The Largest Army

Uncle points me to a link over at the Federalist Papers and he talks about our deer hunting habits.

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters. - -But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

And he's right, you know. America has a lot of folks who understand guns, and who understand, at least in part, their local woods.

For millenia, philosophers have pondered how one can maintain a well-armed population that can fend off all attackers, while simultaneously maintaining ordered governance. In America, we’ve fulfilled this dream, and we’ve done it so well and so effortlessly that no one seems to have noticed.

And he's right. The United States, once you get out of the cities, is an armed nation, and for the most part, the news is very benign.

Years ago, in Kentucky, we conducted a map exercise at the Armor School. The problem was that somehow, a division of Soviet Armor had been inserted near Frankfort, KY, and were advancing on the Bullion Depository. With the assets we had available at Knox and those assets we could rapidly get as replacements, we were having trouble holding off the Soviet horde. Then, someone started factoring in all the hillbillies with deer rifles and started figuring a realistic attrition rate for the invaders. Inside of 50 miles, we had attrited them to the point where they were no longer a viable fighting force.

As long as the deer hunters are out there, America will never be conquered by force of arms. It's all those other ways to conquer minds that scare me.