Realism

I insist that fighting battles in a person's head is a very poor way to simulate scenarios. Our imaginations bring out personal prejudices, ignorances, and logical deficiencies.

For this reason, a strict, a meticulous, embrace of reality is the only way to guide our choices. Faith has a value of its own, but I pity the man who counts on a god in lieu of careful consideration to carry him through the fight we may face.

I rate the possibilities according to four scenarios, in order of decreasing preference:

1. A fight we don't even face. A battle avoided by having no enemy opposition.
2. A fight we can win.
3. A fight we can run from. There's no nobility in fighting a battle that is destined to be lost when running away (and surviving) is a viable option. Survival trumps defeat in order of preference.
4. A losing battle.

I bring this scale up to make two points.

First, dying in a battle one could have easily fled from is only virtuous when your side ultimately wins, decisively. The men who died for Germany in both world wars are mostly forgotten. Britain's soldiers in the American Revolution have vanished from memory. Our soldiers who fought in Korea are fading, and Vietnam is only recalled because it is so recent.

Had the Greeks not finally turned away the Persians, Leonidas would have been forgotten, his decapitated and crucified corpse nothing more than a curious relic of the Glorious Persian Liberation, as it would likely be called.

Weighing your sacrifice against the ultimate failing or success of your objectives is one thing, going down fighting when the back door is unguarded another. Dying just because you refuse to walk away is the mark of someone who's seen too many movies.

Second, we can't win a fight if we don't fight - and no one is going to risk life, limb and everything else they value in a shooting war if they're too scared to break a few bad laws.

Why is the line "Here and no further," instead of at the first infringement? Why will we not comply with the next law when we already comply with so many?

Unless a person is currently actively involved in the peaceful violation of the many bad gun laws (that'd be... well, all of them) I don't think they're going to be much use come a shooting war.

This isn't to say that every one of us needs to set up a back-alley Weapons 'R' Us. That IS to say that doing so, and publicizing it through the right channels, is good, but the risk is great and it's hard to fight from behind bars.

Why the hell haven't you gotten your hands on a silencer or a machine pistol, though? Even if they're useless, for you, they are a litmus test. If you are too scared to assemble an illegal gun, you're not going to be suddenly brave when AWB2 passes.

The plans are available cheap (free, if you really want them) and the parts aren't too expensive. A little ingenuity (replacing pipe with sections of a rifled 9 mm barrel, for example) can turn improvised designs into cheap, effective SMGs.

I lack the tools and skills to participate, but do what I can to collect and distribute information to support those who can. As a rule, I am completely unaware of what they do with the data, but I unapologetically continue its dissemination. That's my story, anyway. It's not like there's any evidence otherwise.

What role are you playing? How do you challenge the status quo?