like I've said, the subject recently came up on another website so I think I'll tell you how I think.
I was terrorfied at the possibilities of what could happen at Richmond and make no bones about it. Thousands of armed people showing up, many with one in the chamber, safety on.
What could possibly go wrong? One jerk with a 2 inch salute and a match could have created an epic panic and God only knows what would have happened. Frankly having lived through the Kent State shooting I have little faith in police training. One policeman with an itchy trigger finger could have started a real melee.
That's on top of one of our guys having a brain fart and squeezing one off although to be honest I think the police were more apt to screw up. Add to it the possibility of Antifa or some false flag operator in action and it looks like we have pretty slim odds of safely pulling off the Lobby Day 20 rally. To this day I consider it to be the Miracle of Richmond.
I fully planned on returning injured or in a box.
Anyway, I showed up at the pre rally meeting held by the people on the website I frequent and came in dressed in my usual attire of a flight jacket, jeans and a basic shirt. The whole meeting was a blur and to this day if I walked passed anyone I met there I probably would not recognize them. I've mentioned this before.
Unlike about 75% of the people that attended I was unarmed. To quote the late Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, I figured that "By the time I need a rifle there would be plenty of them laying around".
I also saw the rules for out of state people carrying arms were a little confusing for my taste and decided that the last thing I wanted to deal with was a Virginia cop that may or may not know what was/was not legal. For me it was a simple case of 'why bother?'
I had a host that was a decent guy and a licensed ham like me that had contacts in the rally leadership. We planned on the pair of us sticking together. I had a handi-talkie programmed for local use by another ham.
If push came to shove, he'd become my battle buddy although he said his plan was to get the hell out of there the instant things went sideways. I still don't know how I would have reacted it things got crazy. As angry as I was, I may very well have stuck around and helped slug it out. Actually I probably would have stuck around until it was clear there was a winner and a loser. If the people won, well the locals could take care of the mop-up. Had they fled, I'd evade to go at it again sometime.
Still, what my plan for push come to shove and I had to try and survive was fairly simple. I would simply hide in plain sight.
Hunters and soldiers know the advantage to blending in with their surroundings. As a hunter and former soldier I was fully aware of this and decided to do just that.
My uniform for the rally was disgusting. I was clad in worn out shoes, shabby, dirty jeans, a grubby hoodie covered with a tan duck barn jacket that looked like a dairy farmer had shoveled out his barn in if for twenty five years and had finally thrown it away. I looked like a totally homeless bum. On top of that I had not shaved in about a week and capped the outfit off with an eared Elmer Fudd hat. To age myself even more I carried a very beaten up old cane that looked like it had been fished out of someone's trash.
I looked just like one of the homeless that seem to show up at every gathering because it looked like a good place to panhandle.
I had figured that if things went totally south and we were losing with all escape and evasion routes blocked I would simply throw my radio away, wet my pants, wedge myself into a doorway and pass myself off as a passed-out pants pissing wino.
In one of my pockets I had a quarter pint of Jim Beam I would pour on myself to smell drunk. Fact is I also had a half pint flask of decent cognac I would use to keep from freezing as it was brutally cold that day.
I figured I'd either be ignored or scraped up and taken to a homeless shelter if my luck held. It was my fallback escape and evasion plan.
With any luck, when things settled down I could get up and stumble off past any police lines. If addressed I'd play incoherent and mumble whatever to convince whoever I was another brain addled wino.
For a second my partner looked at me somewhat disgusted until I told him about Plan B and if I recall he shook his head.
Being unshaven makes me look older than my years and I figured that if anyone saw the pair of us walking around the outside of the crowd they would think I was my partner's farmer uncle or someone getting a tour of the big city or some damned thing.
Anyway I didn't have to do anything but walk around with a radio and occasionally mingle with the crowds.
Later when I mentioned the way I dressed that day someone asked me if I really stood a chance of successful evasion had the big hammer fallen. I told him that sometimes the best place to sleep is in the lion's mouth.
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The rally itself was originally organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League. It was supposed to be unarmed but a grass roots movement put the word out to openly carry. It took off and thousands took up arms and joined in.
In effect the VCDL had inadvertently created an armed group big enough to easily crush the state government without even a burp.
Granted, it was somewhat of a disorganized rabble but the veteran population that was there would be more than enough to leaven the loaf and make it somewhat combat effecient, or at least enough so to win even if it was from sheer mass of numbers.
When the rally broke up we simply cleaned up after ourselves, and ghosted ourselves back home. An hour afterwards there wasn't a soul left by the Capitol building.
I hope the powers that be were paying attention.
The people organized, appeared, showed their strength in numbers and quietly went back to where they came from. They ghosted away, went home, they went to jobs, they simply returned to business and became invisible.
In short, they had appeared out of nowhere and went right back to where they came from and became invisible.
If I were a legislator I would be very, very wary of a people like that. They are everywhere. They're the people that mowed your lawn, repaired the gutter in your house, or fixed your car. It would take most of these people a single phone call to the right people to make a legislator simply vanish if they got pushed them hard enough.
On 20 January, 2020 a ghost army appeared at the capitol in Richmond, met and then returned to wherever they came from.
The next time they may not be so benevolent.
Left out the most important part! Were both flasks empty at the end of the day?
ReplyDeleteNope. The Jim Beam flask stayed 100% full but I did have a pull of cognac. It was COLD>
DeleteAs president of VCDL, I want to clarify a key point: the only part of the rally that had to be unarmed was the part INSIDE the fence around where the speakers were. Outside the fence, everyone could be armed and we NEVER discouraged those outside the fence from being armed. All of our lobby days have armed attendees. It was just this one, in that one part of the event, where people were disarmed, not by us, but by the Governor using metal detectors.
ReplyDeleteI remember that well. The people inside the fence were unarmed however it appeared that they were the minority of the attendees.
ReplyDeleteIn the FWIW department, shortly after some feedbag in Richmond spouted off about the VCDL I INSTANTLY joined. I didn''t want to be left out.