Ugly

We still keep hearing how the Second Amendment is useless because a citizen militia cannot possibly beat the might of a modern US military that is armed with Abrams tanks, F16 fighters, and nuclear weapons. I have blogged before about what a monumentally stupid statement that is. Anyone who makes such a statement has no idea about how the military, armed conflict, or asymmetrical warfare works. 

When I was a firefighter, the government spent a lot of money training me in counter terrorism. I also took a fair amount of college classes on the tactics of terrorism and the weaknesses of the nation's infrastructure. There are millions of people who have done likewise. Police, firefighters, and emergency managers, to name a few. Now I don't want anyone to construe this post as a threat, because it is not. I am simply pointing out that there are a lot of weaknesses in America's underbelly, and there are a lot of people who know where those weaknesses are and how to exploit them. Frankly, it surprises me that no one has yet tried.

For example. one class required us to find a weak point in US infrastructure. Here is the one I wrote about:

There are nine major gas pipelines and two crude oil pipelines that pass from Texas and Louisiana, with less than 10 miles separating five of those pipelines where they pass over the Mississippi river, at a point that is less than 5 miles from the I-40 bridge in Memphis. Those pipelines carry most of the petroleum and natural gas to the northeast corridor and Ohio valley. Think of how many large cities are served by these pipelines. These pipelines are unguarded and virtually unmonitored.

If these pipelines were destroyed, the short term disaster would be huge. NASA has estimated that gas line ruptures and the ensuing explosions at that point would be so large that their reflections would be visible on the other side of the planet as the light from the fireball bounced off the moon. Since these pipelines are within the Memphis metro area, casualties would be high from the large explosion and ensuing confusion.

In the long term, the loss of five of the nine gas pipelines from the Texas/Louisiana gas fields to the industrial areas of Chicago and the Ohio valley would likely cause widespread disruption of energy and heating service in those areas. Loss of the I-40 bridge in Memphis could potentially cause transportation delays, as the loss of this bridge would cause land traffic detours of more than 300 miles and make the Mississippi impassible to water transport. Transformers lost as a result of failures to the electrical grid could take eight to twelve months for replacement.

Imagine what the loss of electricity and the majority of the natural gas to the entire northeastern US would do to the US economy. Since all 6 of those items are within 10 miles of each other, it could be accomplished by one small group of skilled attackers. The entire US economy would be brought to its knees. While this is happening, do you really think that India, China, and Russia will sit idly by and not take advantage of the power vacuum?

So to those of you on both sides of the debate, please take a moment to think about what you are pushing us towards before it is too late. A year or more of sitting in the dark without heat in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, and other major cities.