Events in Ukraine

[Wolfsbane]

This is our Sudetenland hour, I suspect Barack will be exposed as whiter than Neville Chamberlain.
Too bad the Ukrainians don't hold a 2nd Amendment Right as real Americans do.
Every one of us should go to the range tomorrow and exercise that Right lest a tyrant try and take it away.
Take a stance for Liberty, let them hear us, and fear us !

[Bob Z Moose]

They kinda do... There's 3.1 million estimated civilian owned firearms in Ukraine (according to gunpolicy.org), with the real number probably higher. The police have 460k guns, with some being taken by the protesters during the riots. Not enough to arm every man, woman, and child, but they have 'em.

[Wolfsbane]

Good to know Bob, thanks - with the caveats, from the same source, that it's less than 7 guns per 100 people AND only 3.5% are rifles (which I suppose includes rimfire .22's), most are shotguns so they have duck hunters and rabbit hunters but very few deer hunters, and little lethality beyond a 75 yards at best ... in comparison my fellow Americans have 110 MILLION rifles, plus 86 million shotguns AND 114 million handguns !!! As of 2012 surveys indicate 34% of American households have one or more firearms, thank you Founding Fathers !!!

Everybody here in AZ should come out to the Big Sandy Machine Gun Shoot in April - my Youtube channel DreadnoughtAdventure includes some footage.

[Wolfsbane]

For fifty years of the Cold War the whole world counted Ukraine as a country, they had a full seat at the United Nations ...
I understand there are many nuances to the events in Ukraine, for the country of Ukraine - Putin of course is quoted as saying to Bush years ago "it's not even a real country...", which is much like Sadam Hussein claiming his right to invade Kuwait because it's "the 19th province of Iraq". Anyone can look back at the National Geographic pieces on Ukraine from several years ago and see that an East-West divide is real, but not any more so than the tensions here in the USA - the difference is having Moscow in their mix. 

I wonder where our lack of action originates ... we're sending Joe "shotgun" Biden to visit (as his son is handed a seat on the board of directors for the largest Ukrainian fuel company) and the Pentagon is taking weeks to deliver a planeload of MRE's ... bandages, maybe, after September ...

A dozen years ago a chain of socio-political events began with the Serbians throwing out Milosevic, next the "Rose Revolution" revitalizing Georgia and then the Orange revolution or Maiden movement in Ukraine, these were the darlings of American and West European liberals, intellectuals and socialists.

Yes the Maiden movement includes groups with ties to anti-Soviet militias/resistance that date back to WW2, the "fascists" that Putin and the Separatists loath, but how can Americans fail to sympathize with folks who resisted Lenin and Stalin after what they did to Ukraine ?