[All else snipped...]
(I know most of us, like Leigh, think we'd resist, but we're looking at ourselves through rose-tinted glasses: our predictions of our behavior in response to authority figures do not correspond to actual social behavior--see Milgram et al.). <...>
Oh sure, they could have forced me at gunpoint, broken my will, impressed or shanghaied me, but that's not at all economically efficient when there are more than enough "cooperators". Strong enough resistance may even overcome the neccesity on the government's part to require conformity from the individual. At this point in the history of the US, I strongly believe that the "co-operators" are individuals who are mostly "going along" to get the last piece of the "pie" from this society before it's percieved christian apocalyptic crash.
I also suspect reliabilty is a more important factor than conformity when giving someone a weapon, as opposed to a ream of IRS tax forms.
I sense it in the conversations I have with military age kids, go along, get it while the getting's good, or else you may wind up with nothing owed to you by society at all... not even some broken, dismantled variant on the Veterans Administration system.
"...And if 6 people a day walked in, six people... walk in...sing a bar of alice's restaurant, and walked out.... They'd think it was a movement.
And they'd be right." --Arlo Guthrie
#33#