How likely is it that we will actually experience a disaster that brings down our national power grid?

Will the government seize all guns in the United States?

If Continuity of Government response plans are initiated, will they be able to effectively lock down every major city and the country as a whole under a martial law scenario?

Is an economic collapse in our near future?

These and a host of other critical topics are covered in the latest interview from SGT Report with Survival Blog editor James Rawles.

Rawles on Gun Confiscation:

I think it would be impossible to disarm the people of this country. Along with Yemen we’re the most heavily armed society on the planet. It would be absolutely impossible to disarm the citizenry.

There might be an attempt to do it incremently over the course of generations. I think that’s the only way that would happen.

There are so many guns being produced each year – a couple of million guns each  year – it’s just mathematically impossible, if not socially impossible, to even envision the logisitics of trying to disarm the American citizenry. It just can’t happen. There’s too many guns in circulation and they’re essentially the final guarantor of our freedom.

The next phase of the financial collapse:

I think that given the financial situation globally – if you look at what’s happening in Italy, Spain, Greece and the most recent election in France – we’re very likely to see a lot of financial turmoil in the coming months.

A lot of it will spill over into American markets. I think there is likely to be another global credit crisis like in 2008, and it could get very, very  ugly very quickly.

I think it’s prudent for people to prepare. I think that if you look at it in terms of the clock face approach, we’re probably just minutes from midnight in terms of where we should be in terms of our preparedness.

Rawles on the probability of a grid-down worst-case scenario collapse:

In all of my writings I’ve stressed that the North American power grids – and there’re three of them – are the real lynch pin of our modern technological society.

If the grids go down, all bets are off.

It’s important that people plan for the worst case. The worst case would, of course, be grid down. The chances of that happening are fairly small, but if you’re prepared for the worst case you can take anything lesser in stride.

…

In terms of the power grid, if they knock that leg out from underneath society they can create a cascade of events that will be completely beyond their control.

Martial law is not going to restore order if the power grid goes down and does not come back up within a few days.

On martial law:

 I think the whole rhetoric about martial law tends to be overblown, because the logistics of implementing martial law would be daunting. Even in the United States, where we have a fairly sophisticated military, the numbers just don’t add up for martial law being instituted for more than just a very short period of time.

We have a military that’s primarily deployed overseas right now. The military here in the United States, active and reserve components, don’t even have enough vehicles for training much less live operations. The majority of the rolling stock for the US military right now is in places like Bosnia and Afghanistan.

How do you institute martial law if you can’t even get troops from point A to point B?

Obsessing on martial is probably not productive, but we do need to be on guard to guard our liberty, and we do need to speak up when there are abuses of our Constitutional Rights, especially the first amendment.

SGT Report with James Wesley Rawles (Part 1 of 2):

SGT Report with James Wesley Rawles (Part 2 of 2):

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