What if: Terrorists vs Armed US civilians

Mressage from a country that has suffered from terrorists but very, very rarely random mass-shootings for no obvious motive:

Although the security people can pick up clues to the risk an individual poses, and they have stopped many planned attacks; you cannot distinguish a terrorist from anyone else, and you cannot always tell in advance if any individual is going to do anything dreadful. That is particularly so if the attacker is acting alone, as many are. They don't go round identifying themselves to all and sundry!

Killing wildlife for a hobby or food is one thing. That is shooting in controlled conditions in open countryside and at fairly long range, at eaily-identified, unsuspecting so slow-moving animals, that as Asisficair points out, can't shoot back.

Trying to take your hunting rifles or even hand-guns into a crowded city street as an armed vigilante thinking you can head off a terrorist attack in a crowded city street, is quite another. You do not know who the attacker is, nor how and where he will strike, until he has done it; and you do not know whom you might shoot with the rounds that miss him.

It'd hard enough for the Police even if they have been warned an attack is imminent, somewhere on some day soon. Leave it to them, not gung-ho big-game hunters.

It's also better to catch the terrorist alive as then you have more chance of understanding the motives of such people, and more chance of tracing his fellows-in-crime; to improve the chances of reducing the risks of future terrorist attacks.

That and making him face up to what he's done and what sort of person he is.

"There were over 600,000 hunters this season in the state of Wisconsin .... Allow me to restate that number: 600,000!

OWO

Over the last several months, Wisconsin's hunters became the eighth largest army in the world.

(That’s more men under arms than in Iran .. More than France and Germany combined.)

These men, deployed to the woods of a single American state, Wisconsin, to hunt with firearms, And NO ONE WAS KILLED.

That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan's 700,000 hunters, ALL OF WHOM HAVE RETURNED HOME SAFELY.

Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and it literally establishes the fact that the Hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

And then add in the total number of hunters in the other 46 states. It's millions more.

The point?

America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower! Hunting... it's not just a way to fill the freezer.

It's a matter of national security.

OWO

That's why all enemies, foreign and domestic, want to see us disarmed.

Food for thought, when next we consider gun control. Overall it's true, so if we disregard some assumptions that hunters don't possess the same skills as soldiers, the question would still remain... What army of 2 million would want to face 30 million, 40 million, or 50 million armed citizens??? For the sake of our freedom, don't ever allow gun control or confiscation of guns."

With todays politics there are diverse definitions of terrorists particularly domestic ones. We just had two court cases that varied in political interpretation with the trial in Kenosha and the one in Georgia. Vigilantism must be defined because we can’t agree on that from state to state.

This has already happened actually. There was a case not too long ago where vigilantes went after some criminals and the cops arrested the vigilantes.
In a war that is going to be an even worse shit show cause in war everyone has to think on their feet and 99% can't do that.