Prepetorial #5: Eat your Guns


By John Galt

The temperature had to just be miserable today for May 14, 2011, as here I was at a WalMart supercenter queued up in a long line with every other hungry soul in the county it seemed. The radio was blaring the news and some music from the Voice of America, now broadcast on the A.M. radio around the clock as the war in Pakistan and Iran had everyone’s full attention. The announcer came on at 11 a.m. sharp to give the local news and weather when I heard him say “it’s now 91 degrees here in Columbia and the South Carolina news will follow the VOA World Update at 11”. The news was disturbing as usual and the crowd was getting restless. The line had well over two thousand people in it and since the program was mandatory, once you were in line, you could not leave. As we stood there, I noticed the Home Guard patrolling the area, with machine guns mounted on Humvees in full view along with dogs and several large trucks filled with rifles and pistols. “What a program” I thought to myself. This was the most ingenious, yet devious thing I had ever seen and yet I was trapped into because I said “it could never happen here” over and over again to my friends and family.

After six hours in line, and thankfully Home Guard Boy Scouts acting as runners passing out cold bottles of water, it was my turn at the table. The HG officer motioned me behind the curtain and I placed the two guns I owned on the table. Curiously, he inspected the 9 mm pistol for quite a while before uttering the serial numbers to the other soldier at the table. She busily keyed in the serial numbers then uttered “clean” back to the officer. Then in rapid fire succession, she fired off the questions:

“Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”

“No”

“Did you purchase these firearms from an authorized dealer?”

“The shotgun yes, the pistol I purchased from a friend over twenty years ago.”

“Does this individual live in this area?”

“No, I bought it when I lived in Colorado in 1988.”

“Are you aware of this pistol ever being used in a crime prior to your purchase?”

“No”

“Do you still have any ammunition in your possession?”

I hesitated for a moment and said “I might have some 12 gauge shells lying around, but the paper didn’t say anything about turning in ammunition.”

“Please destroy the ammunition immediately or turn it into the nearest Police or Home Guard station. Thank you. Now please move to table 14 for fingerprinting, retina scan and DNA sampling. Here is your receipt for credits to be added to your food ration allowance after you are finished with processing.”

“Sheesh, they treat you like a criminal” I thought, but the turn in was mandatory as the Home Guard was running short of weapons and ammo with so much being dedicated to the troops overseas. At least my wife would be pleased, for once we would have fresh meat instead of frozen soy burgers or whatever that garbage was they passed off as meat in the grocery stores. For turning in two old guns, we got steaks, hamburgers, hams and more that would last for at least two months and I was thankful for that. My family had been losing weight on these caloric rations that you were limited to on your card and if I had to eat any more tofu, I thought I would vomit. “At least the guns were going for a good cause” I thought to myself, as terrorist infiltrations across our borders had increased and the number of attacks exceeded my worst nightmare. Maybe now the excuse that “Americans aren’t doing enough” can be put to sleep.

Once again fiction may seem strange, but improbable? Hardly. Consider the shifting political sands in this nation towards a more socialist idealism. Think about the power grab which could be executed on such short notice without even a whimper if there were numerous terrorist attacks inside the United States and the local law enforcement agencies cried “uncle” as a consequence of years of refusing to share data or train them against terrorist activities. I’m sure I’ll get some nasty emails crying “but they have been trained and information is being shared” and that’s easy enough to address with several questions. Have we trained our officers to emotionally function if infants are plucked from incubators and shot or beheaded in front of their eyes? Or if young girls are executed live on television at their schools? There is not just a tactical methodology that has to be addressed, but an emotional one, and it’s something our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are having trouble dealing with on a psychological basis also. The prospects of such programs are not insane, they have been executed in Western societies in the past, with Nazi Germany being the best example. There has been a lot of speculation that there is long term plan on the books for weapons confiscation and the best way to achieve this goal is not via door to door searches and threats; it’s to starve the population and offer short term tempting treats as the economic and civil situation spirals downward. If everyone remembers the survey question from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s issued to our soldiers about weapons confiscation and domestic disruptions, the table was set years ago. The tactic of confrontation to force compliance only leads to an expedient rise in civil, if not violent, opposition to the actions of the powers that be.

How does one plan to deal with this? Sadly, this is not going to be a prepetorial to help you too much in the arena of actions rather more so to make you think. You have to make individual moral decisions which could endanger your life and your family’s. That decision is split into two very difficult points of discussion.

First, if you turn in your weapons, the adage goes “only the criminals will have guns” and that is a dangerous but factual aspect of life. You might be “law abiding” yet during a time of emergency, national or regional, the government is still unable to allocate enough resources to put every fire out or should I say, protect every citizen. The weapons confiscation program will actually based on a scientific model where in City X the estimated percentage of firearms ownership equals Y and the number of conforming citizens which turn their weapons in will be Z. Thus the idea of the fictional story above, where food is used to tempt in the remaining holdouts is waived not in front of the gun owner who might be a card holding NRA conservative, but in front of the wife and children to tear the family apart and force the issue. After that subgroup is filtered out, that leaves the hardcore “resistance” as they shall be labeled and the criminal tag applied accordingly. That’s when heavily armed “sterilization” units will be introduced to clean out and remove anyone who refuses to get with the program. By that same token, the same statistical analysis, faulty as it is, will be applied to the allocation of law enforcement resources to prevent cooperating communities from becoming victims of upsurges in crime because of such a program. The reality is that using statistical models based on fixed or prior population models in such a societal breakdown will prove to be unreliable and in many cases fatally flawed.


Thus the dangers of option number two; holding out. There are way too many things that I could offer as advice and breaking the law is not one of them. However, if the United States abdicates it’s Constitution, then how can I be loyal to a government which defies the laws it is sworn and empowered to uphold? These are the moral hazard aspects of the question, yet there is more. The danger you as a citizen introduce to your family is nothing to be treated lightly. Consider the initial squeeze under way at this time; ammunition is becoming sparse and expensive. The first operation is to price the average consumer out of the market using economic forces of inflation and shortages. This in and of itself will prevent most people from saving the money to purchase a new firearm or add to their ammunition stocks as they will be forced to pay more for energy, food and shelter. By no means am I saying that monetary inflation is a tool to disarm the citizens, it is a beneficial byproduct of the economic destruction by the central powers. Then by regulating the gun shops to the point where they are forced out of business, be it on inspections to find technicalities or concocted violations or encouraging lawsuit after lawsuit to bankrupt them, the availability of weapons and ammo will be further restricted. Lastly, you glorify the criminal ownership of firearms to make people feel safer if only the law enforcement community owns weapons to protect the citizens and diminish stories of citizens defending themselves from violent crimes. Crazy as this may sound, the reality is here. Turn on a rap video, television series or video game and tell me that the criminal is not glorified in some cases because of their ability to handle a firearm and terrorize communities via crime sprees. All of those things have happened and continue to at an accelerated pace.

Thus the actual moral hazard if you select option number two:

Do you endanger your family by violating the edicts of an Executive Order or do you endanger your family by opening your household up to the average criminal, who will behave far worse in a societal disruption?

That is the question you have to answer for yourself.

I have made my decision, it’s time for you to make yours.

Good luck and I hope you pray hard as you think about this.

This time, it’s for all the marbles.


"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861