Urban Militia: 2000

[Kaptin Kurk]

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, it to create a timeline in which American urbanites are viewed as the people most obsessed with the 2nd Amendment, and the vast majority of guns of all types are owned by urbanites, with Urban militias being pretty much ubiquitous.

 

[sciscisciortino]

You'll have to keep together the radical left in America, or barring that, prevent the Black Panthers from imploding.

 

[Expat]

We should really have a special name for a challenge that isn't ASB but that requires the overthrow of civilization to achieve.

I know it's a jackass answer, but I can't think of any way beyond a war or a livestock plague so severe that results in the downfall of civilization. Larger communities will fortify and arm themselves and demographically most of the guns will be in "cities," though I doubt a city will amount to more than the order of a few thousand people in this situation. Still, it's all relative.

 

[Geon]

POD in the 60's

There is a way to do it.

A good POD would be in the 60's. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated a few years earlier, let us say around 1965. As a result more militant factions develop in the African/American community. These factions starting with King's death use it to turn the cities of the U.S. into battle zones.

President Johnson is forced to draw down U.S. involvement in Vietnam because the troops are needed in our cities to maintain order. But this approach further angers many radicals. Joined by the Weather Underground and other radical groups a guerilla war begins in the U.S. urban centers. Enclaves of scared people, convinced that the government is unable or unwilling to protect them and convinced they must defend themselves begin to form "neighborhood protection groups," which are actually armed vigilantes patroling their neighborhoods. These vigilantes in some cities would get the nod from police due to strained police forces not being able to be everywhere at once.

The street warfare continues sporadically through the 70's and peters out by the 80's, but these urban militas remain "on guard," especially in the face of gang and drug related activity.

Geon

 

[MerryPrankster]

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, it to create a timeline in which American urbanites are viewed as the people most obsessed with the 2nd Amendment, and the vast majority of guns of all types are owned by urbanites, with Urban militias being pretty much ubiquitous.

Rural militias aren't ubiquitous, so if you're trying to make a mirror image here, it's not really working.

 

[Emperor Julian]

There is a way to do it.

A good POD would be in the 60's. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated a few years earlier, let us say around 1965. As a result more militant factions develop in the African/American community. These factions starting with King's death use it to turn the cities of the U.S. into battle zones.

President Johnson is forced to draw down U.S. involvement in Vietnam because the troops are needed in our cities to maintain order. But this approach further angers many radicals. Joined by the Weather Underground and other radical groups a guerilla war begins in the U.S. urban centers. Enclaves of scared people, convinced that the government is unable or unwilling to protect them and convinced they must defend themselves begin to form "neighborhood protection groups," which are actually armed vigilantes patroling their neighborhoods. These vigilantes in some cities would get the nod from police due to strained police forces not being able to be everywhere at once.

The street warfare continues sporadically through the 70's and peters out by the 80's, but these urban militas remain "on guard," especially in the face of gang and drug related activity.

Geon

Meanwhile, the conservative rural areas support the government's attempts to restrict the urbanites' ability to own weapons, and develop a stronger sense of loyalty to the federal government than the city dwellers.