RIP
February 16, 1918 – January 30, 2013
Three beautiful ladies with gorgeous gams...
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Stepping back...
in order to see the forest rather than just trees.
I've discovered that too much information is sometimes a hindrance to understanding a situation. It's easier to see the big picture by stepping back and concentrating on the major pieces of the puzzle and how they fit together.
Too much of my time has been taken up with the trees. It's time to view the forest.
I can't think of one other thing to say.
More:
Moonbattery: Here Comes the Flood
AWD: There’s Something Happening Here
Breitbart: No Deal - Obama: No Border Security Before Path to Citizenship
Keith Koffler: Obama's dangerous charge of 'absolutism'
AT: The Collectivist Mind Game, Part 1: Demonizing the Non-Compliant
Camp of the Saints: Resistance Is Not Futile
Liberty's Torch: A Second Opinion
I've discovered that too much information is sometimes a hindrance to understanding a situation. It's easier to see the big picture by stepping back and concentrating on the major pieces of the puzzle and how they fit together.
Too much of my time has been taken up with the trees. It's time to view the forest.
I can't think of one other thing to say.
More:
Moonbattery: Here Comes the Flood
AWD: There’s Something Happening Here
Breitbart: No Deal - Obama: No Border Security Before Path to Citizenship
Keith Koffler: Obama's dangerous charge of 'absolutism'
AT: The Collectivist Mind Game, Part 1: Demonizing the Non-Compliant
Camp of the Saints: Resistance Is Not Futile
Liberty's Torch: A Second Opinion
Thursday, January 24, 2013
March for Life 2013
January 25th, 2013
This child deserves to live...
God bless all the marchers.
40 years = 55million babies slaughtered.
This child deserves to live...
God bless all the marchers.
40 years = 55million babies slaughtered.
T
Senator Rand Paul questions Kerry...
interesting.
Who are these weasels? Kerry has quantified his intelligence by the amount of the wealth of his wife.
Who are these weasels? Kerry has quantified his intelligence by the amount of the wealth of his wife.
Racism: Libtards just can't help themselves...
and some Wild Bill.
Ever wonder why the tragedy in Sandy Hook is being used by the libtards to push their anti-gun agenda when every year we have hundreds of black children slaughtered in the streets of Chicago?
They're using Sandy Hook because it was white kids who were killed. In their warped thinking, they believe that someone who clings to conservative values wouldn't give a rip about those black kids. This is proven wrong over and over. Who is it that cares about black kids being aborted at a rate that is surely making Martin Luther King do flip-flops in his grave? It's not the libtards. They gloat over the genocide of black people and call it "choice."
Their inherent racism is projected unto "We the People" who champion the rights of everyone - not just the chosen few. The proof is the white yuppie soy-latte drinking quasi-intellectuals who have jumped on the push for gun bans. After all, it's for the white kids, doncha know?
More:
Dems Reintroduce ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban (and List Shows It’s Not Just Rifles): ‘Purpose Is to Dry Up the Supply of These Weapons Over Time’
Wild Bill is backing up what I've already said!
Ever wonder why the tragedy in Sandy Hook is being used by the libtards to push their anti-gun agenda when every year we have hundreds of black children slaughtered in the streets of Chicago?
They're using Sandy Hook because it was white kids who were killed. In their warped thinking, they believe that someone who clings to conservative values wouldn't give a rip about those black kids. This is proven wrong over and over. Who is it that cares about black kids being aborted at a rate that is surely making Martin Luther King do flip-flops in his grave? It's not the libtards. They gloat over the genocide of black people and call it "choice."
Their inherent racism is projected unto "We the People" who champion the rights of everyone - not just the chosen few. The proof is the white yuppie soy-latte drinking quasi-intellectuals who have jumped on the push for gun bans. After all, it's for the white kids, doncha know?
More:
Dems Reintroduce ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban (and List Shows It’s Not Just Rifles): ‘Purpose Is to Dry Up the Supply of These Weapons Over Time’
Wild Bill is backing up what I've already said!
Beyonce didn't sing the National Anthem...
no, really.
I don't care whether she lip-synced or not. That pop-styled aberration, rife with extra notes, many of which were never part of the original song, is not the National Anthem.
This self-styled auto-tuned diva, found it necessary to put her own stamp on our anthem in the name of "artistic" license. Was it it not good enough as written, Beyonce? If so, why don't you go write your own? Oh, I forgot, you steal songs, you don't write.
That rendition is as disgraceful as this entire administration.
I don't care whether she lip-synced or not. That pop-styled aberration, rife with extra notes, many of which were never part of the original song, is not the National Anthem.
This self-styled auto-tuned diva, found it necessary to put her own stamp on our anthem in the name of "artistic" license. Was it it not good enough as written, Beyonce? If so, why don't you go write your own? Oh, I forgot, you steal songs, you don't write.
That rendition is as disgraceful as this entire administration.
If you have any doubt this country is in serious trouble...
watch this:
Take note of the fact that it's mainly women who are lined up for their benefits, compliments of Uncle "Daddy" Sam.
Meantime, our president is planning on traveling all over the country to promote his gun control agenda. On our dime! Ever wonder why the people behind the sock-puppet in DC are so eager to have him out on the road?
Hey, Barry - how about working on jobs for these losers, all of whom look like your "sons and daughters?"
H/T The Blaze
Take note of the fact that it's mainly women who are lined up for their benefits, compliments of Uncle "Daddy" Sam.
Meantime, our president is planning on traveling all over the country to promote his gun control agenda. On our dime! Ever wonder why the people behind the sock-puppet in DC are so eager to have him out on the road?
Hey, Barry - how about working on jobs for these losers, all of whom look like your "sons and daughters?"
H/T The Blaze
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Now there's more Bad Blue...
brought to you by Doug Ross - and we thank him.
From Doug:
From Doug:
By popular demand (or perahps just 'cuz I wanted it for myself), the BadBlue News Service has added a Gun Channel (BadBlue.com/Guns). It's a Drudge-style news service that monitors the major firearms sites for news that's poppin'.
Hillary Clinton smirks at questions from Rand Paul...
what the hell is wrong with these libtards? Is everything a joke to them? Silly question!
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
From Bunni...
Watch out for your fingers,uncouth alert!
The Great Amusing Bunni Needs Help
I can't imagine a world without Bunni...
This country is in deep doo...
and anyone who hasn't seen the light needs to be paying closer attention.
Who is Obama? A nobody! A low class sock-puppet, anti-intellectual, who does the bidding of his masters. His prime concern is his next delivery of "blow" and his next "hook-up" with whatever guy has caught his eye.
I said it in the previous post and I'll say it again:
For the first time I'm truly frightened for this country.
Read (and then re-read) his inauguration speech. It's chilling.
Who is Obama? A nobody! A low class sock-puppet, anti-intellectual, who does the bidding of his masters. His prime concern is his next delivery of "blow" and his next "hook-up" with whatever guy has caught his eye.
I said it in the previous post and I'll say it again:
For the first time I'm truly frightened for this country.
Read (and then re-read) his inauguration speech. It's chilling.
Repulsive creepy pro-abortion video...
touts the anniversary of Roe v Wade.
I don't think I've seen anything quite this awful - ever. For a black man to champion abortion when the majority of abortions are performed on black women makes it even more despicable.
I am becoming increasingly frightened of the path this country is on.
H/T Jammie Wearing Fool
I don't think I've seen anything quite this awful - ever. For a black man to champion abortion when the majority of abortions are performed on black women makes it even more despicable.
I am becoming increasingly frightened of the path this country is on.
H/T Jammie Wearing Fool
It's Tuesday...
what's going on.
Always On Watch: Video: Slaves of Dubai
Capitalist Preservation: CBO: Electric Vehicle Subsidies to Cost $7.5 Billion With Little Benefit. Anyone really surprised?
Sentry Journal: Liberty needs more doers and fewer watchers
Political Clown Parade: A Great Civilization Is Singing Itself To Sleep
Camp of the Saints: ‘To Protect And To Serve’…Whom?
Conservative's on Fire Asylum Watch: Conservatives on Fire has Evolved!
Always On Watch: Video: Slaves of Dubai
Capitalist Preservation: CBO: Electric Vehicle Subsidies to Cost $7.5 Billion With Little Benefit. Anyone really surprised?
Sentry Journal: Liberty needs more doers and fewer watchers
Political Clown Parade: A Great Civilization Is Singing Itself To Sleep
Camp of the Saints: ‘To Protect And To Serve’…Whom?
Monday, January 21, 2013
Tina Turner shows Michelle Obama how to be Tina Turner...
hint: it takes more than bangs.
This is from 2009. Tina Turner was born in 1939. You do the math.
She puts to shame the skinny white girl backup dancers.
I would dearly love to meet this woman. A true survivor...
And check out those arms. I'm jealous!
This is from 2009. Tina Turner was born in 1939. You do the math.
She puts to shame the skinny white girl backup dancers.
I would dearly love to meet this woman. A true survivor...
And check out those arms. I'm jealous!
Classless Michelle Obama on full display shovelling food and rolling her eyes at Boehner......
for anyone who thinks she may be a "lady."
Don't miss her slinging her whole arm on the table. My dog eats more politely than that.
And why is Obama always playing with his nose??
I thought my capacity to be shocked was long gone. Not anymore...
H/T: SooperMexican
Don't miss her slinging her whole arm on the table. My dog eats more politely than that.
And why is Obama always playing with his nose??
I thought my capacity to be shocked was long gone. Not anymore...
H/T: SooperMexican
Obama's speech...
would make any Communist leader proud.
Obama’s Swearing-in, January 19, 2012
OBAMA: Vice President Biden, Mr. Chief Justice, Members of the United States Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:
Each time we gather to inaugurate a president, we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.
For more than two hundred years, we have.
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.
Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.
Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.
Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.
Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.
But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.
This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.
For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.
We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.
We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.
We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.
We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill and courage. Our citizens, seared by the memory of those we have lost, know too well the price that is paid for liberty. The knowledge of their sacrifice will keep us forever vigilant against those who would do us harm. But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.
We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naive about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear. America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm. That is our generation’s task – to make these words, these rights, these values – of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life; it does not mean we will all define liberty in exactly the same way, or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time – but it does require us to act in our time.
For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.
My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction – and we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service. But the words I spoke today are not so different from the oath that is taken each time a soldier signs up for duty, or an immigrant realizes her dream. My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride.
They are the words of citizens, and they represent our greatest hope.
You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course.
You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.
Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.
Thank you, God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America.
End transcript
Obama’s Swearing-in, January 19, 2012
OBAMA: Vice President Biden, Mr. Chief Justice, Members of the United States Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:
Each time we gather to inaugurate a president, we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.
For more than two hundred years, we have.
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.
Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.
Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.
Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.
Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.
But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.
This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.
For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.
We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.
We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.
We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.
We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill and courage. Our citizens, seared by the memory of those we have lost, know too well the price that is paid for liberty. The knowledge of their sacrifice will keep us forever vigilant against those who would do us harm. But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.
We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naive about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear. America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm. That is our generation’s task – to make these words, these rights, these values – of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life; it does not mean we will all define liberty in exactly the same way, or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time – but it does require us to act in our time.
For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.
My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction – and we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service. But the words I spoke today are not so different from the oath that is taken each time a soldier signs up for duty, or an immigrant realizes her dream. My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride.
They are the words of citizens, and they represent our greatest hope.
You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course.
You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.
Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.
Thank you, God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America.
End transcript
Michelle Obama: "We love this country so we can all work together to change it"...
while her disgusting husband informs us how great her new hairdo looks.
Really? This is the most important thing going on?
He can't even tell the truth about her wig. She looks like Puxiltawy Phil peeking out of his hole (no insults to ground hogs intended.)
First Term: Obama Increased Debt $50,521 Per Household; More Than First 42 Presidents in 53 Terms Combined
First Term: Americans ‘Not in Labor Force’ Increased 8,332,000
This comment from the YouTube page sums it up nicely:
H/T: Freedom's Lighthouse
Really? This is the most important thing going on?
He can't even tell the truth about her wig. She looks like Puxiltawy Phil peeking out of his hole (no insults to ground hogs intended.)
First Term: Obama Increased Debt $50,521 Per Household; More Than First 42 Presidents in 53 Terms Combined
First Term: Americans ‘Not in Labor Force’ Increased 8,332,000
This comment from the YouTube page sums it up nicely:
H/T: Freedom's Lighthouse
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
It's Thursday...
what's going on.
White House Dossier: The Real Problem with Obama’s Gun Control Remarks
Laughing Conservative: Another liberal squished on guns
Angry White Dude: OBAMA SHOOTS BLANKS ON GUN CONTROL
Diogenes: I Ask You My Democrat Friends.....How Does It Feel?
HancAquam: Religious Freedom Proclamation: what gets left out?
Father Z: Pres. Obama declares – no kidding – “Religious Freedom Day”
Bunkerville: 3 Supreme Court Cases to Watch: Gay Marriage, Drunk Driving, and Property Rights:
White House Dossier: The Real Problem with Obama’s Gun Control Remarks
Laughing Conservative: Another liberal squished on guns
Angry White Dude: OBAMA SHOOTS BLANKS ON GUN CONTROL
Diogenes: I Ask You My Democrat Friends.....How Does It Feel?
HancAquam: Religious Freedom Proclamation: what gets left out?
Father Z: Pres. Obama declares – no kidding – “Religious Freedom Day”
Bunkerville: 3 Supreme Court Cases to Watch: Gay Marriage, Drunk Driving, and Property Rights:
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
The NRA answer to Obama...
powerful.
More:
Stranded in Sonoma: Executive Odors
Texas Conservative News: Obama Announces List of 23 Gun Control Executive Orders – Lawmakers and Lawmen React
More:
Stranded in Sonoma: Executive Odors
Texas Conservative News: Obama Announces List of 23 Gun Control Executive Orders – Lawmakers and Lawmen React
Read the Executive Actions...
and plan on ignoring them.
Here is a list of the 23 Executive Actions President Obama signed today to impose further restrictions on the 2nd Amendment with my comments:
Today, the President is announcing that he and the administration will:
1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system. What "relevant" information? Your medical records perhaps?
2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system. Wait! You passed the law so we could see what was in it, and now you want to change it? This "law" just keeps evolving.
3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system. What information?
4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks. I smell an expansion of "categories of dangerous people."
5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun. Why was the gun seized to begin with?
6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers. In case they don't know how to do their job?
7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign. Yep! Just like the HHS spent millions to run offensive and unintelligible radio ads speaking in "ebonics" to teach people how to dial 911. Besides, we have the NRA, which does an outstanding job of teaching gun safety.
8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission). More regulations on gun manufacturers.
9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations. Maybe we could start with Fast and Furious?
10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement. Another silly expensive "make-work" idea. Analyze what? Here's how many guns were lost or stolen. What exactly is there to analyze?
11. Nominate an ATF director. ATF: Remember Waco and Ruby Ridge.
12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper
training for active shooter situations. Teach them to stand up and shout, "This is a gun free zone. Please leave!"
13. Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime. Are you suggesting that the police are not prosecuting gun crime? Wait - didn't David Gregory get a pass for breaking the law on National TV by brandishing an illegal clip? My bad.
14. Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence. More wasted money.
15. Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies. We'll get right on that.
16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes. Ooooops! Correcting another little flaw in Obamacare. Go ahead and ask. I reserve the right to say, "None of your business."
17. Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities. Right! Because patient confidentiality doesn't exist.
18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers. Will they be armed?
19. Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education. Because the police are too stupid to know how to handle an emergency?
20. Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover. If you made it clear to begin with, you wouldn't need a "clarifying" letter.
21. Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges. Parity with whom?
22. Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations. Didn't they just say this in number 21?
23. Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health. National dialogue? What the hell does that mean?
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Mental health and guns...
be very careful when you say you want stronger restrictions on the mentally ill owning firearms.
Did you know that ADD and ADHD are considered "mental illnesses" by the so-called experts? Think about the hundreds of thousands of kids who are given dangerous drugs rather than teaching them in a way that is compatible with how their brains function.
My guess?
None of them will ever be able to purchase a firearm.
I have ADD. I do not have a mental illness. I do not have a disability.
I would, however, be much more interested in that little green ball while my friends were lined up like little boring trolls.
Did you know that ADD and ADHD are considered "mental illnesses" by the so-called experts? Think about the hundreds of thousands of kids who are given dangerous drugs rather than teaching them in a way that is compatible with how their brains function.
My guess?
None of them will ever be able to purchase a firearm.
I have ADD. I do not have a mental illness. I do not have a disability.
I would, however, be much more interested in that little green ball while my friends were lined up like little boring trolls.
Law enforcement has no duty to defend or protect you as an individual...
bet you didn't know that.
That's right, people. If you want real protection, it would have to be bought and paid for by you. In most cases the duty of the police is to string yellow crime scene tape, pick up spent shells, and take statements from witnesses - that is if any are still alive.
Not to besmirch the police since in most scenarios they will do their best to help most citizens, but the fact remains - they don't have to.
Listen to Keith Morgan, president of West Virginia Citizen's Defense League, destroy the wimpy libtard host on "State Journal's Decision Makers" on January 13, 2013.
That's right, people. If you want real protection, it would have to be bought and paid for by you. In most cases the duty of the police is to string yellow crime scene tape, pick up spent shells, and take statements from witnesses - that is if any are still alive.
Not to besmirch the police since in most scenarios they will do their best to help most citizens, but the fact remains - they don't have to.
Listen to Keith Morgan, president of West Virginia Citizen's Defense League, destroy the wimpy libtard host on "State Journal's Decision Makers" on January 13, 2013.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Saturday, January 12, 2013
More Ben Shapiro...
on how to fight back against the bullies on the left.
Excellent!
Excellent!
[...]"They don't have good intentions in many cases."
[...]"Unless we get on the same page as the left has been on for the past 40 years. Unless we all recognize who it is we're fighting , we're going to have the moral high ground and lose every election from here to kingdom come."
Friday, January 11, 2013
Why is the National "Catholic" Reporter still allowed to use the word Catholic?...
when they are anything but Catholic.
This shameful publication should have had the name "Catholic" stripped from it's masthead decades ago. Wake up bishops!
The attendance at this years March for Life in Washington, DC may surpass the attendance at the inauguration. Last year 400K people marched. Did you see anything in the MSM about it? Thought not.
From Father Z:
This shameful publication should have had the name "Catholic" stripped from it's masthead decades ago. Wake up bishops!
The attendance at this years March for Life in Washington, DC may surpass the attendance at the inauguration. Last year 400K people marched. Did you see anything in the MSM about it? Thought not.
From Father Z:
Some people are getting it. Liberals, even – to their eternal shame liberal catholics – are hijacking pro-life language as a way of promoting strict gun-control as if it were a pro-life issue. What they are really trying to do is silence pro-lifers. Liberals see those who defend the right to be born as the foundational pro-life issue in the same way that they view those who uphold the 2nd Amendment: stupid, knuckle-dragging throwbacks who cling to their guns and religion. Thus, their fusion of the gun-control debate with their hijacking of pro-life language is a tactic to silence those who believe that we have a right to be born in the first place. Mark my words. This is what they are doing.
See this:
What the National Catholic Reporter is really doing by calling for an “assault weapons” ban. (Hint: It ain’t about guns!)
and
NCR, hardly pro-life, hijacks pro-life language
Can you feel the love tonight...(video)
beautiful.
A patron of a Tim Horton's doughnut and coffee shop in Oakville, Ontario, stumbled into a senior's barbershop choir that meets every Monday after rehearsal. The choir asked for requests. The patron gave one, and pulled out his cell phone to record it.
May God bless them for bringing such joy into the world.
A patron of a Tim Horton's doughnut and coffee shop in Oakville, Ontario, stumbled into a senior's barbershop choir that meets every Monday after rehearsal. The choir asked for requests. The patron gave one, and pulled out his cell phone to record it.
May God bless them for bringing such joy into the world.
It's Friday...
what's going on.
Reaganite Republican: NRA Releases Statement Re. One-Way 'Meeting' with Holder and Joey Plugs
Capitalist Preservation: Liberals continue to use human suffering and prevarications as a means to disarm America
Always on Watch: Tyranny And Gun Control
Lonely Conservative: Yes, People Really Are This Stupid
Bungalow Bill: How Little is Being Said About Big Pharma and Violence in America
T.L. Davis: With Tomorrow In Doubt
NCR: Kudos to the President's Inaugural Committee
American Spectator: A Pimp for Obamacare Feels the Pain
The Blaze: Gov’t Probe: DEA Agent Arranged to Hire Prostitute for Secret Service Agent in Colombia Scandal
Reaganite Republican: NRA Releases Statement Re. One-Way 'Meeting' with Holder and Joey Plugs
Capitalist Preservation: Liberals continue to use human suffering and prevarications as a means to disarm America
Always on Watch: Tyranny And Gun Control
Lonely Conservative: Yes, People Really Are This Stupid
Bungalow Bill: How Little is Being Said About Big Pharma and Violence in America
T.L. Davis: With Tomorrow In Doubt
NCR: Kudos to the President's Inaugural Committee
American Spectator: A Pimp for Obamacare Feels the Pain
The Blaze: Gov’t Probe: DEA Agent Arranged to Hire Prostitute for Secret Service Agent in Colombia Scandal
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Libtards are bullies...
you know that's true.
How many times have you squelched your true opinion in order to avoid a confrontation with a libtard? I have done this many times because, at my core, I don't like confrontation. And when confronted by someone who gets in my face and calls me stupid, I usually choose the path of least resistance.
All too often, the worst offenders are family members, who will speak to you in a way they would never speak to someone outside the family. Because I believe in the Constitution, think abortion is inherently evil, and homosexuals are called to chastity, my own family has labeled me as a "hater" and religious fanatic. Their loss.
How about the rest of the people you come in contact with, and how we should deal with them? First, study and know the Constitution. Read or re-read the Federalist Papers. And then when someone says guns should be outlawed, you will be in a position to calmly ask them to explain the 2nd amendment.
For every statement they make that is antithetical to the constitution, ask them to explain the pertinent amendment. And keep on asking. If they ask you a question, respond with a question. Do not back down. Avoid all references to your "feelings." We don't care how anyone "feels"; we operate with facts. If they bring up their feelings, and they surely will since libtards operate on emotion, repeat the previous sentence to them.
Whenever possible, find something funny about what they're saying. If they become ugly, respond by saying, "It's clear we are unable to have a rational adult discussion", and walk away. By walking away, you have guaranteed that you will live rent free in their heads until the day they become room temperature.
Glenn Beck interviews Ben Shapiro about his new book “Bullies: How The Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.”
H/T for video: Blazing Cat Fur
How many times have you squelched your true opinion in order to avoid a confrontation with a libtard? I have done this many times because, at my core, I don't like confrontation. And when confronted by someone who gets in my face and calls me stupid, I usually choose the path of least resistance.
All too often, the worst offenders are family members, who will speak to you in a way they would never speak to someone outside the family. Because I believe in the Constitution, think abortion is inherently evil, and homosexuals are called to chastity, my own family has labeled me as a "hater" and religious fanatic. Their loss.
How about the rest of the people you come in contact with, and how we should deal with them? First, study and know the Constitution. Read or re-read the Federalist Papers. And then when someone says guns should be outlawed, you will be in a position to calmly ask them to explain the 2nd amendment.
For every statement they make that is antithetical to the constitution, ask them to explain the pertinent amendment. And keep on asking. If they ask you a question, respond with a question. Do not back down. Avoid all references to your "feelings." We don't care how anyone "feels"; we operate with facts. If they bring up their feelings, and they surely will since libtards operate on emotion, repeat the previous sentence to them.
Whenever possible, find something funny about what they're saying. If they become ugly, respond by saying, "It's clear we are unable to have a rational adult discussion", and walk away. By walking away, you have guaranteed that you will live rent free in their heads until the day they become room temperature.
* * *
Glenn Beck interviews Ben Shapiro about his new book “Bullies: How The Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.”
H/T for video: Blazing Cat Fur
Did you know that I won a Zilla Award for Awesomeness in the Dextrosphere?...
well, I did.
And in THREE categories.
Nicest Blogger
Most Thoughtful Blogger
and
Best Pictures Posted to Help Us Get Our Minds Away from All the Bad News
Hooooo Ha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you, Zilla. You love me, you really, really love me!
This is the second annual Zilla Awards in which she rewards us hard working conservative bloggers.
Go see who else won.
And in THREE categories.
Nicest Blogger
Most Thoughtful Blogger
and
Best Pictures Posted to Help Us Get Our Minds Away from All the Bad News
Hooooo Ha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you, Zilla. You love me, you really, really love me!
This is the second annual Zilla Awards in which she rewards us hard working conservative bloggers.
Go see who else won.
Peter Schiff interviews Ted Nugent: Today's slaughter houses - "gun free" zones...
a very good interview.
More:
American Thinker: The Connecticut Bill to 'Out' Gun Owners Shows Us a Nationalized Issue
More:
American Thinker: The Connecticut Bill to 'Out' Gun Owners Shows Us a Nationalized Issue
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Tom Baugh: When to Shoot the Colonels...
In view of the hysterical rhetoric about gun seizure being bandied about, I thought this was a good time to re-post this essay, written several years ago by Tom Baugh, author of Starving the Monkeys.
I've read Starving the Monkeys, and while it has many good points, there are many that I don't agree with. For one thing, Mr. Baugh is virulently anti-Christian and, in particular, anti-Catholic, which had absolutely nothing to do with his points on "makers vs takers", the economic situation, and preparedness. His points on self-sufficiency are good, but overall the book was a bit long-winded and even silly at times. As with all things, it is up to the individual with a well-formed conscience, to dissect and find the truth in anything they read.
I also did a bit of internet searching and over at Sipsey Street Irregulars, there is commentary from a West Pointer that was published back on Jan. 5th, 2010 on Mr. Baugh's essay . Read the essay first (below), and then go and read the commentary.
I ask you to read and ponder the essay first so as to not be influenced by the commentary. It is one of the reasons I post many things without adding my own content or opinion.
Later today, I'll tell you my thoughts (FWIW) on this whole manufactured gun "crisis" the left is trying to ram down our collective throats. I promise to do it in very, very few words.
"At ease, Marines, and be seated", orders the gruff Gunnery Sergeant. "Now turn to Chapter 8 in your Military Constitutional Law text," he continues. "Today we discuss the appropriate conditions for shooting a colonel who is issuing an order which would violate the Constitutional rights of American citizens. Our first scenario involves gun seizures..."
Absurd, isn't it, to think that this sort of education is conducted among our armed forces? Yet, millions of citizens indulge this unspoken fantasy each time they imagine that the military exists to preserve our freedoms.
When I was at the Naval Academy in the mid-80s, and a Marine officer in the late 1980s and early 1990s, discussion of such issues was considered taboo. One fellow junior officer even scoffed that "Congress can change that Constitution any time they like." This isn't to say that there wasn't an undercurrent among most of the warfighters that issues such as gun control and preservation freedom of speech might one day pose a crisis of command. Yet this undercurrent was kept carefully concealed, and tended to become a more and more uncomfortable subject as the ranks of one's company became more elevated. Fortunately, with the Soviets and the threat of global thermonuclear war, these issues seemed far removed and safe from serious discussion.
Not so today. In the aftermath of Katrina, armed and uniformed soldiers patrolled the streets and disarmed Americans. Some uniformed soldiers were captured on film lamenting that "I can't believe that we're doing this to Americans." Yet, they did it anyway, lamentations not withstanding. But why?
To answer that, we need to understand the principles of military command and education. For veterans, this discussion is unnecessary. For the vast number of non-veterans, especially those who harbor that most dangerous and ill-advised fantasy of a Constitutionally-aware military, this discussion is essential to survival.
American military education is one of the most finely tuned and adapted mechanisms in the world for instilling knowledge into its students. No other school or university can come close to the efficiency at which military knowledge is imparted to novices. There are even courses, such as Principles of Military Instruction, for how to teach military courses. These courses even teach how to develop such courses from scratch. The famous John Saxon math courses, popular among homeschoolers, exhibit these techniques, courtesy of that former Air Force officer and academy instructor. Military courses developed along these lines tend to be highly effective at teaching motivated students. Students motivated to learn how to do things such as extinguish fires or shoot missiles. Or shoot you.
As a result, if it is worth teaching to soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines, it is worth embodying in a course. Captured as a course or in official manuals, such instruction is available to all for review and comment to make sure that the correct instruction is given, and given correctly. Conversely, if it doesn't exist as a course, it isn't being taught. And if it isn't being taught, it isn't even on the radar of the military mind. At least not on the minds of those in command. Good luck finding a course such as "When to Shoot the Colonels" in a military instruction catalogue.
Even basics such as reading and writing and math are available as courses. But not shooting colonels. What colonel would even authorize such a thing? Only a colonel who realizes that one day he might have to shoot a general, of course. But that would require a separate course for command grades, entitled "When to Shoot the Generals." And who would authorize that? We can keep climbing this chain all the way up, if we like, but at some point the absurdity makes its point. No one in a position of command or power is going to surrender that power for something as irrelevant as your rights.
And what if a particular soldier scored highly on such a course? What colonel would hand out high efficiency reports on his potential executioner?
Another aspect of this problem that needs to be clearly understood is that all modern American military officers are political appointees. Surprised? You shouldn't be. As a practical exercise ask one to read his commission document to you. Pay particular attention to the "follow lawful orders" part, along with the "serve at the pleasure of the President" phrase. Oath of office notwithstanding, nothing in that document says anything about what to do about unlawful orders. Or even lawful orders, such as "seize all guns because Congress authorized it," which haven't yet stood the test of the judicial branch to adjudge Constitutionality. And like that 1stLt said, enough Congressmen can get together and change that Constitution. The Constitution itself says so.
Besides, if some uppity colonel out there decided to start authorizing instruction about when to shoot the colonels, you can bet that pretty quick the President would no longer be pleased. Because he or she would know where that path must ultimately lead. Which is why uppity colonels don't stay colonels for very long. Political appointees, my friends. That vision you have in your head of the noble military protecting your rights is just a dangerous fantasy. A fantasy you have to get rid of right now, before it gets you killed.
"But wait," you say, "I know Sgt. Soandso, and he would never go along with a gun seizure." Maybe not, but then again, you might be surprised. To "not go along" would mean that he has to violate orders. This violation would at the very least be a career-killer, or possibly get him shot in an extreme situation. Shot by who? By all the other sergeants who don't want to get shot, of course. After all, the colonel only needs a handful of sergeants who are in it for a career, and a raft of lieutenants, captains and majors who one day want to be colonels. For you to have your rights protected would require that a sufficient number of each of these decide, simultaneously, to put on the brakes. It is easier just to shoot you for resisting and go about their day. Say it again, "political appointees."
Besides, if all of these people decide in unison to protect you, and in so doing put their own careers, freedoms and life on the line, who is going to protect them? You? And if so, how? You needed them to protect you in the first place. And if Sgt. Soandso gets shot protecting your rights, what about his family? Retribution aside, who takes care of them with him out of the picture? Worse, after Sgt. Soandso gets shot, some corporal will be there ready to pin on those chevrons. And you can bet that to that guy, you are a minor inconvenience in his day. You wouldn't get lucky enough to get a chain of noble soldiers to protect you. When the day arrives, all of those political appointees will have scrubbed the ranks of those pesky oathkeepers anyway. Those oathkeepers who remain hidden in ranks will be in an impossible situation.
And we haven't even discussed the false-flagging of dressing foreign troops in American uniforms to capitalize on the unwillingness of Americans to kill "our boys." I'll save that one for later.
So if the military doesn't exist to protect our rights and freedoms, why does it exist? The answer is simple. It exists to back our national will with force. Most of the time, that is a good thing, particularly when our national will is to not be attacked by jackasses who threaten us. But when the national will turns to taking your guns away, you will be the jackass who threatens "us." Then the military will execute that national will with cold, unthinking and bureaucratic efficiency. And wrap itself in the flag while doing so.
Want to have some fun? Walk up to any active duty serviceman you wish, shake his hand and thank him for his service. Then, before you release his hand, pull him toward you slightly, look into his eyes and tell him, "now when the time comes, don't forget what your oath really means." Do this ten times, and the reactions of that little informal poll will tell you everything you need to know. Having divested yourself of that little fantasy, maybe you will have a chance to survive that gun seizure for the real battle later. At the very least you will have looked into the eyes of some of the enemy, constituted of complacency and obedience, you may one day face.
More:
Poltico: Biden: Executive action can be taken on guns
As an aside, allow me to thank all the people who have purchased items from Electronic Cigarettes Inc. In a few days I will receive a check for almost $100.00. And guess what? I am not putting this in our savings account like I do with all of my pay checks. No siree! I'm going shopping. I am by naturecheap thrifty and in this economy, even more so. The thought of having a hundred dollars to spend any old way I want is making me positively giddy.
I've read Starving the Monkeys, and while it has many good points, there are many that I don't agree with. For one thing, Mr. Baugh is virulently anti-Christian and, in particular, anti-Catholic, which had absolutely nothing to do with his points on "makers vs takers", the economic situation, and preparedness. His points on self-sufficiency are good, but overall the book was a bit long-winded and even silly at times. As with all things, it is up to the individual with a well-formed conscience, to dissect and find the truth in anything they read.
I also did a bit of internet searching and over at Sipsey Street Irregulars, there is commentary from a West Pointer that was published back on Jan. 5th, 2010 on Mr. Baugh's essay . Read the essay first (below), and then go and read the commentary.
I ask you to read and ponder the essay first so as to not be influenced by the commentary. It is one of the reasons I post many things without adding my own content or opinion.
Later today, I'll tell you my thoughts (FWIW) on this whole manufactured gun "crisis" the left is trying to ram down our collective throats. I promise to do it in very, very few words.
When to Shoot the Colonels
by Tom Baugh
by Tom Baugh
"At ease, Marines, and be seated", orders the gruff Gunnery Sergeant. "Now turn to Chapter 8 in your Military Constitutional Law text," he continues. "Today we discuss the appropriate conditions for shooting a colonel who is issuing an order which would violate the Constitutional rights of American citizens. Our first scenario involves gun seizures..."
Absurd, isn't it, to think that this sort of education is conducted among our armed forces? Yet, millions of citizens indulge this unspoken fantasy each time they imagine that the military exists to preserve our freedoms.
When I was at the Naval Academy in the mid-80s, and a Marine officer in the late 1980s and early 1990s, discussion of such issues was considered taboo. One fellow junior officer even scoffed that "Congress can change that Constitution any time they like." This isn't to say that there wasn't an undercurrent among most of the warfighters that issues such as gun control and preservation freedom of speech might one day pose a crisis of command. Yet this undercurrent was kept carefully concealed, and tended to become a more and more uncomfortable subject as the ranks of one's company became more elevated. Fortunately, with the Soviets and the threat of global thermonuclear war, these issues seemed far removed and safe from serious discussion.
Not so today. In the aftermath of Katrina, armed and uniformed soldiers patrolled the streets and disarmed Americans. Some uniformed soldiers were captured on film lamenting that "I can't believe that we're doing this to Americans." Yet, they did it anyway, lamentations not withstanding. But why?
To answer that, we need to understand the principles of military command and education. For veterans, this discussion is unnecessary. For the vast number of non-veterans, especially those who harbor that most dangerous and ill-advised fantasy of a Constitutionally-aware military, this discussion is essential to survival.
American military education is one of the most finely tuned and adapted mechanisms in the world for instilling knowledge into its students. No other school or university can come close to the efficiency at which military knowledge is imparted to novices. There are even courses, such as Principles of Military Instruction, for how to teach military courses. These courses even teach how to develop such courses from scratch. The famous John Saxon math courses, popular among homeschoolers, exhibit these techniques, courtesy of that former Air Force officer and academy instructor. Military courses developed along these lines tend to be highly effective at teaching motivated students. Students motivated to learn how to do things such as extinguish fires or shoot missiles. Or shoot you.
As a result, if it is worth teaching to soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines, it is worth embodying in a course. Captured as a course or in official manuals, such instruction is available to all for review and comment to make sure that the correct instruction is given, and given correctly. Conversely, if it doesn't exist as a course, it isn't being taught. And if it isn't being taught, it isn't even on the radar of the military mind. At least not on the minds of those in command. Good luck finding a course such as "When to Shoot the Colonels" in a military instruction catalogue.
Even basics such as reading and writing and math are available as courses. But not shooting colonels. What colonel would even authorize such a thing? Only a colonel who realizes that one day he might have to shoot a general, of course. But that would require a separate course for command grades, entitled "When to Shoot the Generals." And who would authorize that? We can keep climbing this chain all the way up, if we like, but at some point the absurdity makes its point. No one in a position of command or power is going to surrender that power for something as irrelevant as your rights.
And what if a particular soldier scored highly on such a course? What colonel would hand out high efficiency reports on his potential executioner?
Another aspect of this problem that needs to be clearly understood is that all modern American military officers are political appointees. Surprised? You shouldn't be. As a practical exercise ask one to read his commission document to you. Pay particular attention to the "follow lawful orders" part, along with the "serve at the pleasure of the President" phrase. Oath of office notwithstanding, nothing in that document says anything about what to do about unlawful orders. Or even lawful orders, such as "seize all guns because Congress authorized it," which haven't yet stood the test of the judicial branch to adjudge Constitutionality. And like that 1stLt said, enough Congressmen can get together and change that Constitution. The Constitution itself says so.
Besides, if some uppity colonel out there decided to start authorizing instruction about when to shoot the colonels, you can bet that pretty quick the President would no longer be pleased. Because he or she would know where that path must ultimately lead. Which is why uppity colonels don't stay colonels for very long. Political appointees, my friends. That vision you have in your head of the noble military protecting your rights is just a dangerous fantasy. A fantasy you have to get rid of right now, before it gets you killed.
"But wait," you say, "I know Sgt. Soandso, and he would never go along with a gun seizure." Maybe not, but then again, you might be surprised. To "not go along" would mean that he has to violate orders. This violation would at the very least be a career-killer, or possibly get him shot in an extreme situation. Shot by who? By all the other sergeants who don't want to get shot, of course. After all, the colonel only needs a handful of sergeants who are in it for a career, and a raft of lieutenants, captains and majors who one day want to be colonels. For you to have your rights protected would require that a sufficient number of each of these decide, simultaneously, to put on the brakes. It is easier just to shoot you for resisting and go about their day. Say it again, "political appointees."
Besides, if all of these people decide in unison to protect you, and in so doing put their own careers, freedoms and life on the line, who is going to protect them? You? And if so, how? You needed them to protect you in the first place. And if Sgt. Soandso gets shot protecting your rights, what about his family? Retribution aside, who takes care of them with him out of the picture? Worse, after Sgt. Soandso gets shot, some corporal will be there ready to pin on those chevrons. And you can bet that to that guy, you are a minor inconvenience in his day. You wouldn't get lucky enough to get a chain of noble soldiers to protect you. When the day arrives, all of those political appointees will have scrubbed the ranks of those pesky oathkeepers anyway. Those oathkeepers who remain hidden in ranks will be in an impossible situation.
And we haven't even discussed the false-flagging of dressing foreign troops in American uniforms to capitalize on the unwillingness of Americans to kill "our boys." I'll save that one for later.
So if the military doesn't exist to protect our rights and freedoms, why does it exist? The answer is simple. It exists to back our national will with force. Most of the time, that is a good thing, particularly when our national will is to not be attacked by jackasses who threaten us. But when the national will turns to taking your guns away, you will be the jackass who threatens "us." Then the military will execute that national will with cold, unthinking and bureaucratic efficiency. And wrap itself in the flag while doing so.
Want to have some fun? Walk up to any active duty serviceman you wish, shake his hand and thank him for his service. Then, before you release his hand, pull him toward you slightly, look into his eyes and tell him, "now when the time comes, don't forget what your oath really means." Do this ten times, and the reactions of that little informal poll will tell you everything you need to know. Having divested yourself of that little fantasy, maybe you will have a chance to survive that gun seizure for the real battle later. At the very least you will have looked into the eyes of some of the enemy, constituted of complacency and obedience, you may one day face.
More:
Poltico: Biden: Executive action can be taken on guns
As an aside, allow me to thank all the people who have purchased items from Electronic Cigarettes Inc. In a few days I will receive a check for almost $100.00. And guess what? I am not putting this in our savings account like I do with all of my pay checks. No siree! I'm going shopping. I am by nature
Ben Shapiro on Hannity: The time for civility is over...
"We can't be civil with them. We can't. We've reached the end of bipartisanship. We've reached the end of civility. It's like the Geneva Conventions. These people are out of uniform. Once they exit the realm of civility they are now fair game. And it's enough playing fair with them. It's enough having the moral high ground. If we have the moral high ground it means that we lose. We need to start fighting back and fighting back hard."
H/T The Gateway Pundit
Monday, January 7, 2013
Today's must read on gun control: Bracken: Dear Mr. Security Agent
because it's important.
For widespread distribution, more cutting-edge commentary from Matt Bracken, former SEAL and author of the Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy, along with his most recent novel, Castigo Cay:
Dear Mr. Security Agent,
Federal, state, or local. You, the man or woman with the badge, the sworn LEO or FLEA and those who inhabit the many law enforcement niches in between and on all sides. This essay is directed to you, because in the end, how this turmoil about gun control turns out will depend largely upon your decisions and actions over the coming months and years.
I sincerely wish that members of Congress—who may soon be voting on new gun control measures—would read this essay, but I realize that’s a pipe dream, considering the impenetrable bubbles around those exalted entities. So I’ll settle for you, Mr. (or Ms.) Security Agent, since you already gobble up everything on the internet, and I don’t have to seek you out.
A decade ago I wrote the novel Enemies Foreign and Domestic, a tale about how tragic events involving the misuse of firearms can be used by an evil administration to misinform and mold public opinion to support its malign anti-freedom policies.
No, my novel was not predicting “Operation Fast and Furious” a decade before that covert policy of “pursuing gun control under the radar,” (which was President Obama’s explanation to Sarah Brady for his lack of overt political action). That inter-agency gun-walking policy, remember, resulted in the deaths of over four hundred Mexicans and two U.S. federal agents, murdered in an effort to discredit the Second Amendment and lead to more restrictive gun control laws in America. (If Nixon—or any Republican, for that matter—were in office, the intentional bloodbath would be called Murdergate, but today’s collaborating Woodwards and Bernsteins are in on the cover-up.)
Instead of gun-walking thousands of AK-47s to Mexican drug cartel assassins (who would believe that?), Enemies Foreign and Domestic begins with a sniper opening fire on a packed football stadium. A thousand innocent fans die, some from the ninety bullets fired but most in the ensuing panic stampede. In a traumatized America, the fictional stadium massacre results in the banning of all semi-automatic rifles, with no buyback, no grandfathering of weapons already owned, and no sunset clause. Citizens had to turn them in for destruction or face years in federal prison.
The page-one stadium massacre was simply a plot device chosen to launch the story in high gear and set the stage to immediately and fully explore the main theme of the novel: the calculated transformation of our Constitutional republic into a socialist police state. Since I prefer to write tightly wound fiction transpiring at a rapid pace in a compressed time period, I examined the imposition of totalitarian controls over the course of just a few weeks, not years or decades.
1. The TSA: On the road to the American police state
Consider: The TSA was born in the panicked backwash of 9/11, which is understandable given the events of that day, when Muslim maniacs screaming allahu akbar murdered 3,000 Americans and others in the name of Islamic global jihad. But a decade after 9/11, due entirely to political correctness, it’s completely out of the question to profile Mohammed at the airport yet absolutely necessary for that bloated agency to “randomly” select your pre-teen or teenage daughter for a body search performed by a government matron in a TSA uniform. This frequently under-the-clothes and against-the-skin complete body search may done in full public view, or in a hidden back room, solely at the discretion of the TSA agents involved.
Meanwhile, Mom and Dad stand off to the side where they have been directed to wait, saying nothing, scarcely moving, avoiding random eye contact lest a TSA security agent catch a wayward smirk or utterance of protest. To pull out a cell phone camera at this time would surely invite arrest. To walk over and grab the matron by the arm is out of the question. Defending your child from the indignity would lead only to your being Tasered and handcuffed on the cold airport floor. After that, your entire family may wind up in some TSA airport detention cells, conveniently located right on your concourse and unknown to you until then. Better to stew in silence, let the incident pass, and try to forget it.
So in the year 2013, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we stand with our eyes averted, burning with humiliation, while our spouses or children are groped above and below the waist by blue-gloved government prison guards—only we are in an airport in a free country, and not in a prison!
Or are we? A virtual open-air prison, where government security agents can pat down ordinary citizens at will is the accepted “new normal.” Did that happen often in East Germany, I wonder? In the Soviet Union? Does it happen today in Cuba? Officially sanctioned crotch groping in the name of “security?”
(Why, again, was it that the TSA was created? Oh yes, Islamic jihad terrorists destroyed some big buildings and killed thousands of people in New York City on September 11 way back in the year 2001. It was because of that very bad day in lower Manhattan and many other acts of bloody Muslim terrorism around the world going on for decades, especially hijacking and blowing up lots of airliners full of people. It’s so easy to forget why exactly it is that we need to become a police state for our own safety.)
And now we read that the TSA is yet again expanding and branching out, like an octopus on steroids. This suddenly gargantuan federal agency is not only running routine checkpoints and stop-and-frisk operations in airports, but at bus and train stations also. Eight thousand times in 2010, if you can believe the government’s own accounting figures. Your papers, please! These checkpoints and mobile searching stations are called VIPR Teams, a telling acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Teams.
Folks, you cannot make this stuff up. Well, actually, you can. Way back in 2002 in Enemies Foreign and Domestic I invented FIST checkpoints, for Firearms Inspections Stop Terrorism. I leave it to you as to which sounds more coolly ominous and plausible in fact and in fiction—VIPRs or FISTs.
The advance word is that at the next stop on this express lane to tyranny, we will be seeing the TSA on our highways, setting up roaming vehicle checkpoints. For our “public safety,” of course. Watch the recent YouTube video of the Texas state trooper digitally raping a mother and daughter by the side of a Texas highway to see law enforcement checkpoint authority run amok, and wonder at the future of our nation and our hard-won legacy of individual freedom. If you can stomach to watch it.
Welcome to the USSA, comrades! How in the world did this happen? When did we wake up to find our freedom stolen in the night—and all in name of “homeland security” and “public safety”?
2. Nobody needs an assault weapon!
And now in the wake of yet another disgusting example of the worst human depravity, this time in an elementary school in New England, we are told by the government that some firearms are simply too dangerous for citizens to possess. We are told that limiting or removing these firearms from private hands will increase the general public safety. We are told that it is a small thing to give up semi-automatic rifles, which the political and cooperating media elites will dutifully call “assault weapons,” even though nobody can quite define the term. In any case, we are told, nobody needs an “assault weapon” with a thirty-round magazine.
Well, actually, almost nobody needs them.
Apparently, Mr. Security Agent and his comrades need them, lots of them. Tens of thousands of new “assault weapons,” enough to shoot all of the billions (with a “b”) of .223 and .40 caliber hollow-point bullets recently purchased by our federal law enforcement agencies in unprecedented new acquisitions. Are we suddenly expecting a foreign invasion I missed reading about? Wouldn’t that be the job of the military? Why do our federal law enforcement agencies suddenly need tens of thousands of “assault weapons” and billions of new hollow-point (not training) bullets, many times more than in previous years?
Evidently, it’s very dangerous on the Homeland Security front, and Mr. Security Agent needs a lot of firepower to be able to put down all of the assorted troublemakers and problem children out in the “uncontrolled spaces” of America. You can’t have too much firepower if you work for our government law enforcement agencies!
But in the name of public safety the government is going to whittle your allowable firearms down step by step, first eliminating semi-automatic rifles, then pistols, and eventually on down to the last bolt-action hunting rifles and shotguns, which may be kept at a government armory, and signed out for an approved day of hunting with a few shells. (Make sure to retrieve your empty brass for the counting.)
So, step by step, the government is going to take away any ability the average citizen might have to resist a rampaging mob or roving gangs of bandits during a breakdown in law and order, or any demands at all made by a tyrannical government sometime in the murky future.
3. Trust us, we’re from the government.
So at the historical moment that our nation is turning into a police state, with no expectation of privacy, even of our private parts in public airports or on public highways, we are commanded to grant even greater trust in our government’s perpetual future benevolence, to have blind faith that at no point in the future will our government turn tyrannical.
But in the year 2013, has the government already earned our trust, or our disgust, with its current abuses of its police powers? In this environment of steadily creeping tyranny, should we comply with government demands for our increasing disarmament?
I wrote Enemies Foreign and Domestic a decade ago with the hope that eventually anti-gun liberals would discover it and it would provide them with a virtual road map to understanding conservative thinking about firearms and their place in society. Additionally, I wrote the novel hoping that if it were successful, it might provide me a platform and a microphone to discuss these issues at some dangerous time in the future.
That time is now. Well-meaning, gun-loathing liberals need to understand that they are blindly tossing matches into a dynamite factory with their threats to severely limit and restrict the Second Amendment. They must understand the other point of view in order not to send America careening into a deadly minefield, the existence of which they are, evidently, blissfully unaware.
4. The gun nuts
To many liberals, the popular American hobby of collecting and shooting guns is a bizarre and shameful vice. Three or four pistols and long guns and a few hundred rounds of ammunition are routinely described in the popular media as an “arsenal.” Perhaps in a Manhattan walk-up studio apartment, where that handful of guns had to be smuggled in and hidden, it would be considered an “arsenal.” But out past the urban beltway, out in Red State America, that is what many folks I know keep in their car or truck for roadside emergencies, or impromptu plinking, or varmint-hunting opportunities. And hell, isn’t that why we have guns out in Red State America? Damn sure is. Among other reasons.
Millions of firearms aficionados in their later years have purchased a rifle, pistol or shotgun every year or two for decades. In millions of cases, these add up to dozens of firearms per household. A round dozen firearms of all types might be a good average. Some are hunting arms, some are military antiques, and increasingly, many are defensive pistols and modern sporting rifles, and yes, both are semi-automatic. For example, millions of AR-15 rifles have been purchased in just the last few years. Note that I did not say modern hunting rifles. That is a separate category, but the important thing to understand is that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, and anybody who says it does is telling a lie.
Those of us who enjoy firearms feel it deeply when some lunatic misuses one to slaughter innocents. Shooting ranges are virtually churches of gun safety, with safety rules posted everywhere, taught to one and all, and enforced strictly. Passing down our tradition of safe and responsible gun ownership from generation to generation is considered a sacred trust. When a firearm is misused by a criminal, our greatest wish is always that we had been present with our legally concealed pistols to stop the slaughter of unarmed, defenseless innocents. And more frequently than you might imagine, this actually happens.
Consider this: the average number of victims per incident when the shooter is stopped by an armed civilian: three. The average number of victims when the shooter is stopped by a policeman: fourteen. Why? Because when every second is a matter of life and death, the police are still minutes away. Think about those numbers. Eleven people die needlessly if the shooting takes place in a “victim disarmament zone,” where legal firearms are prohibited. This is why deranged shooters head for schools, malls, and theaters, where signs forthrightly proclaim that guns are forbidden. A “no firearms” sign draws such a person the way that a starving wolf is attracted to a pen full of helpless lambs.
But when the killer is stopped by an armed civilian, the mainstream media rarely or never mention that fact, because it goes against their propaganda template: the inherent evil of guns in civilian hands. So those stories are spiked and the typical American never hears of them. Did you know that shortly before the tragedy in Connecticut, an armed civilian stopped a maniac in a packed shopping mall after he had killed only two victims, instead of twenty-seven?
5. If it bleeds, it leads:
The media love maniacs. The same media that pointedly ignore frequent life-saving defensive uses of firearms consistently pours hours and days and weeks of attention upon the latest maniac who chooses a firearm as his tool of mass murder, so that the next potential insane villain cannot fail to notice the easy path to fame and immortality that the misuse of a gun can bring. But the greatest fame will only attach if they can beat the previous body-count record, a number constantly and loudly broadcast, so that no one can fail to hear it.
The message to the unstable is clear: Come on, you crazy guys, can’t you at least murder your way to thirty? The Virginia Polytechnic Institute madman is still leading the lone-wolf pack, but college students might resist, so maybe find an easier target to rack up higher numbers. Find a killing zone with younger and more helpless victims. The media’s lesson was clear, and it was well learned by Adam Lanza when he set out to slaughter helpless little lambs instead of bigger and tougher sheep.
The mainstream media pour a Niagara of crocodile tears over the most recent child victims, after doing everything for the killer but sign his name to their pre-written script. With such fanfare, is it any wonder that there is no lack of new monsters playing “beat the kill record” on a regular basis? It’s almost become a recurring television reality show.
Meanwhile, liberal politicians scheme about how to leverage the latest human tragedy into new gun control laws, laws that by definition will be obeyed only by the law-abiding, not by criminals. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” to paraphrase Obama confidant Rahm Emmanuel. And no better opportunity to trim the Second Amendment fangs and claws of their ideological enemies than in the immediate aftermath of another massacre wrought by a madman with a gun.
But conservatives have also considered this phenomenon of grief exploitation for political ends, although from a very different ideological perspective. We look back a century and even longer, and see other nations and peoples that were also on the march forward toward “social progress” when the need for mandatory gun registration suddenly became an urgent national priority.
6. So what’s the matter with gun registration?
To say that Turkey did not enjoy a smooth transition from being the seat of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, through World War I and into the modernist Ataturk era, would be a massive understatement. In those turbulent times, ethnic Turks, Muslims composing the vast majority of the population, considered their Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, to be disloyal and treacherous.
In 1911, a national gun registration law was passed in Turkey, with no apparent ill intention beyond increasing public safety. In 1915, during the Great War, these gun registration lists were used to disarm the Armenian and other Christian populations. Army battalions cordoned off entire towns and did gun sweeps. Once disarmed, the official state violence visited against the Armenians ratcheted up to murderous levels. Typically, on town-wide sweeps, all of the men and boys were taken away by the Turkish soldiers, never to be seen or heard from again.
Only after these Armenian “enemies of the state” were disarmed and completely helpless to resist did the final step begin: the officially sanctioned, ordered, led and conducted wholesale “deportations” of the Christian minorities from Turkey. These “deportations” were in reality forced marches into fiery deserts, accompanied by pervasive sadistic cruelty comparable only to the Japanese “Bataan Death March,” and the less known but much more deadly death marches of the last surviving Jews in Nazi hands as the Red Army closed in on Germany.
Three decades earlier in Turkey, rape, roadside torture sessions ending in death, and the entire worst catalog of human abuses were standard procedure while the Christian Armenians were being marched into the deserts to die of thirst, hunger, exposure, and sheer brutality. The stragglers who could not keep up with the columns being force-marched without food or water by Turkish soldiers were killed with bullets, bayonets, swords and even crueler means (for sport and variety), until the columns were no more and the missions were complete.
Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half of the two million Turkish Armenians were murdered, along with a half million Christians of other sects. The rest escaped from Turkey in one of the first great diasporas of a genocided people in the modern era. There is no need to build gas chambers or slave-labor gulag death camps in a country with ample deserts. In Turkey there is no Dachau or Auschwitz to memorialize the dead, just bones scattered in the sand and rocks a century ago, a model of efficiency that Hitler might have envied. (The Turks deny to this day that it happened, just as some deny the later Nazi holocaust.)
But even after conducting this first modern mega-death holocaust, with diplomats and reporters covering the genocide with daily wire reports, Turkey was not expelled in disgrace from the community of nations. There was no Western boycott of the new Turkish state. Adolf Hitler noticed this 20th-century indifference to genocide, and so did Lenin and Stalin and other despots. After the horrors of the First World War, the West had little gas left in the tank for do-gooder intervention just because some ethnic minority or other had been wiped out in Turkey.
A new low standard had been set. A nation’s leaders could commit genocide against a despised minority, murder two million living souls in full view, and the world would not give a good damn. It was an important lesson for future dictators, leading to even greater mass murders under the Nazis and Soviets.
And the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists learned another crucial lesson from the Turks: national gun registration laws could be passed easily in the name of dubious “public safety,” and the registration lists could be used later to disarm selected minorities and then subsequently to arrest, deport, and murder them by the millions after they were helpless to resist.
In the Turkish case, only a small clique understood the true purpose behind the gun registration and gun control laws of 1911. If average Turks thought about the gun laws at all, they probably believed they would actually lead to greater public safety, as advertised. That was also generally the case with the Russians, Germans, Chinese, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Rwandans, and all the rest who were required to register or even turn in their firearms for “public safety,” and who accepted the demand at face value as a “reasonable” gun control measure, to their later regret.
American liberals who would like to see the Second Amendment torn out of the Constitution as a problematic relic of a bygone era generally do not know—or pretend not to know—this well-established historical pattern. But American Constitutionalists, who are more often than not students of history, understand the pattern very well.
So, directly behind the insane faces of contemporary villains like Loughner, Holmes and Lanza, we see the smirking faces of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, tyrants who did not murder individual victims by the fives and tens, but entire populations by the tens of millions. And in each case, these national genocides were preceded by gun confiscation that was made possible by national firearms registration laws sold to a gullible population in the name of “public safety.”
(Interestingly, during the bloody French Revolution’s “Great Terror” of 1793 to 1794, it was the “Committee of Public Safety” who condemned tens of thousands of French men and women to the guillotine or other forms of summary execution without trial. After previously being disarmed, of course.)
7. The case of Switzerland
Let’s look at another foreign country for a positive perspective on gun ownership. Although surrounded by sometimes hostile neighbors, Switzerland has maintained neutrality for centuries. It is an armed neutrality: nearly every adult Swiss male serves a short period of active military duty and thereafter is a member of the home guard militia. The inactive reservist keeps his military-issued fully automatic battle rifle at home, with plenty of ammunition and magazines, for the rest of his life. If Switzerland were ever invaded, the invaders would immediately find themselves taking accurate fire from many directions. Beyond personal rifles kept at home, field artillery, heavy machineguns and other crew-served weapons were hidden in disguised barns and other public and private buildings across the countryside, among the very citizen-soldiers who would man and fire them.
An interesting story, but what does it have to do with this essay? Over those same centuries that Switzerland has not been invaded by a foreign enemy, it has also never been taken over internally by a dictator. Any would-be Swiss tyrant would face the same dilemna faced by an invading army: a citizenry armed to the teeth with the latest military-grade, full-automatic-capable true assault rifles, plus jointly operated crew-served weapons. A citizenry dedicated to preserving its freedom from any tyrant, foreign or domestic.
Liberals might cite the example of Great Britain or Australia as countries that have created national registration lists and then later disarmed their populations through confiscation, but without a subsequent genocide. That’s true, but there is often a long delay between the stages of the registration-confiscation-extermination progression. For example, national gun registration in Germany was implemented in the 1920s, without any immediate dire consequences. Then Hitler was elected and took dictatorial powers under the Enabling Act. Beginning in 1938, Hitler used the gun registration lists to first disarm and then exterminate his enemies, primarily the Jews.
8. The Scapegoat Express
Scapegoating an unpopular group is standard operating procedure for budding socialist dictators wrecking once-free economies. For the Soviets, it was the Kulaks; for the Chinese it was the so-called “landlords.” I could list more recent cases to include Cambodia, Uganda, Guatemala, Rwanda and others. Once disarmed and helpless to resist, the hated national scapegoats are slaughtered by the millions.
Probably few Turks, Germans or Russians gave a thought to the ultimate aim of their new gun registration laws, passed quite plausibly in the name of public safety. But national gun registration is a slow-acting poison, sweet and easy to swallow, but potentially becoming deadly only years later, when a tyrant takes the reins of power and inevitably sends for the list. He begins with his most dangerous enemies and works his way through the list, marching the helpless scapegoats into deserts or gas chambers or gulags after disarming them.
In America today, we are seeing the beginning of an insidious scapegoating process, with older conservative white Christian males designated as the national Lucifer du jour, fair game for any vicious attack. Famous black movie stars joke about murdering white folks and white liberal media stars laugh along with them, conveying elite acceptance of the prevailing “evil whitey” meme.
Filled from birth on a steady diet of the pervasiveness of white racism in America, rage-filled urban youths across the nation play “the knockout game” with often fatal results for their randomly selected white or Asian victims. Meanwhile, the elite liberal media fail to notice the national scope of the almost weekly occurrences. Google “the knockout game” and start reading the dozens of local stories that the media refuse to connect or identify as part of a dangerous national trend.
And it doesn’t stop with knocking out random passers-by with sucker punches and then kicking them in head until they are dead, disfigured for life, or in comas. Have you ever heard of “The Knoxville Horror”? How about “The Wichita Horror”? Google them, read the local news articles about them, and ask yourself how much national media attention those cases and others like them would garner had the races been reversed.
When alternately trumpeting or ignoring crime stories based entirely on the races of the perpetrators and the victims isn’t enough to convey the media’s full slant, they will invent stories or lie freely, as we saw in the Trayvon Martin case, with video footage edited and spliced to deliberately portray “white-Hispanic” George Zimmerman as a racist killer. Selectively covering or ignoring crimes depending on the races of the victims and perpetrators is a vital part of the process of scapegoating. The unspoken message is clearly conveyed: crimes against disfavored groups just don’t matter. The violence prone absorb the lesson, and the result is a wave of racial attacks such as those described under the rubric of “the knockout game.”
Or consider the types of cartoons that are considered acceptable today in mainstream publications, portraying prototypical older white Christian men—presumably filthy-rich conservative Republicans—as hate-spewing maniacal villains, complete with fangs, Confederate flags, prominent Christian crosses and gigantic, threatening guns. Compare these viciously racist cartoons to the vilest anti-Semitic cartoons created by Nazi propagandists before and during World War II. I am not speaking of cartoons drawn by nobodies and posted on obscure fringe websites, I am talking about cartoons printed in mainstream newspapers, cartoons that would be condemned if the targeted group was any other than the scapegoat.
Cartoons are not serious, you say? Then how about a paper in an approved and sanctioned semi-official U.S. military publication, written by a War College professor in good standing. Serious enough for you? Google the “Small Wars Journal” piece entitled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future,” by Colonel Kevin Benson, USA (ret), 2012. The “full spectrum operations” envisaged for the Army in the homeland are not made against hypothetical hostile drug cartels in the Southwest, or urban gangs, or the traditionally ambiguous and vague “Pineland Liberation Group,” or “Orangeland People’s Front,” hypothetical stand-ins named to offend no one, not even by accident.
This long-standing neutral naming protocol is tossed aside in “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland,” where the new domestic enemy that the U.S. Army must crush is a neo-KKK, a white racist “Tea Party terrorist” organization, headquartered in, of all places, Darlington, South Carolina. Yes, the NASCAR Darlington. Anybody who has been in or near an actual Tea Party event or rally knows the crowd is made up mainly of an older white population, a quiet group that leaves no mess behind, not even a stray poster, and causes no fuss.
Yet “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland” postulates that these white grandpas and grannies will be the very group that the U.S. Army will be called upon to crush in its first major battles on American soil since 1865. The message this paper sends throughout the upper ranks of the War-College-trained military, actually naming an ethnic group—Southern whites—as the national enemy to “hypothetically” be crushed by the Army in the year 2016, is simply mind-boggling.
The path forward that is indicated by the media’s growing acceptance of these vile and outrageous anti-white celebrity rants, cartoons, and articles is the same path that in previous eras led to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber for the scapegoated populations. But the final solution—genocide of the scapegoats—is only possible after the mob is sufficiently inflamed with hatred toward them by the mass media, in collaboration with an evil government. And time after time, it works.
We are seeing the opening stages of the scapegoating of white conservatives today, as the last election seems to demonstrate to the left’s satisfaction that a crucial political and demographic tipping point has been passed, and the ultimate power equations of raw tribal loyalty have changed in a fundamental way—and now it’s payback time.
We have seen this play out before in other countries and times, and it is deadly serious. Once the scapegoating gets far enough under way, it can pick up a life and a momentum of its own. For example, if the economy ever truly crashes, and the EBT system that feeds fifty million Americans goes down hard, leading to hunger, looting, and riots, (or we suffer other unforeseen problems of similar crisis proportions), the scapegoats will always be dragged to the forefront as the pre-designated patsy, to deflect blame from the government.
“It’s the traitorous Armenians! It’s the greedy Kulaks! It’s the filthy Jews! It’s the oppressive Rwandan Hutus! It’s the white-racist rednecks! Let’s go get them, and make them pay!”
The end result of disarming a scapegoat population is as easy to follow as 1-2-3:
1. Registration. 2. Confiscation. 3. Extermination.
And in this cultural and social climate, with class envy and racial hatred being stoked by the government and its willing partners in the liberal media against white conservatives, our socialist-leaning administration now wants us to surrender our most useful and effective self-defense tools, in the name of “public safety”!
9. Dear Mr. Security Agent…
Why is this essay titled Dear Mr. Security Agent, when it dwells mainly upon the media and coastal-dwelling urban liberals and their utopian belief in the benefits of new gun control laws in the United States? Mr. Security Agent will protest that he is no liberal, he is ex-military, he’s a cop, he’s a fed—he’s one of the good guys! He took the same oath to defend the Constitution that you did, Buster! He doesn’t need any lectures on defending the Constitution! So why single him out in this essay?
Why? Because liberal bliss-ninnies in San Francisco and Boston are not issued flash-bang grenades, battering rams, body armor, flex-cuffs by the gross, and MP-5 submachine guns. No, the dirty end of the confiscation job will fall upon the shoulders of sworn law enforcement officers and gold-badged federal law enforcement agents. The LEOs and the FLEAs. That’s you, Mr. Security Agent.
We really don’t want a problem with you, believe me. And there is no reason for us to have a problem, because we both can read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and neither of us requires a team of black-robed mystics to translate its plain English into Newspeak for improved comprehension. You and I both understand what “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” means, without requiring five out of nine politically appointed Supremes to tell us that it does not mean what it very plainly states in black and white.
Now, as long as Mr. Security Agent remembers that he swore the same oath that millions of Americans swore, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, he will certainly not permit himself to take part in gun confiscation raids. But if he does, well, let’s be frank: tens of millions of Americans would then consider him to be the very domestic enemy that they swore to defend the Constitution against.
But Mr. Bracken—I can hear it now—this is the United States of America! Abuses like the ones you hypothesize simply cannot happen here. Gun registration does not always lead to confiscation, much less to extermination. We are not Germany or Russia or any of those other countries you mentioned. This is the 21st Century. America is different, and it can’t happen here. You must lay your irrational fears aside and place your trust in your government. It cannot, it will not, ever turn in the dark and tyrannical direction that you imagine.
Oh, really? Google “wrong-address SWAT raids” and read any of the dozens of articles you will find. We should trust the government not to abuse us even further, once we are disarmed and helpless to resist them? Thanks, but I don’t think so.
In 2002, in Enemies Foreign and Domestic, I wrote a fictional account of future government agents waterboarding American “detainees” in a clandestine “interrogation center.” In 2013, I think that we are many steps closer to that reality. Today, we already see genital groping by federal agents and at least one Texas state trooper who was caught on film. Their goal is not “public safety,” but public humiliation, intimidation, and control. Cowing the peasants into meek obeisance to unchecked authority. Can waterboarding American “detainees” in clandestine torture centers really be that far behind?
We have recently learned, Mr. Security Agent, that your law enforcement comrades can read every email we send or receive with no need for a pesky and outdated warrant. Today, our cell phones come complete with undisclosed “back doors” for law enforcement use, allowing them even to be switched on remotely, to serve as no less than a secret police microphone in our very own pockets.
Next year there will be drones patrolling the skies above America, keeping a watchful “Gorgon Stare” (Google it) mega-eye out for our “public safety.” Please read “The Coming Drone Attack on America,” by Naomi Wolf, to understand the grim implications of this development for what remains of American freedom.
Facial recognition cameras are going up everywhere. Nearly all public and corporate video camera networks have their feeds directed to dozens of new law enforcement “fusion centers,” whose very existence is kept secret from the American people they were supposedly built to protect. (Google “fusion centers” as well. Discover more news that the liberal mainstream media don’t think you need to know.) Data-mining and Social Network Analysis by our “protectors” edges steadily toward the “Department of Pre-Crime” foreseen in the science fiction movie Minority Report.
Next, project a decade ahead to what may be considered routine law enforcement behavior in 2023, after millions of Americans refuse to comply with new firearms registration and confiscation laws. Action will beget reaction. SWAT raids will spur armed resistance, which will spur “death squad” reprisals by “off-duty” agents, exactly in the way I wrote in “Enemies Foreign and Domestic.” It is a natural, almost organic progression, once started—and it has started. Secret detention centers will proliferate like mushrooms in the night. The media will not report on them, even if screams are heard around the clock by neighbors. Particularly brave reporters who break the media silence to report on police abuses will disappear, or be found headless, as they are in Mexico today.
For that is what a modern “dirty civil war” looks like, in country after country, from continent to continent. If present trends continue, America is going to experience a very old witch’s brew on her home soil for the first time since the Civil War. This is my own very dark “vision of the future” (to quote the subtitle of Colonel Benson’s piece) if new and restrictive gun control laws are passed.
So now we’re back to you, Mr. Security Agent, and your unique role in this high drama. Let me state this very clearly, both for you and for the liberal agenda-setting elites who might accidentally stumble upon this essay. Let there be no doubt about this. Let no one later say, “But we were just trying to improve public safety. We had no idea that all these disastrous unintended consequences would happen.”
I am telling you now that disastrous unintended consequences will happen if Congress passes new laws banning presently legal firearms. To make it very easy to remember, and in the spirit of our beloved Department of Homeland Security’s old color-coded security threat levels, let me spell out three lines of demarcation.
The Yellow Line:
The yellow warning line will be crossed with national gun registration laws, including laws forbidding private gun sales without government permission. When that law passes, millions of Americans will feel that they have been pushed directly to the edge of the abyss above the mass graves of history. Defenders of the Second Amendment know what happened in Turkey, the USSR, Germany, China, and other nations that fell under totalitarian rule: in every case a necessary preliminary step on the road to genocide was national gun registration, followed by confiscation. The Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust say, “Never again!” And so do we.
The Red Line:
The red line will be crossed with the passage of laws mandating that currently owned weapons, ammunition magazines, and ammunition quantities above a certain number must be turned in to authorities or destroyed, and thereafter their simple possession will be a felony. At that point, the nation will be on a hair trigger, with a thousand flaring matches nearing a thousand primed cannon fuses aimed directly at the next Fort Sumter.
The Dead Line:
The next line requires a bit of history to explain. In some primitive Civil War POW camps, where lack of funding or logistical constraints did not allow the construction of proper fences, a knee-high continuous railing of wooden slats encircled the prison grounds. Guards with rifles were positioned at the corners and in crude towers. If a prisoner so much as stepped over the narrow plank, he was shot dead without warning, obviating the need for a real fence to contain him. Hence the term “dead line.” Cross the line and people die, right now.
And this is what liberal utopians must understand: after passing the yellow line with national gun registration and transfer requirements, and the red line by making possession of currently legal firearms felonious, the dead line will be breached with the first SWAT raids upon citizens suspected of owning legal firearms made illegal by the new gun control laws. People will die resisting confiscation, in large numbers.
Confiscation crosses the dead line, make no mistake about it.
So this essay is really for you, Mr. Security Agent, because it won’t be elite Manhattan or Malibu liberals or Ivy League professors or politicians or columnists who will be ordered to strap on the sweat-stained body armor and enforce the new gun control laws at gunpoint. No, that grim task will fall to you.
But as long as you are an honorable agent of the people while an employee of the government, and as long as you honor your oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, then you will encounter no problems at all with gun owners. Why? Because you will refuse to take part in gun confiscation raids. Period. End of sentence, end of paragraph.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the leading American law enforcement agency, at least in terms of its long history and high prestige. Dear Mr. Security Agent, please consider that F.B.I. also stands for Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. Soon, your fidelity to your solemnly sworn oath may be severely tested. It will take a lot of bravery to make your personal integrity a higher calling than following illegitimate orders, simply to maintain your steady paycheck and benefits.
On the other hand, if you no longer resemble the upstanding and honorable federal agents I have known in the past, if that whole oath-to-the-Constitution shtick was a big fat joke to you and you would accept a transfer to the old Soviet KGB or East German Stasi for a ten percent pay raise…then we are definitely going to have a problem. So that oath you swore really matters, one way or the other, and so does your personal sense of honor.
Dear Mr. Security Agent, let me spell it out. If you find yourself in the sub-basement of an annex to a secret intelligence center on the far end of town, waterboarding citizens into revealing the locations of suspected “illegal caches” of firearms, ammunition or ammunition magazines that were legally owned in 2012, then know this one simple fact: tens of millions of Americans will most surely consider you a betrayer of your sworn oath and a traitor to your country.
And so, if you find yourself silently dismounting a covert SWAT vehicle at zero-dark-thirty, dressed all in body armor, counting down to the time-coordinated explosion of battering rams and flash-bang grenades, on a raid against a sleeping household intended to result in the confiscation of firearms, ammunition or ammunition magazines that were legal to own in 2012, millions of Americans who also swore an oath to defend the Constitution will consider you their domestic enemy, and they will resist you with force of arms. Just as the soldiers of King George were resisted on another notable gun confiscation raid on April 19, 1775. It used to be called “The Shot Heard ’Round the World.”
You may consider the sentiments expressed above to be absurd, hyperbolic, dangerous, ridiculous, or simply wrong-headed. But please understand that tens of millions of Americans feel this way to their cores, and they will not be disarmed without a fight. Well-meaning but naive liberals should understand the certain-to-follow consequences of new gun control laws intended to disarm their fellow citizens in the name of “public safety.” LEOs and FLEAs should understand the dire consequences of participating in gun confiscation raids, in direct violation of their sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution, including the Second Amendment.
The unintended consequences of this misguided utopian fool’s crusade to ban guns would include a second civil war as agonizingly painful as the first one, if not more so, since there would be no front lines and no safe areas for anybody, anywhere. Every sane American wants to prevent such a calamitous outcome as a “dirty civil war” on United States soil.
But know this: those tens of millions will never be quietly disarmed and then later forced at government gunpoint onto history’s next boxcars. If boxcars and detention camps are to be in America’s future, then you, Mr. Security Agent, will have to disarm them the hard way first. Not Piers Morgan, not Michael Moore, not Rosie O’Donnell, not Dianne Feinstein, not Chuck Schumer.
You.
Matt Bracken was born and raised in Baltimore, and graduated from the University of Virginia and Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training in 1979.
He has written four novels about defending freedom in an era of steadily encroaching tyranny.
Excerpts of his novels, and all of his recent essays, may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com.
For widespread distribution, more cutting-edge commentary from Matt Bracken, former SEAL and author of the Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy, along with his most recent novel, Castigo Cay:
Dear Mr. Security Agent,
Federal, state, or local. You, the man or woman with the badge, the sworn LEO or FLEA and those who inhabit the many law enforcement niches in between and on all sides. This essay is directed to you, because in the end, how this turmoil about gun control turns out will depend largely upon your decisions and actions over the coming months and years.
I sincerely wish that members of Congress—who may soon be voting on new gun control measures—would read this essay, but I realize that’s a pipe dream, considering the impenetrable bubbles around those exalted entities. So I’ll settle for you, Mr. (or Ms.) Security Agent, since you already gobble up everything on the internet, and I don’t have to seek you out.
A decade ago I wrote the novel Enemies Foreign and Domestic, a tale about how tragic events involving the misuse of firearms can be used by an evil administration to misinform and mold public opinion to support its malign anti-freedom policies.
No, my novel was not predicting “Operation Fast and Furious” a decade before that covert policy of “pursuing gun control under the radar,” (which was President Obama’s explanation to Sarah Brady for his lack of overt political action). That inter-agency gun-walking policy, remember, resulted in the deaths of over four hundred Mexicans and two U.S. federal agents, murdered in an effort to discredit the Second Amendment and lead to more restrictive gun control laws in America. (If Nixon—or any Republican, for that matter—were in office, the intentional bloodbath would be called Murdergate, but today’s collaborating Woodwards and Bernsteins are in on the cover-up.)
Instead of gun-walking thousands of AK-47s to Mexican drug cartel assassins (who would believe that?), Enemies Foreign and Domestic begins with a sniper opening fire on a packed football stadium. A thousand innocent fans die, some from the ninety bullets fired but most in the ensuing panic stampede. In a traumatized America, the fictional stadium massacre results in the banning of all semi-automatic rifles, with no buyback, no grandfathering of weapons already owned, and no sunset clause. Citizens had to turn them in for destruction or face years in federal prison.
The page-one stadium massacre was simply a plot device chosen to launch the story in high gear and set the stage to immediately and fully explore the main theme of the novel: the calculated transformation of our Constitutional republic into a socialist police state. Since I prefer to write tightly wound fiction transpiring at a rapid pace in a compressed time period, I examined the imposition of totalitarian controls over the course of just a few weeks, not years or decades.
1. The TSA: On the road to the American police state
Consider: The TSA was born in the panicked backwash of 9/11, which is understandable given the events of that day, when Muslim maniacs screaming allahu akbar murdered 3,000 Americans and others in the name of Islamic global jihad. But a decade after 9/11, due entirely to political correctness, it’s completely out of the question to profile Mohammed at the airport yet absolutely necessary for that bloated agency to “randomly” select your pre-teen or teenage daughter for a body search performed by a government matron in a TSA uniform. This frequently under-the-clothes and against-the-skin complete body search may done in full public view, or in a hidden back room, solely at the discretion of the TSA agents involved.
Meanwhile, Mom and Dad stand off to the side where they have been directed to wait, saying nothing, scarcely moving, avoiding random eye contact lest a TSA security agent catch a wayward smirk or utterance of protest. To pull out a cell phone camera at this time would surely invite arrest. To walk over and grab the matron by the arm is out of the question. Defending your child from the indignity would lead only to your being Tasered and handcuffed on the cold airport floor. After that, your entire family may wind up in some TSA airport detention cells, conveniently located right on your concourse and unknown to you until then. Better to stew in silence, let the incident pass, and try to forget it.
So in the year 2013, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we stand with our eyes averted, burning with humiliation, while our spouses or children are groped above and below the waist by blue-gloved government prison guards—only we are in an airport in a free country, and not in a prison!
Or are we? A virtual open-air prison, where government security agents can pat down ordinary citizens at will is the accepted “new normal.” Did that happen often in East Germany, I wonder? In the Soviet Union? Does it happen today in Cuba? Officially sanctioned crotch groping in the name of “security?”
(Why, again, was it that the TSA was created? Oh yes, Islamic jihad terrorists destroyed some big buildings and killed thousands of people in New York City on September 11 way back in the year 2001. It was because of that very bad day in lower Manhattan and many other acts of bloody Muslim terrorism around the world going on for decades, especially hijacking and blowing up lots of airliners full of people. It’s so easy to forget why exactly it is that we need to become a police state for our own safety.)
And now we read that the TSA is yet again expanding and branching out, like an octopus on steroids. This suddenly gargantuan federal agency is not only running routine checkpoints and stop-and-frisk operations in airports, but at bus and train stations also. Eight thousand times in 2010, if you can believe the government’s own accounting figures. Your papers, please! These checkpoints and mobile searching stations are called VIPR Teams, a telling acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Teams.
Folks, you cannot make this stuff up. Well, actually, you can. Way back in 2002 in Enemies Foreign and Domestic I invented FIST checkpoints, for Firearms Inspections Stop Terrorism. I leave it to you as to which sounds more coolly ominous and plausible in fact and in fiction—VIPRs or FISTs.
The advance word is that at the next stop on this express lane to tyranny, we will be seeing the TSA on our highways, setting up roaming vehicle checkpoints. For our “public safety,” of course. Watch the recent YouTube video of the Texas state trooper digitally raping a mother and daughter by the side of a Texas highway to see law enforcement checkpoint authority run amok, and wonder at the future of our nation and our hard-won legacy of individual freedom. If you can stomach to watch it.
Welcome to the USSA, comrades! How in the world did this happen? When did we wake up to find our freedom stolen in the night—and all in name of “homeland security” and “public safety”?
2. Nobody needs an assault weapon!
And now in the wake of yet another disgusting example of the worst human depravity, this time in an elementary school in New England, we are told by the government that some firearms are simply too dangerous for citizens to possess. We are told that limiting or removing these firearms from private hands will increase the general public safety. We are told that it is a small thing to give up semi-automatic rifles, which the political and cooperating media elites will dutifully call “assault weapons,” even though nobody can quite define the term. In any case, we are told, nobody needs an “assault weapon” with a thirty-round magazine.
Well, actually, almost nobody needs them.
Apparently, Mr. Security Agent and his comrades need them, lots of them. Tens of thousands of new “assault weapons,” enough to shoot all of the billions (with a “b”) of .223 and .40 caliber hollow-point bullets recently purchased by our federal law enforcement agencies in unprecedented new acquisitions. Are we suddenly expecting a foreign invasion I missed reading about? Wouldn’t that be the job of the military? Why do our federal law enforcement agencies suddenly need tens of thousands of “assault weapons” and billions of new hollow-point (not training) bullets, many times more than in previous years?
Evidently, it’s very dangerous on the Homeland Security front, and Mr. Security Agent needs a lot of firepower to be able to put down all of the assorted troublemakers and problem children out in the “uncontrolled spaces” of America. You can’t have too much firepower if you work for our government law enforcement agencies!
But in the name of public safety the government is going to whittle your allowable firearms down step by step, first eliminating semi-automatic rifles, then pistols, and eventually on down to the last bolt-action hunting rifles and shotguns, which may be kept at a government armory, and signed out for an approved day of hunting with a few shells. (Make sure to retrieve your empty brass for the counting.)
So, step by step, the government is going to take away any ability the average citizen might have to resist a rampaging mob or roving gangs of bandits during a breakdown in law and order, or any demands at all made by a tyrannical government sometime in the murky future.
3. Trust us, we’re from the government.
So at the historical moment that our nation is turning into a police state, with no expectation of privacy, even of our private parts in public airports or on public highways, we are commanded to grant even greater trust in our government’s perpetual future benevolence, to have blind faith that at no point in the future will our government turn tyrannical.
But in the year 2013, has the government already earned our trust, or our disgust, with its current abuses of its police powers? In this environment of steadily creeping tyranny, should we comply with government demands for our increasing disarmament?
I wrote Enemies Foreign and Domestic a decade ago with the hope that eventually anti-gun liberals would discover it and it would provide them with a virtual road map to understanding conservative thinking about firearms and their place in society. Additionally, I wrote the novel hoping that if it were successful, it might provide me a platform and a microphone to discuss these issues at some dangerous time in the future.
That time is now. Well-meaning, gun-loathing liberals need to understand that they are blindly tossing matches into a dynamite factory with their threats to severely limit and restrict the Second Amendment. They must understand the other point of view in order not to send America careening into a deadly minefield, the existence of which they are, evidently, blissfully unaware.
4. The gun nuts
To many liberals, the popular American hobby of collecting and shooting guns is a bizarre and shameful vice. Three or four pistols and long guns and a few hundred rounds of ammunition are routinely described in the popular media as an “arsenal.” Perhaps in a Manhattan walk-up studio apartment, where that handful of guns had to be smuggled in and hidden, it would be considered an “arsenal.” But out past the urban beltway, out in Red State America, that is what many folks I know keep in their car or truck for roadside emergencies, or impromptu plinking, or varmint-hunting opportunities. And hell, isn’t that why we have guns out in Red State America? Damn sure is. Among other reasons.
Millions of firearms aficionados in their later years have purchased a rifle, pistol or shotgun every year or two for decades. In millions of cases, these add up to dozens of firearms per household. A round dozen firearms of all types might be a good average. Some are hunting arms, some are military antiques, and increasingly, many are defensive pistols and modern sporting rifles, and yes, both are semi-automatic. For example, millions of AR-15 rifles have been purchased in just the last few years. Note that I did not say modern hunting rifles. That is a separate category, but the important thing to understand is that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, and anybody who says it does is telling a lie.
Those of us who enjoy firearms feel it deeply when some lunatic misuses one to slaughter innocents. Shooting ranges are virtually churches of gun safety, with safety rules posted everywhere, taught to one and all, and enforced strictly. Passing down our tradition of safe and responsible gun ownership from generation to generation is considered a sacred trust. When a firearm is misused by a criminal, our greatest wish is always that we had been present with our legally concealed pistols to stop the slaughter of unarmed, defenseless innocents. And more frequently than you might imagine, this actually happens.
Consider this: the average number of victims per incident when the shooter is stopped by an armed civilian: three. The average number of victims when the shooter is stopped by a policeman: fourteen. Why? Because when every second is a matter of life and death, the police are still minutes away. Think about those numbers. Eleven people die needlessly if the shooting takes place in a “victim disarmament zone,” where legal firearms are prohibited. This is why deranged shooters head for schools, malls, and theaters, where signs forthrightly proclaim that guns are forbidden. A “no firearms” sign draws such a person the way that a starving wolf is attracted to a pen full of helpless lambs.
But when the killer is stopped by an armed civilian, the mainstream media rarely or never mention that fact, because it goes against their propaganda template: the inherent evil of guns in civilian hands. So those stories are spiked and the typical American never hears of them. Did you know that shortly before the tragedy in Connecticut, an armed civilian stopped a maniac in a packed shopping mall after he had killed only two victims, instead of twenty-seven?
5. If it bleeds, it leads:
The media love maniacs. The same media that pointedly ignore frequent life-saving defensive uses of firearms consistently pours hours and days and weeks of attention upon the latest maniac who chooses a firearm as his tool of mass murder, so that the next potential insane villain cannot fail to notice the easy path to fame and immortality that the misuse of a gun can bring. But the greatest fame will only attach if they can beat the previous body-count record, a number constantly and loudly broadcast, so that no one can fail to hear it.
The message to the unstable is clear: Come on, you crazy guys, can’t you at least murder your way to thirty? The Virginia Polytechnic Institute madman is still leading the lone-wolf pack, but college students might resist, so maybe find an easier target to rack up higher numbers. Find a killing zone with younger and more helpless victims. The media’s lesson was clear, and it was well learned by Adam Lanza when he set out to slaughter helpless little lambs instead of bigger and tougher sheep.
The mainstream media pour a Niagara of crocodile tears over the most recent child victims, after doing everything for the killer but sign his name to their pre-written script. With such fanfare, is it any wonder that there is no lack of new monsters playing “beat the kill record” on a regular basis? It’s almost become a recurring television reality show.
Meanwhile, liberal politicians scheme about how to leverage the latest human tragedy into new gun control laws, laws that by definition will be obeyed only by the law-abiding, not by criminals. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” to paraphrase Obama confidant Rahm Emmanuel. And no better opportunity to trim the Second Amendment fangs and claws of their ideological enemies than in the immediate aftermath of another massacre wrought by a madman with a gun.
But conservatives have also considered this phenomenon of grief exploitation for political ends, although from a very different ideological perspective. We look back a century and even longer, and see other nations and peoples that were also on the march forward toward “social progress” when the need for mandatory gun registration suddenly became an urgent national priority.
6. So what’s the matter with gun registration?
To say that Turkey did not enjoy a smooth transition from being the seat of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, through World War I and into the modernist Ataturk era, would be a massive understatement. In those turbulent times, ethnic Turks, Muslims composing the vast majority of the population, considered their Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, to be disloyal and treacherous.
In 1911, a national gun registration law was passed in Turkey, with no apparent ill intention beyond increasing public safety. In 1915, during the Great War, these gun registration lists were used to disarm the Armenian and other Christian populations. Army battalions cordoned off entire towns and did gun sweeps. Once disarmed, the official state violence visited against the Armenians ratcheted up to murderous levels. Typically, on town-wide sweeps, all of the men and boys were taken away by the Turkish soldiers, never to be seen or heard from again.
Only after these Armenian “enemies of the state” were disarmed and completely helpless to resist did the final step begin: the officially sanctioned, ordered, led and conducted wholesale “deportations” of the Christian minorities from Turkey. These “deportations” were in reality forced marches into fiery deserts, accompanied by pervasive sadistic cruelty comparable only to the Japanese “Bataan Death March,” and the less known but much more deadly death marches of the last surviving Jews in Nazi hands as the Red Army closed in on Germany.
Three decades earlier in Turkey, rape, roadside torture sessions ending in death, and the entire worst catalog of human abuses were standard procedure while the Christian Armenians were being marched into the deserts to die of thirst, hunger, exposure, and sheer brutality. The stragglers who could not keep up with the columns being force-marched without food or water by Turkish soldiers were killed with bullets, bayonets, swords and even crueler means (for sport and variety), until the columns were no more and the missions were complete.
Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half of the two million Turkish Armenians were murdered, along with a half million Christians of other sects. The rest escaped from Turkey in one of the first great diasporas of a genocided people in the modern era. There is no need to build gas chambers or slave-labor gulag death camps in a country with ample deserts. In Turkey there is no Dachau or Auschwitz to memorialize the dead, just bones scattered in the sand and rocks a century ago, a model of efficiency that Hitler might have envied. (The Turks deny to this day that it happened, just as some deny the later Nazi holocaust.)
But even after conducting this first modern mega-death holocaust, with diplomats and reporters covering the genocide with daily wire reports, Turkey was not expelled in disgrace from the community of nations. There was no Western boycott of the new Turkish state. Adolf Hitler noticed this 20th-century indifference to genocide, and so did Lenin and Stalin and other despots. After the horrors of the First World War, the West had little gas left in the tank for do-gooder intervention just because some ethnic minority or other had been wiped out in Turkey.
A new low standard had been set. A nation’s leaders could commit genocide against a despised minority, murder two million living souls in full view, and the world would not give a good damn. It was an important lesson for future dictators, leading to even greater mass murders under the Nazis and Soviets.
And the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists learned another crucial lesson from the Turks: national gun registration laws could be passed easily in the name of dubious “public safety,” and the registration lists could be used later to disarm selected minorities and then subsequently to arrest, deport, and murder them by the millions after they were helpless to resist.
In the Turkish case, only a small clique understood the true purpose behind the gun registration and gun control laws of 1911. If average Turks thought about the gun laws at all, they probably believed they would actually lead to greater public safety, as advertised. That was also generally the case with the Russians, Germans, Chinese, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Rwandans, and all the rest who were required to register or even turn in their firearms for “public safety,” and who accepted the demand at face value as a “reasonable” gun control measure, to their later regret.
American liberals who would like to see the Second Amendment torn out of the Constitution as a problematic relic of a bygone era generally do not know—or pretend not to know—this well-established historical pattern. But American Constitutionalists, who are more often than not students of history, understand the pattern very well.
So, directly behind the insane faces of contemporary villains like Loughner, Holmes and Lanza, we see the smirking faces of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, tyrants who did not murder individual victims by the fives and tens, but entire populations by the tens of millions. And in each case, these national genocides were preceded by gun confiscation that was made possible by national firearms registration laws sold to a gullible population in the name of “public safety.”
(Interestingly, during the bloody French Revolution’s “Great Terror” of 1793 to 1794, it was the “Committee of Public Safety” who condemned tens of thousands of French men and women to the guillotine or other forms of summary execution without trial. After previously being disarmed, of course.)
7. The case of Switzerland
Let’s look at another foreign country for a positive perspective on gun ownership. Although surrounded by sometimes hostile neighbors, Switzerland has maintained neutrality for centuries. It is an armed neutrality: nearly every adult Swiss male serves a short period of active military duty and thereafter is a member of the home guard militia. The inactive reservist keeps his military-issued fully automatic battle rifle at home, with plenty of ammunition and magazines, for the rest of his life. If Switzerland were ever invaded, the invaders would immediately find themselves taking accurate fire from many directions. Beyond personal rifles kept at home, field artillery, heavy machineguns and other crew-served weapons were hidden in disguised barns and other public and private buildings across the countryside, among the very citizen-soldiers who would man and fire them.
An interesting story, but what does it have to do with this essay? Over those same centuries that Switzerland has not been invaded by a foreign enemy, it has also never been taken over internally by a dictator. Any would-be Swiss tyrant would face the same dilemna faced by an invading army: a citizenry armed to the teeth with the latest military-grade, full-automatic-capable true assault rifles, plus jointly operated crew-served weapons. A citizenry dedicated to preserving its freedom from any tyrant, foreign or domestic.
Liberals might cite the example of Great Britain or Australia as countries that have created national registration lists and then later disarmed their populations through confiscation, but without a subsequent genocide. That’s true, but there is often a long delay between the stages of the registration-confiscation-extermination progression. For example, national gun registration in Germany was implemented in the 1920s, without any immediate dire consequences. Then Hitler was elected and took dictatorial powers under the Enabling Act. Beginning in 1938, Hitler used the gun registration lists to first disarm and then exterminate his enemies, primarily the Jews.
8. The Scapegoat Express
Scapegoating an unpopular group is standard operating procedure for budding socialist dictators wrecking once-free economies. For the Soviets, it was the Kulaks; for the Chinese it was the so-called “landlords.” I could list more recent cases to include Cambodia, Uganda, Guatemala, Rwanda and others. Once disarmed and helpless to resist, the hated national scapegoats are slaughtered by the millions.
Probably few Turks, Germans or Russians gave a thought to the ultimate aim of their new gun registration laws, passed quite plausibly in the name of public safety. But national gun registration is a slow-acting poison, sweet and easy to swallow, but potentially becoming deadly only years later, when a tyrant takes the reins of power and inevitably sends for the list. He begins with his most dangerous enemies and works his way through the list, marching the helpless scapegoats into deserts or gas chambers or gulags after disarming them.
In America today, we are seeing the beginning of an insidious scapegoating process, with older conservative white Christian males designated as the national Lucifer du jour, fair game for any vicious attack. Famous black movie stars joke about murdering white folks and white liberal media stars laugh along with them, conveying elite acceptance of the prevailing “evil whitey” meme.
Filled from birth on a steady diet of the pervasiveness of white racism in America, rage-filled urban youths across the nation play “the knockout game” with often fatal results for their randomly selected white or Asian victims. Meanwhile, the elite liberal media fail to notice the national scope of the almost weekly occurrences. Google “the knockout game” and start reading the dozens of local stories that the media refuse to connect or identify as part of a dangerous national trend.
And it doesn’t stop with knocking out random passers-by with sucker punches and then kicking them in head until they are dead, disfigured for life, or in comas. Have you ever heard of “The Knoxville Horror”? How about “The Wichita Horror”? Google them, read the local news articles about them, and ask yourself how much national media attention those cases and others like them would garner had the races been reversed.
When alternately trumpeting or ignoring crime stories based entirely on the races of the perpetrators and the victims isn’t enough to convey the media’s full slant, they will invent stories or lie freely, as we saw in the Trayvon Martin case, with video footage edited and spliced to deliberately portray “white-Hispanic” George Zimmerman as a racist killer. Selectively covering or ignoring crimes depending on the races of the victims and perpetrators is a vital part of the process of scapegoating. The unspoken message is clearly conveyed: crimes against disfavored groups just don’t matter. The violence prone absorb the lesson, and the result is a wave of racial attacks such as those described under the rubric of “the knockout game.”
Or consider the types of cartoons that are considered acceptable today in mainstream publications, portraying prototypical older white Christian men—presumably filthy-rich conservative Republicans—as hate-spewing maniacal villains, complete with fangs, Confederate flags, prominent Christian crosses and gigantic, threatening guns. Compare these viciously racist cartoons to the vilest anti-Semitic cartoons created by Nazi propagandists before and during World War II. I am not speaking of cartoons drawn by nobodies and posted on obscure fringe websites, I am talking about cartoons printed in mainstream newspapers, cartoons that would be condemned if the targeted group was any other than the scapegoat.
Cartoons are not serious, you say? Then how about a paper in an approved and sanctioned semi-official U.S. military publication, written by a War College professor in good standing. Serious enough for you? Google the “Small Wars Journal” piece entitled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future,” by Colonel Kevin Benson, USA (ret), 2012. The “full spectrum operations” envisaged for the Army in the homeland are not made against hypothetical hostile drug cartels in the Southwest, or urban gangs, or the traditionally ambiguous and vague “Pineland Liberation Group,” or “Orangeland People’s Front,” hypothetical stand-ins named to offend no one, not even by accident.
This long-standing neutral naming protocol is tossed aside in “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland,” where the new domestic enemy that the U.S. Army must crush is a neo-KKK, a white racist “Tea Party terrorist” organization, headquartered in, of all places, Darlington, South Carolina. Yes, the NASCAR Darlington. Anybody who has been in or near an actual Tea Party event or rally knows the crowd is made up mainly of an older white population, a quiet group that leaves no mess behind, not even a stray poster, and causes no fuss.
Yet “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland” postulates that these white grandpas and grannies will be the very group that the U.S. Army will be called upon to crush in its first major battles on American soil since 1865. The message this paper sends throughout the upper ranks of the War-College-trained military, actually naming an ethnic group—Southern whites—as the national enemy to “hypothetically” be crushed by the Army in the year 2016, is simply mind-boggling.
The path forward that is indicated by the media’s growing acceptance of these vile and outrageous anti-white celebrity rants, cartoons, and articles is the same path that in previous eras led to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber for the scapegoated populations. But the final solution—genocide of the scapegoats—is only possible after the mob is sufficiently inflamed with hatred toward them by the mass media, in collaboration with an evil government. And time after time, it works.
We are seeing the opening stages of the scapegoating of white conservatives today, as the last election seems to demonstrate to the left’s satisfaction that a crucial political and demographic tipping point has been passed, and the ultimate power equations of raw tribal loyalty have changed in a fundamental way—and now it’s payback time.
We have seen this play out before in other countries and times, and it is deadly serious. Once the scapegoating gets far enough under way, it can pick up a life and a momentum of its own. For example, if the economy ever truly crashes, and the EBT system that feeds fifty million Americans goes down hard, leading to hunger, looting, and riots, (or we suffer other unforeseen problems of similar crisis proportions), the scapegoats will always be dragged to the forefront as the pre-designated patsy, to deflect blame from the government.
“It’s the traitorous Armenians! It’s the greedy Kulaks! It’s the filthy Jews! It’s the oppressive Rwandan Hutus! It’s the white-racist rednecks! Let’s go get them, and make them pay!”
The end result of disarming a scapegoat population is as easy to follow as 1-2-3:
1. Registration. 2. Confiscation. 3. Extermination.
And in this cultural and social climate, with class envy and racial hatred being stoked by the government and its willing partners in the liberal media against white conservatives, our socialist-leaning administration now wants us to surrender our most useful and effective self-defense tools, in the name of “public safety”!
9. Dear Mr. Security Agent…
Why is this essay titled Dear Mr. Security Agent, when it dwells mainly upon the media and coastal-dwelling urban liberals and their utopian belief in the benefits of new gun control laws in the United States? Mr. Security Agent will protest that he is no liberal, he is ex-military, he’s a cop, he’s a fed—he’s one of the good guys! He took the same oath to defend the Constitution that you did, Buster! He doesn’t need any lectures on defending the Constitution! So why single him out in this essay?
Why? Because liberal bliss-ninnies in San Francisco and Boston are not issued flash-bang grenades, battering rams, body armor, flex-cuffs by the gross, and MP-5 submachine guns. No, the dirty end of the confiscation job will fall upon the shoulders of sworn law enforcement officers and gold-badged federal law enforcement agents. The LEOs and the FLEAs. That’s you, Mr. Security Agent.
We really don’t want a problem with you, believe me. And there is no reason for us to have a problem, because we both can read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and neither of us requires a team of black-robed mystics to translate its plain English into Newspeak for improved comprehension. You and I both understand what “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” means, without requiring five out of nine politically appointed Supremes to tell us that it does not mean what it very plainly states in black and white.
Now, as long as Mr. Security Agent remembers that he swore the same oath that millions of Americans swore, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, he will certainly not permit himself to take part in gun confiscation raids. But if he does, well, let’s be frank: tens of millions of Americans would then consider him to be the very domestic enemy that they swore to defend the Constitution against.
But Mr. Bracken—I can hear it now—this is the United States of America! Abuses like the ones you hypothesize simply cannot happen here. Gun registration does not always lead to confiscation, much less to extermination. We are not Germany or Russia or any of those other countries you mentioned. This is the 21st Century. America is different, and it can’t happen here. You must lay your irrational fears aside and place your trust in your government. It cannot, it will not, ever turn in the dark and tyrannical direction that you imagine.
Oh, really? Google “wrong-address SWAT raids” and read any of the dozens of articles you will find. We should trust the government not to abuse us even further, once we are disarmed and helpless to resist them? Thanks, but I don’t think so.
In 2002, in Enemies Foreign and Domestic, I wrote a fictional account of future government agents waterboarding American “detainees” in a clandestine “interrogation center.” In 2013, I think that we are many steps closer to that reality. Today, we already see genital groping by federal agents and at least one Texas state trooper who was caught on film. Their goal is not “public safety,” but public humiliation, intimidation, and control. Cowing the peasants into meek obeisance to unchecked authority. Can waterboarding American “detainees” in clandestine torture centers really be that far behind?
We have recently learned, Mr. Security Agent, that your law enforcement comrades can read every email we send or receive with no need for a pesky and outdated warrant. Today, our cell phones come complete with undisclosed “back doors” for law enforcement use, allowing them even to be switched on remotely, to serve as no less than a secret police microphone in our very own pockets.
Next year there will be drones patrolling the skies above America, keeping a watchful “Gorgon Stare” (Google it) mega-eye out for our “public safety.” Please read “The Coming Drone Attack on America,” by Naomi Wolf, to understand the grim implications of this development for what remains of American freedom.
Facial recognition cameras are going up everywhere. Nearly all public and corporate video camera networks have their feeds directed to dozens of new law enforcement “fusion centers,” whose very existence is kept secret from the American people they were supposedly built to protect. (Google “fusion centers” as well. Discover more news that the liberal mainstream media don’t think you need to know.) Data-mining and Social Network Analysis by our “protectors” edges steadily toward the “Department of Pre-Crime” foreseen in the science fiction movie Minority Report.
Next, project a decade ahead to what may be considered routine law enforcement behavior in 2023, after millions of Americans refuse to comply with new firearms registration and confiscation laws. Action will beget reaction. SWAT raids will spur armed resistance, which will spur “death squad” reprisals by “off-duty” agents, exactly in the way I wrote in “Enemies Foreign and Domestic.” It is a natural, almost organic progression, once started—and it has started. Secret detention centers will proliferate like mushrooms in the night. The media will not report on them, even if screams are heard around the clock by neighbors. Particularly brave reporters who break the media silence to report on police abuses will disappear, or be found headless, as they are in Mexico today.
For that is what a modern “dirty civil war” looks like, in country after country, from continent to continent. If present trends continue, America is going to experience a very old witch’s brew on her home soil for the first time since the Civil War. This is my own very dark “vision of the future” (to quote the subtitle of Colonel Benson’s piece) if new and restrictive gun control laws are passed.
So now we’re back to you, Mr. Security Agent, and your unique role in this high drama. Let me state this very clearly, both for you and for the liberal agenda-setting elites who might accidentally stumble upon this essay. Let there be no doubt about this. Let no one later say, “But we were just trying to improve public safety. We had no idea that all these disastrous unintended consequences would happen.”
I am telling you now that disastrous unintended consequences will happen if Congress passes new laws banning presently legal firearms. To make it very easy to remember, and in the spirit of our beloved Department of Homeland Security’s old color-coded security threat levels, let me spell out three lines of demarcation.
The Yellow Line:
The yellow warning line will be crossed with national gun registration laws, including laws forbidding private gun sales without government permission. When that law passes, millions of Americans will feel that they have been pushed directly to the edge of the abyss above the mass graves of history. Defenders of the Second Amendment know what happened in Turkey, the USSR, Germany, China, and other nations that fell under totalitarian rule: in every case a necessary preliminary step on the road to genocide was national gun registration, followed by confiscation. The Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust say, “Never again!” And so do we.
The Red Line:
The red line will be crossed with the passage of laws mandating that currently owned weapons, ammunition magazines, and ammunition quantities above a certain number must be turned in to authorities or destroyed, and thereafter their simple possession will be a felony. At that point, the nation will be on a hair trigger, with a thousand flaring matches nearing a thousand primed cannon fuses aimed directly at the next Fort Sumter.
The Dead Line:
The next line requires a bit of history to explain. In some primitive Civil War POW camps, where lack of funding or logistical constraints did not allow the construction of proper fences, a knee-high continuous railing of wooden slats encircled the prison grounds. Guards with rifles were positioned at the corners and in crude towers. If a prisoner so much as stepped over the narrow plank, he was shot dead without warning, obviating the need for a real fence to contain him. Hence the term “dead line.” Cross the line and people die, right now.
And this is what liberal utopians must understand: after passing the yellow line with national gun registration and transfer requirements, and the red line by making possession of currently legal firearms felonious, the dead line will be breached with the first SWAT raids upon citizens suspected of owning legal firearms made illegal by the new gun control laws. People will die resisting confiscation, in large numbers.
Confiscation crosses the dead line, make no mistake about it.
So this essay is really for you, Mr. Security Agent, because it won’t be elite Manhattan or Malibu liberals or Ivy League professors or politicians or columnists who will be ordered to strap on the sweat-stained body armor and enforce the new gun control laws at gunpoint. No, that grim task will fall to you.
But as long as you are an honorable agent of the people while an employee of the government, and as long as you honor your oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, then you will encounter no problems at all with gun owners. Why? Because you will refuse to take part in gun confiscation raids. Period. End of sentence, end of paragraph.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the leading American law enforcement agency, at least in terms of its long history and high prestige. Dear Mr. Security Agent, please consider that F.B.I. also stands for Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. Soon, your fidelity to your solemnly sworn oath may be severely tested. It will take a lot of bravery to make your personal integrity a higher calling than following illegitimate orders, simply to maintain your steady paycheck and benefits.
On the other hand, if you no longer resemble the upstanding and honorable federal agents I have known in the past, if that whole oath-to-the-Constitution shtick was a big fat joke to you and you would accept a transfer to the old Soviet KGB or East German Stasi for a ten percent pay raise…then we are definitely going to have a problem. So that oath you swore really matters, one way or the other, and so does your personal sense of honor.
Dear Mr. Security Agent, let me spell it out. If you find yourself in the sub-basement of an annex to a secret intelligence center on the far end of town, waterboarding citizens into revealing the locations of suspected “illegal caches” of firearms, ammunition or ammunition magazines that were legally owned in 2012, then know this one simple fact: tens of millions of Americans will most surely consider you a betrayer of your sworn oath and a traitor to your country.
And so, if you find yourself silently dismounting a covert SWAT vehicle at zero-dark-thirty, dressed all in body armor, counting down to the time-coordinated explosion of battering rams and flash-bang grenades, on a raid against a sleeping household intended to result in the confiscation of firearms, ammunition or ammunition magazines that were legal to own in 2012, millions of Americans who also swore an oath to defend the Constitution will consider you their domestic enemy, and they will resist you with force of arms. Just as the soldiers of King George were resisted on another notable gun confiscation raid on April 19, 1775. It used to be called “The Shot Heard ’Round the World.”
You may consider the sentiments expressed above to be absurd, hyperbolic, dangerous, ridiculous, or simply wrong-headed. But please understand that tens of millions of Americans feel this way to their cores, and they will not be disarmed without a fight. Well-meaning but naive liberals should understand the certain-to-follow consequences of new gun control laws intended to disarm their fellow citizens in the name of “public safety.” LEOs and FLEAs should understand the dire consequences of participating in gun confiscation raids, in direct violation of their sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution, including the Second Amendment.
The unintended consequences of this misguided utopian fool’s crusade to ban guns would include a second civil war as agonizingly painful as the first one, if not more so, since there would be no front lines and no safe areas for anybody, anywhere. Every sane American wants to prevent such a calamitous outcome as a “dirty civil war” on United States soil.
But know this: those tens of millions will never be quietly disarmed and then later forced at government gunpoint onto history’s next boxcars. If boxcars and detention camps are to be in America’s future, then you, Mr. Security Agent, will have to disarm them the hard way first. Not Piers Morgan, not Michael Moore, not Rosie O’Donnell, not Dianne Feinstein, not Chuck Schumer.
You.
Matt Bracken was born and raised in Baltimore, and graduated from the University of Virginia and Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training in 1979.
He has written four novels about defending freedom in an era of steadily encroaching tyranny.
Excerpts of his novels, and all of his recent essays, may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com.
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