BRING IT ON MOTHERFUCKERS. Civil War Round 2. You southern rural fucks lost the first time, and you'll lose again.

She's so angry. She'd be prettier if she smiled.

This is basically a call to arms.

Since IL DOUCHE was elected, the RWNJ's in the NRA and the gun industry no longer have their usual bugbears (SCARY BLACK MAN IN WH! SCARY WHITE WOMAN MAYBE IN WH!) at which to point in order to sufficiently squeeze the amygdalas of their rabid followers, so they're trying to come up with a new scary Other to pump up their suddenly stagnating sales. Apparently Brown people just aren't doing the job for them, so they're turning to the next group on their list: liberals.

So, on top of Islamo-fascist terrorists and the aforementioned Brown people (really just the same group under different names), gun owners must now be eternally vigilant against (read: scared shitless of) their blue-leaning neighbors.

This ad is a form of reverse psychology.
Trump supporters already own guns, and are already NRA members.
The NRA wants liberals to buy guns.
It's a mostly untapped market for the gun industry, and the NRA knows that nothing gets people to buy guns like a good dose of fear.
The NRA isn't about protecting anything, it's about selling guns.

The sad thing is, it's going to work.
Fear of tRump and his supporters is going to cause many people on the left to buy guns.

This idea isn't popular only among the right-wing-gun-nuts... There are some liberals in favor of this (e.g., Susan Sarandon). I heard plenty of predictions that the election of either Trump or Clinton would "bring the revolution" and these were happy, hopeful predictions saying a revolution was long overdue.

@1
The Civil War was the US Army against the South.
This time around, it would be the Army AND the South against......
Who exactly?
Liberals?
The Coasts?
Basically unarmed untrained citizens.

Anyone who wants a revolution never thinks that they are going to be one of the millions who have to die for it, or one of the many millions more who have to suffer for it.

@7:

No, it would be pretty much the same as the last one. I really don't envision the U.S. military, given the civilian-led command-and-control structure already in-place, would collectively take the side of a crazy band of armed insurrectionists. You might have a few isolated rebellions within the ranks, but those individuals will be grossly outnumbered, and the military treats acts of treason very harshly.

@10
I wish that were true, but that's not how things will happen.
Mango Mussolini is in charge of the military, so they will definitely be on his side.
If there is going to be a war, it's going to start with tRump declaring Martial Law.

You don't seem to realize that the civilian command and control of the military is tRump and the GOP.

This is seriously dispicable. These people are like an alien species, no sense and no heart.

America is only safe when we shoot guns at other Americans. Makes sense to me.

Ignore them.

@11:

The pretext for declaring martial law nationwide would have to be a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, particularly at the federal level, something on the order of a Yellowstone eruption or a massive meteor strike, or a "Red Dawn" style invasion by a foreign power. Even another 9/11 scale attack wouldn't be sufficient to meet that standard.

Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution spells out very stringent terms under which the writ of habeus corpus can be suspended, which in turn would remove the authority of the Judicial Branch, thus effectively invoking martial law; but even then, Congress has the power to override such a declaration, as does the Supreme Court, and the Vice President and the sitting Cabinet is also empowered to declare the president unfit. Similar restraints are also invoked in the Insurrection and Posse Comitatus Acts, which would be another avenue the president could conceivably use to make such a declaration. A GOP-dominated Congress and even a Conservative-dominated SCOTUS wouldn't in and of itself be sufficient to uphold the declaration, as state government would still have some authority to challenge it. Even if the Executive were to argue such a need by pointing to an armed "rebellion", as indicated in 1.9, it would have to be literally on nearly a nation-wide scale, such as what caused President Lincoln to make such a declaration at the outset of the Civil War, and realistically the likelihood of such a large-scale, widespread insurrection simply defies credulity.

So, a declaration by the president to invoke martial law, if not justified by a situation at least fundamentally similar to the examples above, could very easily be determined unlawful at any number of levels of authority, in which case the standards set in the Uniform Code of Military Justice would preclude any service personnel from obeying such an order coming from a superior, including the president in their role as Commander-In-Chief; in fact the UCMJ stresses that under such circumstances it is the duty of all members of the military to NOT obey the order, as they would still be held responsible for their actions and accountable to authority (i.e. no defense using the "I was only following orders" argument).

In short, it would take literally the wholesale collusion of the President, the Cabinet, the majority of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, AND an overwhelming majority of the military, national guard and state militias, and state and local law enforcement, all acting in concert to successfully invoke and uphold martial law on a national scale - and that is just as far-fetched of a paranoid delusion as it was when the RWNJ's were suggesting its imminence during the Obama Administration.

I was fully prepared to chastise my fellow lefties about overreacting to whatever this ad was.

Then i watched it, and holy fucking god, it's terrible. Terrible terrible terrible. Near-criminal levels of terrible.

@15
I wish I had your ability to trust this government, but I'm a realist.
Hopefully your right, but considering the fact that a third of the country believes that the fool they put in office can do no wrong, I'm more than a little concerned.

@17:

And those are the people you should be rightly concerned about. Government isn't perfect, and the founders knew that, which is one - of many reasons - they implemented what's turned out to be a pretty strong set of checks-and-balances against any one branch wielding too much power over the others. I mean look at the current situation: the GOP effectively controls two of the three branches, and has heavy influence on the third, and yet they still can't get shit done.

@1 I hate this shit. Who is in control of the GOP right now? Is it Trump? The urban billionaire businessman from NYC? Maybe Kushner? The millionaire son of a real estate mogul from NJ? Or is it the neocons like Pence (Indiana) and Ryan (Wisconsin) - an urban and a suburban midwesterner from wealthy families? Or maybe it's the billionaire midwesterners like the DeVos-Prince family? Or the alt-right assholes and their media machine, Breitbart, run out of Southern California and headed by Virginia's Bannon after he spent years in finance? Or the other Stephens- Stephen Miller, born and raised inCalifornia- or Steven Mnuchin, billionaire from NJ who works for Goldman Sachs? Perhaps the billionaire alt-right technocrats in Silicone Valley like Peter Thiel? Let's see, Tillerson and the Koch Bros are both southerners, in oil and gas, but they spent most of their life making money in New England and neither are rural fucks.

I'm just saying that I'm sick to death of this stereotype that it's somehow poor rural hicks that are driving the country in the ground when it is overwhelming being run by rich urban people from CA and New England. If it's a civil war, if blue states like CA, NY, NJ are going to secede, I hope as hell they take all these assholes with them.

@10 also.

It's foolish to think that the lines of power are being drawn along regional lines. Here's the truth. The big blue urban areas control the country. They control BOTH the conservatives and the liberals. The vast majority of the people in power ON BOTH SIDES are from the big blue urban areas. Because there are more average citizens who vote blue in big blue urban areas, people in a bubble think that it's just rural hicks in red areas causing this problem. But rural hicks have no power, nor do liberals in blue cities. And the people with actual power- the oligarchs, the government, the military chiefs, the media moguls, etc- they are overwhelmingly from big blue urban areas as well. And even when they came from other regions, they almost always then moved away to big blue urban areas for school/work. The divide is not regional.

As for guns (to the general discussion) here's the thing. So long a gun owners are on the side of state violence (supporting the rule of law, supporting the police, supporting border patrol, generally being patriotic and supportive of the military) then the far right will LOVE you. The NRA will love you, the police and military will tolerate you, the GOP will play you. So you might feel that you have some power. The moment you try to actually take power against the state - even just for the autonomy of your own group- the state will crush you to dust. Think Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. It doesn't matter if you are on the right or if you are in the NRA or if you support the GOP. If you try to achieve any autonomous power, the state will crush you. On the left, they will destroy you the moment you organize and pick up guns because people on the left are generally opposed to state power in the first place. Think Black Panthers who armed themselves. The point is, this sort of vigilante empowerment bullshit is only tolerated by people in power so long as it is used to SERVE state power, and that's what the NRA is targeting. If you take a step beyond that, right or left, you will be squashed immediately. This is why it's nonstrategic to even attempt bringing about any sort of violent revolution (aside from the many ethical and practical arguments against it, many of which are mentioned above). I agree with @5. This commercial has caused a lot of alarm among people who are organizing on the left, and it's exactly what the NRA etc want. They want them to try to arm themselves because they know they will immediately be crushed if they do. There are better ways to fight power. Obstruction, civil disobedience, long-term organizing, better media game, running better candidates, getting money out of politics, massive strikes, etc. It's not that I'm a pacifist, it's just that I know the difference between a poorly organized militia with guns and the worlds best funded military with the capacity to blow up the planet many times over.

@COMTE Sorry about the previous post if it seemed I was arguing with you- I was emphatically agreeing and adding on, and it's been pointed out to me lately that it makes me sound like I'm arguing when I'm just being intense, lol. Yes, they will not declare martial law unless something really big goes down- a big terrorist attack, a major riot (LA riot style major, not Ferguson). But I also agree with Adam K about the armed right's intentions with this ad. They don't need a giant move like a declaration of martial law to slowly take more power and to squash any resistance group or anti-state organizing. They can do it on the local level just by arming the police, giving them slightly more freedom and power every year, increasing surveillance, increasing jail time, and cracking down on any organized groups with weapons. And we don't have to speculate what any of this looks like since we've already seen it play out many times over. Look at the increased powers given to the police and feds under the patriot act. Look at decreased privacy since then, increased powers of executive branch, continued merging of fed agents with local, especially in deportations. This took place under both Obama and Bush, so of course this admin could use any organized armed threat against their control to increase as well. And to see how it plays out if a group really does organize itself with weapons with the goal of achieving some autonomy from the state, we need to look no further than Waco or Black Panthers to see how the govt will respond.