otakon17 said:
Imperioratorex Caprae said:
Frankster said:
And yeh this. With dat epic military budget and everyone and their grandma having assault rifles, you'd figure US would be immune to things like this.
I mean cmon, i've seen americans be all "yeah if the british ever come back or anyone invades us, they will find a gun behind ever blade of grass!" (last part paraphrased from the japs as i loved that description).
But if you can't even handle a bunch of hicks in your own backyard, then no way you guys have a chance when the redcoats return and finally decide to finish the job! :O
"Posse Comitatus Act" prevents the US military from operating on US Soil against Americans. But DHS, FBI's HRT and the ATF should be all over a militia cult that seizes power... Even after Waco and Ruby Ridge they'd at least cordon off the area and have a known presence.
Only thing I can figure is they have some kind of radio silence/bribery going making it so none of this gets out of Hope. Also I want to play the Pastor so I can yell out during playing "I KICK ASS FOR THE LORD!".
I would imagine it is some variant of this, a lot of people think a town of 60,000 10 minutes outside of a major city counts as rural, but between the Rockies and the Sierras you've got a lot of places that are almost completely isolated. I've been to towns in Idaho and Nevada that are an hour+ drive at freeway speeds from the nearest neighboring town, where the mayor is basically the only government representative in the town, and you've got one police officer for the whole area, far enough out of the way that even highway patrol and state police won't roll through unless they are called in.
There are entire towns where you wouldn't even need to cut off cell towers or radio silence because there are no cell towers, no radio towers, and nothing close enough to reach on a short range radio anyway, and the only communication is a single landline that carries phonecalls out. Theoretically you could maybe get a message out with something like a longer distance radio, but if you cut off communication you could easily keep a lot of these places isolated for a week or more before anyone even realized anything was up, and if you had people helping you at the county level you would likely be able to keep the charade up for awhile. The only thing at the federal level that stops real life militias like this is that the feds are pretty good at not letting things like rocket launchers and machine guns illegally fall into peoples hands, and militias that legally acquire automatic weapons tend to be under a lot of scrutiny.
Especially up in the mountains, there's little logging towns that don't have any outside access for weeks at a time just due to the weather, if a little snow can isolate a town for days, I imagine a militia, that apparently has rockets, machine guns, and rebuilt WWII fighter planes, can manage the same for at least a few weeks with competent planning.
