Gun control quandry.

[one-eyed fat man]

Gun Control in Counterinsurgency

"Application of populace and resources control measures in counterinsurgency is often more art than science, and in Iraq’s Salah Din Province in 2006 the battlespace commander’s attempts to reduce the number of weapons available to insurgents actually caused residents otherwise uninvolved in insurgency to violate the law, while effectively ensuring that the population had no means to resist insurgent theft of supplies or forcible recruitment."

Commanders in a war zone often have the power to do by fiat what democracies must struggle to do. As virtual king, he can issue a decree and apply all the combat power at his disposal to effect it. All the 'conventional gun control wisdom' decrees you disarm the population and allow only the state agents to be armed. This places the disarmed populace in complete dependence on the state and gives the insurgent unfettered access whenever state agents are absent.

Does not the situation mirror the mess people in Chicago find themselves?

[Hoopla Phil]

1. k and r

[SteveM]

2. Of course, "...effectively ensuring that the population had no means to resist..."

doesn't really occur because that population will become part of the black market to obtain guns. Does anyone think that only "combatants" have guns during insurgencies? Does anyone think only the drug gangs and the Mexican military have guns in the W.O.D.? Does anyone think all the guns sold out of a car trunk in Chicago go only to thugs?

[one-eyed fat man]

3. In the Area of Operations

A military commander might easily decree that civilian weapons are contraband and seize them whenever and wherever they are found. He has troops he con order into houses to search and seize weapons.

There are those gun control advocates here whose ecstasy at that prospect would positively have cum drops as big as horse turds running down their legs. There was one notable and prolific poster who repeatedly espoused that very tactic be used here by a foreign military.

They even dismiss that the heavy handedness of such an approach might encourage sympathy for the insurgents.

[SteveM]

4. God, the mixed-metaphor! I remember that posting.

[cowman]

5. I remember that posting also

and no matter what we said, he was convinced that the American Military and the American people would just stand by and let it happen, I notice he doesn't post here anymore.