Just Don't Add Up

(Edited from a comment I made in a thread on Facebook.)

There's a lot of hysteria and paranoia about Obama and how he plans to destroy America, kill many Americans and make slaves of the rest. I'm at a loss to explain it, unless it's a holdover from the Cold War and mutually assured destruction.

Obama's aim to disarm citizens has been an ongoing topic among his Internet critics In a recent thread on Facebook, the discussion centered on Internet rumors that the Secret Service would be empowered to confiscate guns from American citizens. Someone mentioned Obama's past comment about creating a civilian security force, and wondered how that would figure into gun confiscation.

I noted that he said that (about a civilian security force) in 2008 as a candidate. Hasn't mentioned it again since.

One thing has mystified me about the dire speculation following the election, Benghazi, and Sandy Hook. What's missing in all the talk of armored vehicles, FEMA coffins and billions of rounds of ammo for DHS is ... who's gonna fire them? This is the one element that has been missing since the beginning of the speculation -- enough people (enough of the right kind of people -- trained and ruthless).

First, it was the US military ... but evidently, Obama found out he can't count on them, even with all the firings and removals of top brass, so the military sort of faded from the speculation talk. So then it was UN troops. The problem with that is that WE are the UN, for all intents and purposes. If our troops won't do his bidding as the American military, they're not going to do it as members of a UN coalition. Our friends in the UN (Europe, Canada, Oz, etc) will not do it. Basically, that leaves (1) Islam and (2) the third world. Are Muslims going to take orders from an American president, regardless of how friendly he is to Islam? And who really thinks third worlders like Somalis can enforce gun confiscation here?

Forget the UN.

So then it was Interpol. And Interpol's charter/constitution forbids such actions. My understanding from online info is that they aren't law enforcement agents, per se, anyway. They're a liaison between law enforcement authorities in different countries that need to work together on international criminal cases.

Then it was FEMA kids (all 231 of them). So now it's the Secret Service. Sounds like he's scraping the bottom of the barrel. It'll be interesting to see who will be put forth next as Obama's enforcers.

Wikipedia says there were 1,429,995 people on active duty in the armed forces as of Jan 31, 2013. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 2,204,800 million civilians work for the Federal Government. Not all of those work in enforcement agencies; and not everyone employed by an enforcement agency is an enforcement agent. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, State and local law enforcement agencies employed about 1,133,000 persons on a full-time basis in 2008, including 765,000 sworn personnel.

So if you take the entire federal workforce many of whom are not enforcement personnel, and the entire US military and the entire state and local law enforcement employees, you have approximately five million (5,137,800) people.

The population of the United States is 313,914,040. That's 313 million as of July 2012. About 70 to 80 million of them are gun owners holding about 300 million firearms.

If the military, federal employees and state and local cops ALL turned into Obama enforcers (which of course isn't going to happen) and attempted gun confiscation precipitated civil war, you'd have 5 million of them opposed to 70 or 80 million civilian gun owners with 300 million guns and who knows how many bullets...

I dunno, folks. Seems to me it's not civilian gun owners who need to be skeered.

(Note, Internet statistics are woefully unreliable; as are my math skills. But even accounting for that, the situation just doesn't seem as dire as people's paranoia would indicate.)