33) said they would refuse to fire on U.S. citizens, whereas 26.34% (18.67 + 7.67) indicated they would fire.

So you were among that group of 300 Marines?
 
Iraqi is a sovereign country, a decent number of the people in that country are actively engaged in criminal acts, up to and including organized mass murder and working for the overthrow of the lawful government.
Seems like Iraq already had a lawful (if brutal) government before we went in and overthrew it :rolleyes:
 
So what you're saying is that the bad guys can have all the guns, mags and ammo they want, but the good guys are limited to one gun and two mags per house?

Brilliant!!! Mission Accomplished! :mad: :banghead: :mad:
 
Just a thought on current soldier's views vs. old soldier's views.

I've been told on more than one occasion that those M1s sitting in the American Legion Hall are for more than just the final sendoff of a fallen comrade.
 
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