AN ARMED CITIZENRY

I just received the following e-mail:

The world's largest army... America 's hunters! There were over 600,000 hunters this season in the state of Wisconsin . That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan's 700,000 hunters. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and it literally establishes the fact that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world. The point? America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower.

Those are interesting stats. But even though I am a strong pro-gunner, I don't buy that crap about nobody willing to invade us because our citizens are armed. It's the same crap that's been floating around for years about why the Japanese did not invade America after Pearl Harbor.

The fact is that the Japanese could not invade us because it was logistically impossible to sustain an invasion all the way across the Pacific. Our armed citizenry had nothing at all to do with it.

The Japanese had no problem defeating the Chinese army, the British army in Malaysia and Singapore, the U.S. army in the Philippines, etc. Granted there was no armed citizenry in those places, but had there been, they would not have been able to stop the Japanese.

How can anyone in their right mind think that a highly sophisticated war machine can be stopped by a bunch of guys armed with the ‘home-grown firepower’ of pistols, rifles and shotguns. At best, like the European partisans during the Nazi occupation of their lands, they would be a nuisance that would distract an occupying army, but not drive it out.

This is not 1776 when it was mano-a-mano, musket to musket during the American revolution. This is not the 1860s with its horse mounted soldiers, its infantry armed with single shot rifles, its artillery of crude cannons and its horse mounted soldiers during our civil war.

To think that an armed citizenry can defeat a sophisticated military armed with powerful warplanes, tanks and a multitude of other advanced weapons is nothing more than a foolish fantasy.