We shall overcome. Some day.

Pam Spaulding quotes Freepers under the presumption that if Barack Obama loses there will necessarily follow a violent civil war against whites [1]:

This scenario is called the SHTF scenario, where the acronym stands for $#|+
Hits The Fan. So this will be the SHTF gun thread for November 2008... Of
course, gun ownership isn't for everyone. But it is the most accessible
safety measure under our constitution, which is as our founding fathers
intended. Recall where the police were when the Rodney King riots started:
they left the scene for their own safety. If that were to happen in your
neighborhood, what is your plan?

*A pump shotgun is a great weapon for a neophyte. Easy to aim. Easy to load
and unload. Hard hitting effective rounds. Less likely to kill a bystander
with an errant shot.* Intimidating. And makes a great sound as you chamber a
round.

If you are on a budget but serious about home & self-defense ... I bought a
Mossberg `Maverick' 12 gauge shotgun at Wally World for $177.00 not too long
ago. The safety is on the trigger guard, like a Remington, so I could put a
top folding stock on it. I also bought an 18 1/2" barrel, but the longer
barrel is better. It chambers 2 3/4 and 3 inch shells. I plan to put it in
my trunk right after Halloween. Save the .22 for plinking cans and
squirrels. Series.

I would rather have a .22LR than having to use my fist. I have seen LOTS of
dead gang bangers in Little Rock with no visible wounds, later found to be
shot with .22. You are right though, limited stop potential *UNLESS YOU CAN
score with a head shot.

I'm not answering for ZULU, but from experiencing fighting the rioters in
Newark, N.J. in '67 & '68. *They don't leave their neighborhoods, but
attempt to burn & steal everything from all businesses in them. They will
also shoot at any white person who happens to be there, or passing through.

This last one interests me the most, because as I demonstrate in NIXONLAND—as documented by the New Jersey governor's own commission of inquiry (and the governor was quite conservative, as you'll see below)—the notion of sniping at whites was 99.9 percent folklore, and became cover for what I call in the book "officially sanctioned murder":

A second wave flared, then burned itself out around midnight Thursday. Relieved officials decided the crisis was over. Mayor Addonizio soon had to admit it wasn't. At 2:30 AM he called Governor Richard Hughes in a panic to call out the State Police and National Guard. Spina announced over every police radio: "If you have a gun, whether it is a shoulder weapon or whether it is a hand gun, use it." The same Governor Hughes who had determinedly refused to interfere with the tenure of the Communist history professor Eugene Genovese during his reelection fight in 1965, announced, "The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America." By 4:30 AM the first state police appeared. By 7 National Guard units rolled up Springfield Avenue, the Essex County main drag that started in leafy Short Hills and ended in Newark's heart of darkness. White residents set up shotgun patrols, standing ready for Negroes "to spill over onto white ground." They shouted at the passing trucks: "Go kill them nigger."

And that is what they did. Thus began the second Newark riot: not looting, not arson, but officially sanctioned murder.

Three were dead by daylight Friday. One was Rose Abraham, a 45-year-old mother of five, out looking for one of her children. Tedlock Bell, Jr., 28, a father of four, a former basketball star who had just told his companions to submit quietly to the police. A young man named James Sanders was shotgunned in the back while running from a liquor store. The commander of the anti-riot forces, Colonel Kelly of the New Jersey State Police, pronounced that the looting was under control. Another looter was shot dead in the back at the end of the day. His name was Albert Taliaferro. But then nine Newark residents had died.

A group of citizens was milling around outside of the Scudder Homes housing project off Springfield when three police cars turned the corner. The crowd assumed they must be firing blanks--until a .38 caliber bullet ripped through Virgil Harrison's right forearm. Men took off their undershirts to wave as white flags. The cops kept on shooting--at ground level, claiming they were hunting a sniper on the upper floors. That was how Rufus Council, 35, Oscar Hill, 50, and Virgil's father Isaac "Uncle Daddy" Harrison, 72 (and perhaps Robert Lee Martin, 22, and Cornelius Murray, 28) lost their lives. Oscar Hill was wearing his American Legion jacket. Robert Lee Martin's family reported that cops stripped money from his body. Murray's body was missing $126 and a ring. There indeed had been snipers in Scudder Homes. But they began shooting an hour later, in response to the cops. They killed a police detective, Fred Toto, 33, a father of three.

Seventy-six residents of Beacon Street signed an eyewitness petition: "At approximately five-thirty PM on the fourteenth of July, most of the residents of Beacon Street were sitting on their porches watching their kids playing in the front. Without provocation, members of the state police approached the corner and sprayed the street from left to right. They shot James Sneade, 36, in the stomach, as he made repairs on his car out front. Karl Greene, 17, was shot in the head as he stood on his sister's porch."

At 8:30 a father driving with his family to White Castle slowed for a barricade. Guardsmen opened fire. His ten year old son, Eddie Moss, was mortally wounded in the head.

At around 10:30, Leroy Boyd, 37, father of two, was shot to death. A funeral home director reported finding six .38 caliber bullets--police bullets--in his body.

A man named Albert Mersier died shortly before midnight after being shot while attempting to load a stolen vacuum cleaner into his car.

On Saturday morning, 14 square miles were sealed off by National Guard roadblocks, pacifying the rioters—but not ending the violence. Saturday afternoon 24-year-old Billy Furr got into a debate with a Black Muslim who had just told a Life Magazine reporter that the riot would continue "until every white man's building in Newark is burned." Billy demurred: "We ain't riotin' agains' all you whites. We're riotin' against police brutality, like that cab driver they beat up the other night. That stuff goes on all the time. When the police treat us like people 'stead of treatin' us like animals, the the riots will stop." Furr and the reporter ran into each other later. Furr gave him a beer he's looted and went back into Mack Liquors. A police car skidded to a halt as Billy Furr emerged with a six pack. He ran, and was cut down by high velocity Double 0 shot to the head. Particles from three shells went completely through his body and sprinkled the reporter. An errant shot cut down a 12-year-old boy, Joey Bass, who managed to survive.
At 6 PM bullets ripped through the windows of Eloise Spellman, a 41-year-old widow, on the 10th floor of the Hayes Homes project. Her son and daughter watched her die. The shooters were Guardsmen and state troopers, who reported she died from sniper fire.

Rebecca Brown, 30, liked to sit at her second floor window. She kept a color photo of the Star Spangled Banner clipped from the New York Sunday News on the wall. An adjacent wall was pocked with 26 automatic weapon bullets from street level, one of which killed Mrs. Brown.

Mrs. Hattie Gainer, also on the second floor, was cut down by the same flurry of bullets. A conscience-wracked state trooper barged in as she lay moaning in a pool of blood and cried, "We made a mistake. We shot the wrong person. We're killing innocent people." The ambulance didn't collect her for another three hours.

By Saturday evening 4,000 National Guardsmen were harrassing residents at random from hundreds of checkpoints set up around the city. A man described driving to the hospital to visit his injured wife: "I saw a guy get pulled from a car at Bergen and Sixteenth Avenue and the cops were beating him." Officers shot out one of his tires, taunting him from their jeeps: "Kennedy's not with you now"; "Let's kill all these black bastards."

There's more, of course; see for yourself. [2]

Reading Pam's post was a strange end to a surreal day for me. Over lunchtime, I lectured to at Gage Park High School, about ninety percent minority, about Martin Luther King's housing marches through their neighborhood in 1966—the one where he was met with Swastikas, and hit by a rock, and concluded: "I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." (I wrote about that in my most widely read post. [3]) The kids were great; they listened in rapt attention, asked great questions, brought me gifts. ("Mr. Perlstein is dope!") Then I got home to an email from one of my readers that ran like this:

I read your book this past weekend. Being 55, I was around and aware of the period described in your book, and related to it.... It is now 40 years later. I live in central NJ, a nice progressive town. The South Side is where the black people live, where the little crime we have comes from. The public schools are 50%+ black because most white parents who can afford it send their kids to private schools..... We are all quite gentile about it relative to 1968, but we will not tolerate the lowering of standards and standards of living that come with the influx of blacks.

Let me leave you with something I learned in Yeshiva: You know that the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert after leaving Egypt. But, even walking with long rest breaks, the trip might take months, not 40 years. The commentaries tell us that the Israelites with instructed to take the long way to Palestine, through Jordan, thus the 40 years. G-d knew that people who have only known slavery would not know how to behave as free people, so the generation that knew slavery died out during the march, and a new generation of free Israelites entered the land.

We freed the slaves before they ever learned to be free.... Maybe in 100 years or so - maybe - they will be civilized enough to live on the North Side with us.