And don't forget where a fair chunk of public sentiment is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2diNojgJF9c In all honesty, I don't know what the difference would be if they go door to door taking guns, just another group of armed criminals doing the looting.
On the other hand, if there is a big push for the door to door gun confiscation without a ten year long purge of pro-freedom types within the military, then what we have is a boots on the ground force that will be more prepared to back up the freedom fighters when the feds and their local designated forces make their moves like they did in New Orleans.
My take on New Orleans, and probably the number one reason I was kept out of the deployment is that once we saw local police pulling stunts like the Danziger bridge massacre and those numerous incidents of aiming rifles at people coming off the refugee buses as they were were being "processed", then regardless of whether or not their authority to commit acts of abuse came from a civilian authority or not, it would be necessary to assert federal authority on the part of the military command and remove the police from the situation, if not neutralize them.
This gets to the subject of what is coming down the pipe, and nobody can realistically expect the entire military command structure at the Pentagon to sit things out as some situation in some city gets out of hand while incompetent and brutally corrupt local authorities commit to actions which would have the logical consequence of starting major uprisings.
We saw this in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where the LAPD was viewed by the military as having caused most of the problems they got themselves in with the local population, and then when military personnel were restricted to five rounds per man to go in and play target dummy duty at fixed location security while LAPD ran around playing rambo. The directives for military involvement in the anticipated second set of riots had the officers been acquitted again in the Rodney King case involved some demands for asserting military authority to contain situations, removal of LAPD and direct federal oversight of further policing operations there for an indefinite period of time.
That was requested, belatedly, and denied during the Katrina deployments. The thing is, we have precedents for such action, complete blueprints for it as coordinated with Special Forces advisers, down in Southern Mexico. There have been incidents on video where the Army shows up one morning to the police HQ in a town and just takes them all in to custody, then formally disarms them and begins patrolling the streets as they attempt to sort out which officers are loyal to which drug cartels and other criminal groups.
This just goes to illustrate what I have been posting for a long time about the upcoming revolution; it is more likely than not that we will not be directly involved in the early stages, and nobody but the central players in the groups most directly involved will even know what the sides are. Sure, there are people with personal agendas and vendettas, but that does not account for big picture side taking or how other people in other organizations decide to interpret their oaths.
What nobody can depend on in any of these scenarios is planning based on "the cavalry will come over the hill to save us". There most likely be no help at all coming if you mix it up with bad guys sporting what they figure is sufficient authority to put you down. At that stage, realistic decisions need to be made regarding how to behave when the operations environment is both personally hostile, and enemy held turf with numerous enemy loyalist elements holding the reigns of power. That gets to the ugly point of the gray area of pretending to get along while resisting, and that "pretending to get along" reaches so far into collaboration that those who need your help in the fight for freedom might view you as a betrayer. Other points that gets to involve realistic expectations and resources for cooperation with those who are willing and able to assist, what those goals should be, and how much assistance is warranted for each situation that pops up.
