My favorite bit of gear these days is a national match Springfield M1A,.308. It’s a version of the 1930’s Garand, which George S. Patton described as the greatest battle implement ever devised. At 100 yards it will shoot clean through a cinder block wall or a car engine block. It will discharge 20 rounds as fast as you can pull the heavy trigger. In the hands of a skilled user it’s lethal at 800 yards. Yup, it’s 80+ year old tech and it’s 10 times cooler than ChatGIMMIEABREAK.
The gunnery sergeant in “Full Metal Jacket” gave a concise description of what a trained rifleman can do with an M1, citing the case of the “Texas Tower Sniper,” mass murderer Charles Whitman. Unfortunately, as was the subject of the film, the training was about stripping away the young recruit’s humanity to make him over as a born again killer.
Now imagine if you can, providing the shooting skill without the statist soul crushing to decently raised young adults. You’d get minutemen, not degenerates. Because Americans once included a hefty percentage of decent and strong young men who were well armed and could shoot, we got a nation. Because we ceded defending freedom to a formerly unconstitutional class of guardians answerable only to their gang leaders, we got a psychotic empire.
Now we need minutemen once again to defend freedom against skulduggery. That is, if we can still grow them. The jury is out on that proposition. But the tools are there, and they don’t choose mission or target, nor do they pull the trigger. At least, not yet.
ATwork space 