Tag Archives: DHS

Skippy Blowemup…

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I’ve always said that if I wanted to strike fear into the hearts of Americans, I’d find ten or fifteen fanatics, strap bombs to them, and send them off to ten or fifteen random coffee shops to blow themselves to pieces. It wouldn’t be in New York or DC. Those places are predictable targets. We’ve come to expect terrorist attacks there as just another feature of “life in the big city.”

I’d have pointed my boys (because let’s face it, the ones who are usually willing to get themselves killed in the process are almost always young men) at Kansas City, Boise, Tampa, Salt Lake City, or Cleveland. If I had more people and more supplies, they’d go to even smaller cities – maybe no more than 20,000-30,000 people. I mean do you really think the average person getting their caffeine fix in Henderson, Kentucky is looking some half-assed wannabe jihadist to come walking through the door with a pipe bomb strapped to his gut?

As much as I like to think I’m aware of my surroundings, no one knows more than I do how often and how easy it is to find yourself distracted. I suspect that even the best would say it’s difficult to impossible to stay “on” all the time… and even if you manage it, being suspicious of everyone walking through the door is a hard way to live. You’ll just have to assume that I’m right on that one based on my personal lack of trust in just about everyone.

Point is, we got lucky in New York today. We got lucky because Skippy Blowemup was a shit bomb builder. We won’t get lucky every time. I can’t imagine we’ll get lucky even most of the time. Terrorism with a small “t” has come to America. It got here a while ago, but it’s hard to believe we won’t see more if it. It’s just easier to get your hands on a pipe bomb or pressure cooker than it is to find a airliner and trained pilot sitting around. As a country we do a fair job of getting out hands around the big problems – I mean skyscrapers aren’t toppling on a regular basis. We’ve put security in place that helps prevent that from happening.

The real question, though, is how good are we going to be at catching the small timers with a death wish? Our daily life is built around the idea that we’re free to come and go when and where we please? How likely are any of us to put up with a pat down or full body scan every time we go to the local shopping center or get on a subway train?

I swear to God the longer I’m in it, the more I hate the 21st century.

Need more ammo…

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I think it’s fun that the tinfoil hat brigades of the internet have gotten up in arms about federal agencies purchasing “large” amounts of ammunition. It’s especially fun when they define 147,000 rounds as “large” amounts. Let’s face it, many of us know individual citizens with at least that much ammo stored in their basement, hideout, bunker, or other secure, undisclosed location where they plan to wait out the end of the world. When you have an quarterly firearms training requirement for a couple hundred people, +/- 200,000 rounds just isn’t going to last that long. And it’s definitely not going to be enough to wage a shadow war against our fellow citizens. It’s cute that some people are just that paranoid, though.

Let’s ponder this for a moment… If the United States Government were really planning to wage war in the streets against its own citizens, don’t you think that maybe, just maybe they’d have ordered the ammo on some kind of “secret” contract instead of by posting it right there on the internet for every contractor in the country to see? For the record, they would have probably ordered more than 100 sets of riot gear, too, but I’m trying to stay just a little focused.

Look, a little paranoia isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s healthy to ask questions in a constitutional republic, but it’s not healthy to see a conspiracy that includes millions of run of the mill working stiffs at every turn. At that point, you start making the shift from concerned citizen to crazy coot and that’s never pretty. Like TMZ, sure it’s good for entertainment value, but it’s not exactly what I’m going to consider hard news. Yeah, I’m looking at you here, Infowars.

P.S. And before someone raises the question of the millions of rounds ordered by Homeland Security, go ahead and do the math on the number of armed guards they have who are also required to do quarterly firearms training and you’ll find that the per capita number of rounds ordered isn’t particularly alarming either, but hey, thanks for playing.