I just finished reading an article in the NRA magazine ‘American Rifleman’ (November) on potential crisis level events that could occur in our country in the very near future. Although on first blush they may appear sensationalistic and over the top, they are not.
Before you blow off reading this article, first click on the links added at the bottom of this blog entry. They were both written by federal government agencies within our country! Toward the end, I will embellish some of the information contained in the NRA report based on my own experience within a large police agency over twenty years ago! It will emphasize the degree to which our country is in trouble and how it is a ticking time-bomb.
IS CHAOS AT OUR DOOR? — by Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President
But the reality is that we may be living in some of the most dangerous times in human history. Does that sound like some crazy exaggeration to you? Well, consider this: Recently, in The Wall Street Journal, former CIA Director James Woolsey warned that “the most significant threat to the U.S. in the world” is the threat
of catastrophe caused by an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. And that danger appears to loom larger every year. What is an electromagnetic pulse? It can be triggered by a massive solar storm, or set off by detonation of a nuclear device hundreds of miles
above the earth. Even if no blast, shock or fallout reaches the ground, the cascading avalanche of infrastructure failures caused by an EMP can create a national catastrophe.
Because an EMP, like an astronomical bolt of lightning, destroys the electronic equipment upon which so much of modern life is built.
In the short term, EMP drowns out radio transmissions-everything from radio, TV and cell phones, to air-defense radar systems, to police, fire and EMS frequencies.
Most importantly, over a much longer timeframe, an EMP blacks out the power grid, slamming it with so much voltage-and slagging so many transformers when it does-that it could plunge much of the continental U.S. into darkness and chaos lasting for months, if not years.
Collapse of the power grid, in turn, would have a domino effect on the infrastructures Americans depend on most for survival. Landline telephone systems would fall silent. Cell phone towers would go black-even if you had a way to charge your phone.
An EMP would flatline the Internet and paralyze all the vital signals the Internet carries: Military command and control, our banking and financial system, gas pipeline and power plant safeguards, hospital and emergency response communications.
And it would pull the plug on public water and sewage services-perhaps our most urgent and immediate life-support systems of all.
This isn’t some feverish, paranoid fantasy. It’s not some fabrication from “Doomsday Preppers.” It’s the kind of scenario that the most informed national security experts in the country-military commanders, emergency response planners and scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and the Hoover Institution-have been warning politicians about with increasing urgency for more than a decade. As recently declassified reports from these experts on the congressional EMP Commission make clear:
• “China and Russia have considered limited nuclear-attack options that employ EMP as the primary or sole means of attack.”
• “Designs for variants of such weapons may have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter century.”
• In 2004, Russian military officials warned U.S. government investigators that North Korea’s military had recruited Russian scientists to develop nuclear EMP weapons.
• “Terrorists or state actors that possess relatively unsophisticated missiles armed with nuclear weapons may well calculate that … they may gain the greatest political-military utility from … an EMP attack.”
Yet, while the media should be alerting the public to this danger, and our nation’s leaders should be setting up systems to protect us instead, we get adolescent media gossip about the latest celebrity tweet.
Imagine your world blanketed by pitch black. You have no lights, no electricity. Phones don’t work. Even the battery-powered radio you keep for emergencies picks up nothing but static-if it powers up at all.
Transportation grinds to gridlock as soon as everyone’s gas tank runs dry-even if their cars’ computer chips aren’t ruined by the EMP. Fuel shipments dry up as energy companies struggle to jump-start their pipelines and refineries. Food shipments stop.
In many ways, our nation would be plunged back into the 1800s. Without clean water or sanitation, Third World diseases would re-emerge-amoebic dysentery, typhoid, cholera-killing our youngest and frailest family members. Hospitals would be overwhelmed.
Remember the horrific scenes you saw from Hurricane Katrina or the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Then magnify those calamities to a national scale and lengthen them from weeks to many months.
If this all sounds inconceivable to you, again, consider the findings of the government’s own congressional EMP Commission. According to their report, within a year of a national blackout, as much as 90 percent of the population of the U.S. could die due to starvation, disease and the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Now, that might be too terrifying to even comprehend. But an EMP attack is far from the only way of wreaking havoc on America’s infrastructure or blacking out our power grid.
Cyber attacks through the Internet, for example, are a new and growing danger to our nation’s most sensitive government, military and financial operations. Many experts worry that they could shut down our nation’s financial system, locking up bank accounts, freezing credit cards and putting our economy into a tailspin.
Worse, according to 911 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, the danger of cyber terror is even more immediate and deadly. “Hackers can threaten the control systems of critical facilities like dams, water treatment plants and the power grid,” Kean wrote recently in The Wall Street journal. “A hacker able to remotely control a dam, pumping station or oil pipeline could unleash large-scale devastation.”
Terrorists could deliver a knockout punch with more conventional means as well.
Last year, in what the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, called “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred,” unknown individuals used rifles to disable 17 tremendous electrical transformers near San Jose, Calif.
It took technicians almost a month to get the facility back online-and that was just one substation. What if terrorists did the same thing in coordinated attacks all across the country? According to Wellinghoff, they could disable the grid and black out much of the United States.
Whether it’s through an EMP, a massive cyber attack, another 911 or just isolated sprees of murder and mayhem, military and homeland security officials agree it’s just a matter of time before the U.S. faces some kind of terrorist attack.
It might be along the lines of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, where terrorists launched a dozen coordinated attacks, gunning down innocent victims at hotels, a bar, a train station, a hospital and a movie theater. In all, they killed 164 innocent people.
Or it might be like the attack on Westgate Mall in Kenya last year. Four armed terrorists linked to al Qaeda were able-thanks to Kenya’s strict anti-gun laws-to spend four days torturing, mutilating and gunning down shoppers with almost no fear of reprisal. They killed 63 innocent people and wounded 175 more before they were stopped.
So ask yourself: Could suicidal terrorist mass murderers try to bomb an American hotel, an American train station, shopping mall or movie theater?
Make no mistake: The world that surrounds us is growing more dangerous all the time. Whether it’s enemy state actors, foreign terrorists, Mexican drug cartels or domestic criminals, the threats Americans face are massive-and growing.
America’s police community knows that every U.S. city of any appreciable size already has a serious, established, drug-funded Mexican drug-cartel presence.
Even the Justice Department admits:
• Mexican drug gangs are operating in more than 1,000 U.S. cities;
• 20,000 gangs with at least a million members are embedded coast to coast;
• More than 100,000 street gang members have been documented in Obama’s hometown of Chicago alone.
Add to that volatile mix the thousands of hardened, dangerous criminals that are being released from prisons allover America.
When states can’t or won’t spend the money needed to imprison their criminals, and those prisons become overcrowded, the courts say to set them free. So now the floodgates are open as our nation’s prisons are purged.
The U.S. Justice Department is now planning to release more than 40,000 federal felons before their sentences are served. More than 13,500 inmates every month are being released early in California alone. The state has even released nearly 3,000 inmates who were supposed to serve life sentences, including convicted murderers!
On top of that flood, add the waves of drug smugglers, kidnappers, sex-slave traffickers and criminals of all kinds who invade our country from the south every day. Instead of securing the Mexican border to protect the American people, Obama and his allies play political games with the immigration issue.
Even when they catch convicted criminals coming into this country, Washington’s political class does nothing to stop them. Last year alone, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, Obama’s ICE authorities intentionally released 36,000 illegal aliens who had already been convicted of nearly 88,000 crimes, including 193 homicide convictions, 426 for sexual assault and 303 for kidnapping.
No jail. No prison. Just a stern but meaningless warning-and off they went.
Where all these released criminals went, no one knows. But you can bet on this: They’re among us, embedded throughout our society. For all you know, you pass them in your car on your way to work.
And consider this: Terrorists have known for 26 years that our southern border is so porous and unprotected that crossing into the U.S. is like crossing the street.
Between 1999 and 2010, at least 6,000 so-called “special interest aliens” were caught illegally trying to cross into the U.S. Authorities admit catching at least three people “linked to terrorism” and one suspected al Qaeda bomb maker.
But how many more did they catch that they didn’t tell us about? And if 6,000 were caught, how many weren’t?
Even if you take terrorists and criminals out of the picture, chaos is an ever-present danger to Americans today — especially when you factor in the undercurrent of social unrest that seethes beneath the surface of much of our society.
How many times have we seen peaceful protests in this country degenerate into riots, looting, shootings, arsons, and worse?
How many times have we seen crowds turn into angry mobs after court decisions they didn’t like, sports team defeats they felt were unfair, natural disasters that collapsed civil order — or just for the sheer hell of it?
And who among us can say with certainty that we’d never face that same kind of out-of-control mayhem and brutality in our own city or home town?
When you consider all the threats encroaching on our country, one fact is clear:
We live in an age when preparing to survive whatever comes our way is a simple fact of life or death. It’s simply the most prudent way to survive. Prudent leaders prepare their nation. Prudent people prepare themselves.
And millions of NRA members and gun owners know the truth: The police can’t always be there to protect you. The government can’t-or won’t-protect you, either. Only you can protect you.
And nothing provides individual citizens more immediate, undeniable and irreplaceable protection than the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms. It’s the one freedom that guarantees our lives and our freedoms with force. It’s the one thing we can count on to protect ourselves when nothing else will or even can.
Now, you can bet the media will pounce upon and ridicule gun owners for talking about these dangers and preparing for the worst. They’ll call us paranoid, fear-mongering, reckless and ill-advised. They did the same thing after Sandy Hook, when the NRA said that shielding our schools with police or certified trained armed security was the only proven method to protect them.
Since then, schools everywhere have done exactly what we suggested. They’re giving their kids the first deterrent and last fail-safe defense against armed madmen who murder without fear. Because they understand-as we all understand-that there are surely more madmen out there, planning their attacks on the most vulnerable among us, even now.
We were right. History proves it. The American people know it. And men and women who care about their safety will never let themselves be shamed, ridiculed or accused of being “unreasonable” for defending their God-given right to defend-life and limb.
We’ve proven it over and over again, and we’ll do it again on Election Day.
So let this be a declaration to America’s leaders:
You have no right, no reason and no authority to deny us the protection that the Second Amendment alone guarantees.
We will not be left defenseless. We will not give up our freedoms. We will not surrender our safety to the lies of leaders who promise everything and deliver nothing.
On Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 4, we will defend our right to defend ourselves because we have no other choice. We will vote our guns! We will vote our freedom! We will vote our freedom! And we will prevail! ”
As for the criminal statistics, here are my experiences and recollections from the 1980’s!!
As far back as the 70’s when I went through the police academy, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department central jail was 140% occupancy! As a result, the sheriff himself was put under a court order to show due-diligence toward reduction of inmates — the alternative was for him to be put in his own jail!
That situation continued until the new Twin Towers jail was built to augment the old Central jail. After only a few months both jails were full and over 100% occupancy.
Since 2000 (or earlier) they have been releasing felons with as little as three months jail time due to crowding. My point being that this is not a new problem and is only getting worse — especially with illegals doing at least 30% of the serious crimes.
The following are two documents worth reviewing regarding EMPs. If you think this is a ‘pie in the sky’ conversation, you are seriously wrong!
NOW is the time to prepare! It’s your choice…
