I've heard enough promises of fierce resistance to gun confiscation from the patriot movement to have become skeptical. Obviously, so has the government. People who are really able and willing to carry out a threat seldom find it necessary to make it more than once. Furthermore, there is a degree of insincerity when those who threaten to shoot government agents trying to take away their guns simultaneously preach the moral virtue of obeying laws.

Our enemies mostly control the making of laws in our country. There will come a time when each of us must decide whether to obey the laws and submit to slavery, or to begin breaking the laws by fighting the oppressors.

It will always be "illegal" for people to take power away from their rulers. The first American Revolution was illegal, and the second one will be, too. A nation's oppression ends only when the people break the damn laws and take back the power anyway. A rebel fighter isn't a thief. Breaking laws isn't necessarily immoral. A so-called patriot who isn't willing to break laws is being cowardly, not virtuous.

Our country has become one of those "bad" countries, of the kind you read about pages of history books. Remember the Soviet Union? That's what the United States is turning into. It will put a big hurting on us before we, or someone else, can put the final smack on it.

Regaining lost freedom requires the sacrifice of lives in resistance, simply because the evil elites always, sooner or later, get political momentum. Their well-paid minions aggressively oppress us, trying to cow us down, believing we will never dare to kill them for fear that they will kill us. And, for a while, it works.

Fear is what keeps a people from defeating their oppressors, and it comes from knowing that the first 50,000 active rebels, aiming a gun at a gun-grabbing government agent, as the woman in that patriot poster-picture seems to be doing, will die for their cause. Rebellions can't even get started because every potential rebel refuses to risk being one of those 50,000 who won't survive the war.

Rebels don't get to kill oppressors for free. Rebels die too. The progress of civil armed resistance is measured by the kill-ratio; by how many of them die for each of us who dies. The strength of civil resistance is measured by the ratio of remaining armed rebels to remaining armed oppressors. A civil war is a war of attrition, and there are no short-cuts. If you aren't as ready to die as you are to kill, then you aren't serious about civil war.

One day the land will stand in your memory, Robert Mathews.