Say, that's a good question...

here:

District Attorney Daniel F. Conley confesses to taking a bong hit in his college days. DA Gerry Leone admits he “tried it once” as a collegian. DA Michael O’keefe won’t out himself beyond a typical lawyer-like circumlocution that he “did a lot of things that were unwise, unhealthy and illegal” as a youth.
So where do these pot puffing prosecutors stand on decriminalization?
Here’s a hint: all quotes in this report come from a Boston Globe article titled “DAs fight bid to ease penalty for marijuana.”
So how does this work? If marijuana is so bad why didn’t these former potheads end up as heroin hacks and crack slackers today, punching out grandma for her bingo money so they can shoot up and zone out? Marijuana, back in their college days, was known by hardcore drug warriors as a “gateway drug.” One whiff of Mary Jane and you were trapped in the ever escalating spiral of addiction, running from drug to ever harder drug in the all consuming pursuit of staying high.
But these former drug abusers (there is no “user” in the Drug War Dictionary, only “abuser”) actually graduated college. Went to law school. Passed their bar exams. Worked their way up to district attorneys.
So why is pot okay for them but not for you?

Good question. I'd love to see some enterprising journalist in Boston ask them that question, and why lowering the penalty for possession of marijuana is such a bad thing. I am the furthest thing from a stoner, but there are a hell of a lot worse things than certain currently illegal drugs being legalized, as Milton Friedman so astutely pointed out to Bush drug czar William Bennett. Speaking of Mr. Bennett, it should be noted that he also championed the semiautomatic rifle ban later signed into law by President Clinton — no doubt, he argued for the ban as a necessary measure to quell the violence in the inner city fueled by the illegal drug trade. Which brings me to another argument.
I know I am far from the first one to point this out, but it can't be said enough — As long as you have a War On Drugs, you will have a War On Guns to go with it. (Interestingly enough, even the socialists on the NYT editorial board have this simple truth figured out, as you'll see if you click on a certain link brought up by the above Google search.) Because as long as these drugs are illegal, there will be a black market for them, with ionospheric prices and stratospheric profits. And what comes with black markets? Turf wars. And what are these turf wars fought with? Guns. In fact, as long as you have a War On Drugs, it is going to be used as cover for, or folded into, the War On Guns. (Incidentally, heroin from Marseilles was a problem? Marseilles, as in the city in southern France, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea? Wow, outlawing heroin in the United States — you know, the country clear across the damn Atlantic Ocean — worked quite well, didn't it?) It really is that simple. No one will get any argument from me that drugs are bad. Hell, just look at the effects of alcohol and tobacco on Americans — drugs that, I might add, are completely legal. One would think we learned our lesson with Prohibition, but apparently not.
But sooner or later, if there's any hope for liberty, we're going to have to re-think the whole War On Some Drugs thing. No doubt there would be those who would take said drugs and pay with their lives, just as many do with alcohol and tobacco, but at some point one must ask, as Patrick Henry did once upon a time, " Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?"
(h/t David Codrea, who observes, "Funny, how they get a power fix, and yesterday's liberal-minded become today's blue-nosed puritan fascists." Indeed...)

"Blood will run in the streets..."

...if Barack Grand Funk Railroad Obama loses next week, according to author and 9/11 Truther Erica Jong...

Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night." She also says that her friends Jane Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to pass, the result will be a second American Civil War.

Sweet bleedin' Barnabus, these people are pathetic. But it's funny in a way, too. Civil war. Which side does she think has all the guns, or at least the vast majority of them?

A Tale of a Lost Sale

So I was waiting at the counter at the gun store to pay for my PTR-91 this morning, and as I was waiting an older guy came to the counter. He had come to pick up a pistol but due to extenuating circumstances, i.e. Coast Guard offshore duty, he had to fill out another Form 4473. The lady at the counter went and ran him through the system, and it came back that he was delayed. He got frustrated, said "the hell with it," got his money back and walked out. I think it'd be interesting to find out how many gun sales have been lost because of someone getting frustrated with those background checks because of getting delayed for whatever reason. And I'd love to know the reasons for the NICS check coming back telling the FFL to delay the transfer. No doubt 99 percent of the time it's bureaucratic error. Yeah, I know, it's for teh childrenses, if it saves just one life, blah, blah, blah...but what if he'd been a she, perhaps a battered wife whose psychotic husband was coming back to kill her? Something to think about, I think...

I'm going shopping...

for an Evil Black Rifle...watch this space.
UPDATE: SCORE! I hit CDNN this morning in search of the PTR-91. They had a few in stock, so one thing led to another and it was off to my friendly local gun store, and she's on her way to me now. They told me it'd be about a week. I bought three extra 20-rd. magazines for her too. .308, 18" barrel..yes, sir. ;-)

On the electoral college...

Somebody obviously missed the clue train...

...the vast majority of voting-age Americans can't cast a meaningful vote for their candidate of choice. Yes, we can vote absentee, early, or at the polls. Yes, we can vote a straight party ticket or for an individual politician. But, what we can't do is make that vote count. We might as well write in "none of the above" or leave a hanging chad. Why? Look no further than the Electoral College.
Unfortunately, because we now use the Electoral College to elect our country's and arguably the world's most powerful leader, we have abdicated our right to have our vote count. And what is voting without the right to have that vote impact an election?
In 48 states, including Texas, the Electoral College rules result in all of that state's electoral votes going to the winner. If, for example, Obama gets 45 percent of the Texas votes he still gets 0 percent of the Texas electoral votes. If Obama wins by 1 vote in Ohio he still gets all of Ohio's electoral votes. In fact, it is mathematically possible for a candidate to get 49 percent of the popular vote and 100 percent of the electoral votes.

All of this would seem to me to be a rather blatant appeal to emotion, or ignorance, even. The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. They knew that with safeguards like the Senate and the Electoral College, whoever had the most votes wouldn't be able (or perhaps, be less able) to screw over the other side. If you wonder what pure democracy can lead to, I'd say Illinois and its gun laws make for a pretty good example of that because as it turns out most of the downstate Illinois residents are outvoted by Chicago and its environs. (According to Wikipedia, some 66 percent of Illinois residents live in metro Chicago.) Morton Grove and Wilmette, to name two suburbs of Chicago, had handgun bans just like Chicago does. If the Electoral College was abolished we'd see this sort of thing writ large across the fruited plain — not necessarly these types of draconian gun laws (although I'd bet they'd be one of the first things to roll down the pike), but the smaller, more rural states would be vastly outvoted by the more urbanized ones — in fact, one could say the folks in the large cities would hold complete power over the rest of us — and no doubt they'd suffer as a result of that. Or, as it's been defined in this space, what the author is essentially proposing is a "tyranny of the majority" whose doctrine says that if 51 percent of the people vote to strip the other 49 percent of their God-given rights then that's just too bad for them. As one commenter said, if the author of this drivel has this level of understanding of the Constitution he should just go back to his day job.
But hey, here's some hope! From the letters to the editor in today's Chron...

Once again the fabric of the country is under fire from someone who should know better. Mr. Pozmantier either doesn't understand the basis of this country's Constitution or prefers to try to disguise it as something it is not.
The filtering of the people's choice through the Electoral College is a belief in the American republic. Doing away with it would be totally against the spirit of the Constitution.
If we were to eliminate the Electoral College we would see elections dominated by the most populous regions of the country and those of us in "fly-over" country would not have a voice.
...
Without the Electoral College, 46 or so states would never again receive a single instant of any presidential candidate's attention. Let's hope those less-populated states understand the damage they'd do to themselves by ratifying an amendment to render irrelevant their voices in national elections.
...
Using the popular vote instead of the Electoral College also gives more power to heavily populated cities in each state. It effectively disenfranchises Texans living in the less-populated counties, municipalities and rural areas.
Thankfully, our forefathers and framers of our U.S. Constitution had the good sense to establish the electoral college as the law of the land, so that every vote actually was worth something without giving undue influence to places having the greater number of people or voters.

I must admit, I was actually heartened by the response to that op-ed piece. With some of the idiocy that appears in the op-eds and letters to the editor I was half-expecting a chorus of "oh yeah, let's do it!" I only hope that was not just an aberration, that more people actually do see the reasons for such safeguards.
More on the Electoral College here.

Pull my leg a little harder...

Not that it ever would have been remotely easy to give even a Texas Democrat my vote, although I might have an easier time of that than voting for, say, certain Illinois Republicans...but I still thought they would have been smarter — or that they would have given Texans more credit — than to say things like this...

Turn In Your Deer Rifle And Your 12-gauge Shotgun To The Texas Department Of Gun Control...That is an order that will never be given by a Democratic government. Democrats will protect Americans’ Second Amendment right to own firearms, and will keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists by fighting gun crime, reauthorizing the assault weapons ban, and closing the gun show loophole, as President Bush proposed and failed to do. Democrats passed the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban.

Hm. I believe in Texas we would call this sort of rhetorical chicanery "pissing down our backs and telling us it's raining." They're going to protect our right to keep and bear arms by making it that much harder to get said arms? One could also call it "Orwellian doublespeak." And perhaps our ancestors were hunters and needed their guns to defend themselves as well...but when it comes to nut-cuttin' time I'd much rather have an AK or AR than a bolt-action rifle. (Although a scoped boltie would be the bee's knees for long-range work...) And damn you, Barbara Hudson, it's my right as a human being and an American to have that rifle. The Founding Fathers said as much in the Constitution and they told us all why it was our right to have those fearsome arms in everything they wrote before the Constitution. You might want to check into that. I see you mentioned the Brady background check...so I take it you have no problem with violent criminals walking the streets of Blanco County as long as they allegedly can't procure a firearm. And you want to make it harder for the citizens of Blanco County (and the rest of us) to defend themselves against said criminals. Wow, you really are a piece of work. And of course you and your fellow jackasses aren't going to tell us to turn in our deer rifles and 12-gauge shotguns...you're going to tell us to turn in our long-range high-powered sniper rifles and big-bore street-sweeper riot guns. We know how this works, Barbara. Just because some of us might talk slow doesn't mean we all think slow. So fucking stop insulting our intelligence by trying to hide behind the "camaraderie of the deer camp" horseshit. We saw that for what it was a long time ago.
(h/t JR & Kurt)

Great minds think alike, apparently...

Frank J. over at IMAO:

...perhaps my friend has the right idea: invest in metals.

Only, I don’t think I’m going to invest in gold.

I’m thinking steel, brass, and lead.

I've been thinking more about that myself...haven't been able to locate a Springfield M1A anywhere, though. So I've been exploring alternatives. Anyone have any input on the newer Century Arms FALs?

I figured it wouldn't matter either way...

Via Wizbang, Barack Obama thinks everyone should have election day off. I would think that since Obama has the welfare vote locked up, that just leaves the productive people, so it either would not help Obama one little bit, or it would actually help John McCain...

Just an observation...

If you click on the story of the neo-Nazi skinheads accused of plotting to kill Obama and who knows how many other black people, you'll see some lipstick-bedecked loser holding some sort of scoped semi-auto rifle. One could only assume that said loser was going to be shooting from a fairly decent range...not unlike many deer hunters do. I have to wonder how many of the Fudds will concentrate on the semi-auto part and downplay the scope...

These people are just deranged...

Something called the Potowmack Institute...

Ayers can only be faulted for acting out the NRA's childish political fantasy.

Once again, excuse the fuck me? I very highly doubt the NRA as an organization ever entertained the thought of killing 25 million people in an attempt to establish some "socialist utopia" like Bill Ayers and his Commie thug friends did. To put that in perspective, it's the equivalent of over four Holocausts. Yeah, trying to link Bill Ayers and the National Rifle Association, yeah, I'd say that was seriously deranged...but then again, so is their main belief, which seems to be that all governments are deserving of the monopoly on force, no matter the carnage they inflict. One wonders just what they would support to help get that monopoly back...

A Good Guy Gets A Louder Mike

I've been reading Bill Whittle since May of 2005, round about the time his Sanctuary essay came down the pike. It didn't take me long at all to plow through all the essays that came before it. To this day I envy his supreme eloquence and insight. I was quite glad to see him get a writing gig at National Review (More Bill Whittles and Mark Steyns, guys, and fewer Chris Buckleys and Kathleen Parkers!) and added to the staff at Pajamas Media as well. At the same time, though, I missed those longer-form essays. He delivered early this morning, and although it's not one of those epic conceptual analyses like Sanctuary or Tribes, it's still a more than worthy read. A snippet...

I do not blame Barack Obama for believing in wealth distribution. That’s his right as an American. I do blame him for lying about what he believes. But his entire life has been applying for the next job at the expense of the current one. He’s at the end of the line now.

I do, however, blame the press for allowing an individual citizen to do the work that they employ standing armies of so-called professionals for. I know they are capable of this kind of investigative journalism: it only took them a day or two to damage Sarah Palin with wild accusations about her baby’s paternity and less time than that to destroy a man who happened to be playing ball when the Messiah decided to roll up looking for a few more votes on the way to the inevitable coronation.

You know what to do next...

...so what do you want, a cookie?

A recent commenter says here,

ive stumbled upton some really shocking information about McCains connection to Abramoff.

Riddle me this, Batman. Was Jack Abramoff a genocidal maniac like Bill Ayers and his communist thug friends, or just a crooked lobbyist? Which, really, do you think is worse? And is it not pathetic that a question like that has to be asked in this day and age? I would surely not claim John McCain is a saint, but you put him up against an out-of-the-closet communist like Barack Obama and he ends up looking like one by comparison. Furthermore, if we're gonna play the guilt-by-association game, a genocidal Communist thug is the trump card there, the match-winning play — every SINGLE time — as far as I'm concerned. And I bet I'm not the only one who feels that way either.

Underrated? Yep, I'd say so...

or, once again, I Get Referrals, from this search: underrated 10mm auto cartridge.
Yep, I think the 10mm is quite underrated. A lot of folks would point to the .40 Smith & Wesson as the best of the 9mm and .45 worlds, but I think the 10mm is a better one — heavier than the 9mm and much faster than the .45, even with bullet weights approaching the .45, and in most cases faster than 9mm, even. Those hot loads are no doubt a handful, but they are in any pistol. I'll admit I haven't driven my homemade 10mm rounds as fast as some folks do, but a 180-grain bullet at about 1200 fps or a 155-grain bullet at 1400 is still damn potent for an autopistol — and surprisingly easy to shoot, too. To steal Ferris Bueller's words, "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up." I have two of them myself...

More Sunday morning randomness

Via Vanderleun...
Quote of the WEEK, from Jim Treacher, on the Ohio and national media:

They've all gone after a guy who fixes pipes to distract us from the guy who used them to blow stuff up.

Brilliant observation, and oh-so-true! But if their influence has waned as much as some think it has with the advent of alternative media like blogs and YouTube, maybe enough people will think of Obama, "this guy's unfit for Podunk City Dogcatcher, never mind Leader of the Free World." I bet you that'll be another of the great untold stories of 2008, how the bloggers did the job the mainstream media failed to do. We'll see soon enough.

Next up, they say "Don't Mess With Texas," but you could just as well say "Don't Mess With Oklahoma"...

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - Recalling a run-in 25 years ago with a group accused of voter registration irregularities, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe says protesters scattered when he warned them to leave his home in one minute or "I'll kill all of you."

Can I get a, oh, HELL YEAH! Second Amendment in action, friends and neighbors!

And finally this morning, What if Sarah Palin had been a Democrat?

ANCHORAGE — Fresh from her jaunty, popular appearance on Saturday Night Live, the mom from the American Outback, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, continues to inject new life into the country's mainstream as Sen. Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate.
"When I said I wanted a reformer, I meant it," said Obama, who threw caution to the wind with his selection of Palin. The Obama campaign was impressed with the former PTA mom who took on Big Oil and dethroned the old boys' club that ran Alaska politics for more than a generation. "As The New York Times and Washington Post have frequently pointed out, Gov. Palin is the only candidate on either ticket with executive experience," Obama said. "And more importantly, she has experience fighting the powerful on behalf of the people — and winning."

Ouch! Painful but oh-so-true. As it is, Sarahcuda's prety much reduced Obama to making juvenile cracks about pigs and fish...

"...figuring out...the elimination of 25 million people."

It would be interesting to find out how many Americans find it disturbing that the national media finds Sarah Palin's wardrobe more important than the fact that Barack Obama counts as a close associate of his a man who wanted to kill 25 million Americans. You owe it to yourself to read the entire essay. Toward the end, you'll find a transcript and video of an interview of undercover agent Larry Grathwohl, who penetrated Bill Ayers' Weather Underground:

I bought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. We, we become responsible, then, for administrating, you know, 250 million people.
And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.
The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them... how things were going to be.
I asked, well, what's going to happen to those people that we can't re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious.

Now if we had a national media doing its job — or, of course, if the shoe was on the other foot and it was a Republican associating with these people — we wouldn't have to go to relatively obscure corners of the Web to find this stuff out. But I did find it interesting how Grathwohl said they didn't give any thought to clothing and feeding what they arguably wanted to be the proletariat in this grand new socialist dictatorship. I don't know how likely the scenario of foreign occupation would be, but I am certain that if the Russians had had anything to do with something on the level of an occupation of the United States back in those days, it likely would have been after nuclear war and there wouldn't have been 25 million Americans left, period. So I'd bet that takes the foreign-occupation tool right of the box. So what's left? That's a question that needs to be asked, especially considering the factors of the military and the armed civilians too. In other words, what are you going to do when the people you want to enslave and kill can shoot back, from near or far? They probably didn't think about that either. So it sounds like at first glance just a bunch of theoretical pie-in-the-sky bullshit, but that's no reason to dismiss any of it as the rantings of an impotent lunatic fringe either — especially considering the protege of one of the ringleaders is dangerously close to being elected to the highest office in the land, in other words, in a position to facilitate these people bringing their evil plans to fruition. And it may well have turned out to be impossible for them to implement their plans, but that doesn't change the fact that any number of innocents could have been (and indeed, a few WERE) killed, maimed or injured. But, hey, where'd that money come from for Sarah Palin's clothes?

Well, I'd say it's perfect...

I don't mean to generalize, but more than once I've gotten the idea that the folks writing at the Houston Press are a bunch of idiots, and this blog post is the perfect encapsulation of why:
(http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2008/10/gun_raffle_fundraiser.php)

Amundsen admits the event, however popular in Manvel, might be less well thought of out of Brazoria County. “No question there are some people that raise an eyebrow,” he says. “We’re a charitable organization doing good in the community and then we’re sending guns out into the community. All I can say is hunting is a foundation in our country. These are hunting rifles that we’re raffling off. Of course, for people who anti-hunters, this won’t sit well with them, but nothing to do with hunting would, not just our gun raffle.
And does Amundsen see any irony in raffling guns to help battered women?

Damn, but where to start? What the hell's so wrong with citizens having guns? Why does this Tom Amudsen character try to cast that as a problem? And why in the bloody fuck should anyone in Manvel or Brazoria County (or Texas, for that matter) give a flying fuck what outsiders might think? Irony? What the hell? I guess those hotshots think the writers of Miranda Lambert's "Gunpowder & Lead" just pulled that song out of their asses as opposed to basing it on real-life situations and advice women get on how to deal with them...dumbasses.

Why have gun control?

Because, silly, armed citizens make for a hostile work environment for a certain demographic!

Just a couple of questions...

On Universal Health Care...over at AD's place, one commenter seemed to be making the argument that once Barack Alan Jackson Obama got universal health care in place, Joe the Plumber's healthcare costs were going to be lower. That could very well be...but won't his taxes be higher once he's paying for everyone else's healthcare in addition to his own? And we haven't even factored in the potential cost increases due to abuse of the system when the government makes health care "free" to everyone. As the old saying goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch...and I get the feeling that Barack Cody Canada Obama's free healthcare lunch is going to cost the working people he says he wants to give a break a hell of a lot more than he's letting on, if the example set in Canada is anywhere near accurate.
From everything I've seen about Sarah Palin's SNL appearance, it was by and large a success...but apparently the Obama Kool-Aid drinkers didn't think so, with one saying, "she should have taken her cue cards and gone home after the first segment...she really didn't know they were laughing at her and not with her." I'm thinking she knew damn well they were laughing at her, but she wanted to be a good sport about it all. But she couldn't have won with them either way, because even if she did say, "fuck all you Hollywood elitist motherfuckers," and shot them the bird as she walked out, you know damn good and well the Obama Kool-Aid drinkers would have pointed to her and called her thin-skinned and unable to take any kind of criticism. Said Kool-Aid drinker also observed that perhaps Sarahcuda could have been moose hunting as the sports reporter on the Weekend Update. And I'm like, why? So they could call her a bitter gun-clinging Jesus freak and laughed at her some more?

Musings on Anti Strategies

Reader Bob S., in comments here:

I think the push will come not in bans or restrictions but economics. Imagine excise taxes on the level of alcohol or cigarettes.
Since it doesn't affect the majority of the population, antis will probably be able to sell it as a "way of making the sport pay for itself", etc; stating the moneys raised by the taxes will go to wildlife preservation.

They could do that, but they'll only be able to get away with that if no one points out what's already there in the form of taxation — the Pittman-Robertson excise tax, which imposes an 11 percent excise tax on “sporting” firearms and ammunition, a ten percent tax on handguns, and 11 percent sales tax on archery equipment. I would really hope that any more taxes on guns or ammunition would be seen as the blatant attack on the RKBA that it so obviously is. And I would bet that any more taxation on ammunition would mostly if not entirely be imposed on the smaller handgun calibers that are by and large used only for self-defense, such as the big three autopistol calibers plus .380acp, .38 Special and maybe .357 Magnum. I almost hope they'll take that route, as it could be tied to Heller v. D.C., which was brought about in the first place by the fact that D.C. resident Shelly Parker was denied permission by the D.C. government to keep a handgun for self-defense. And then there's the fact that the antis have tried it before, including outspoken enemies of the right to arms such as Teddy Kennedy.

Another approach will be environmental, all that lead, copper, etc can't be good for nature. So let's ban it and use "green" ammo. Nobody wants to harm the environment, right?

This is the the one I would worry about. They've already done this in California, and of course, as they say, as goes California, so goes the nation. But then there's the whole matter of the potential black market for leaded ammunition. I don't know just how easy it would be to make copper-jacketed lead ammunition, but I guarantee you there are some machinist-engineer-shooting enthusiasts out there who could easily figure out how to do it. As the old saying goes, where there's a will, there's a way. And I would really hope that particular strain of California plague could be contained. It has been for this long, and I am pretty sure that reps from the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation would be letting RKBA-friendly pols in on the facts of the matter, on both taxation and lead-free ammunition. Honestly, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find that the environmental lobby was indeed overstating the effects of lead ammunition on the environment. People have been hunting with lead ammo for decades, if not centuries, and as far as anyone can tell there hasn't been any widespread deleterious effect on the environment. If there was it would surely have come to light by now. In any event, I guess we'll see what happens.

So they should have just sat there and taken it?

Via Armed and Safe, Josh Horwitz of the Coalition To Enable Holocausts is at it again, in the Huffington Post:

...the majority opinion (in Heller v. D.C --ed.) drafted by Justice Scalia goes far beyond simply asserting an individual right to own a firearm in the home for self defense against common criminals. Incredibly, he also endorsed an individual right to commit acts of violence against a "tyrannical" federal government which, if history is any lesson, most Americans would find appalling.

This may well be true — that is, that most Americans would find something like armed resistance "appalling." I would hope, though, that the moral fiber of the American people is stronger than that. I would hope that most Americans still believe that we as human beings have a moral obligation to fight evil, with hot lead if it comes to that. I would hope that the only reason Americans would find resistance to jack-booted thuggery "appalling" is that they either don't remember or were never really taught about the great genocides of the 20th century and how they were brought about. I think it's rather ironic that he talks about history being a guide when the fact is that any sentient being with a working moral compass with good knowledge of the history as written about the 20th century would figure out what happens when good people are disarmed by their government — and therefore would NOT find the idea of armed resistance so "appalling." And you'd think that as an attorney, he'd know better than to resort to the argumentum ad populum fallacy. But I guess you use whatever you have, especially if it's the only thing you have left — and if it takes advantage of the ignorance of the people, so much the better.
In any event, it's plain to see Horwitz finds the idea appalling himself. I guess he thinks the Jews and other "undesirables" living under Hitler's Third Reich should have just sat there and taken what Hitler and his thugs gave them. Pretty ironic, since (if I remember correctly) he's a Jew himself. Would that there were a time machine to put him in and send him back to that time and place. Let the jack-booted thugs come to his door and find out what happens when one doesn't or can't fight back against evil. Sounds to me like he would have had it coming.