Ok, before I start with the substantive portion of my diary, let me just give a little back slap to myself for making the "High Impact Diaries" list. Woohoo for number 99!!! Ok, sorry, I was just a little excited. Ok, let's get on with it, shall we?
A lot of talk has been dedicated over the past few days over Chuck Norris' bid for the president of Texistan, as well as the "We Surround Them" farce due to take place tomorrow. Now, my personal opinion is that these little gatherings will be an enormous flop, not to mention that you can't just rip a page from Obama's campaign playbook without having good ideas to back it up, but I digress. Let's pretend that the gun totin' secession, fueled by S'More Schnapps, gets off the ground and we have ourselves full out riots, gun battles, and the like. Could they succeed? More over the fold...
There are several key assumptions I'm going to make for purposes of this little thought experiment. First is that, due to better training, equipment, and (for local law enforcement personnel) knowledge of the geography of the area, I'm going to (a little arbitrarily, but based a little on my military experience) peg 1 law enforcement officer being able to take on at least 3 or more insurrectionists. My second assumption is that there would be large scale coordination to squelch this rebellion at the outset, and last, that there will be a statistically insignificant number of law enforcement going over to the insurrectionists side.
So, let's start with regular law enforcement personnel, your cops, detectives, and so forth. As of 2006, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, there are 861,000 law enforcement personnel in America today. Next we have federal law enforcement personnel which are empowered to make arrests and carry firearms, which the Bureau of Justice Stastics numbers at 88,000. Finally, from Wikipedia, the number of active duty and reserve personnel serving in all branches in the US military number 2,903,053. Now, based on my own experience, many of those personnel will be combat ineffective for a variety of reasons (old age, lack of training, work in administrative posts, stuck in Iraq, etc.) so I'll reduce that number by 2/3. That leaves us with 967,684 people.
Adding all that up, we have 1,916,684 people who (in my little scenario) presumably would respond to a large scale uprising on the part of these secessionists. Now, based on my previous conservative (in my eyes, anyway!) estimate of 1 law enforcement personnel dealing with 3 insurrectionists, we arrive my guesstimate of them being able to deal with 5,750,052 insurrectionists. I would actually peg the number much higher, since I know what sort of equipment can be brought to bear against them (tanks, humvees, swat vehicles, Bradleys, just to name a few), but, since my little story also has a lot of information gaps, I figured this would be one way to address that. Please also note that I have not included numbers of other US citizens who would probably be drafted to help, or the number of private citizens who would fight against the secessionists militia style, since I have no good way to even guess at these numbers.
So, now I suppose the question is, would you believe that Glen Beck, Chuck Norris, Rush Limbaugh, and all the other blowhards are going to be able to form a group of at least 6 million people who are willing to die, go to prison, and give up all that they hold dear for this new nation? I really don't think so, and I don't think you should either. So, what do you think? I couldn't come up with any way to estimate the number of people likely to ascribe to these viewpoints, or the number likely to actually fight to make this little fantasy come true, but if someone knows a good way, I'd love to hear it!