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Enterprise, Number 19, December 1, 1996.
Letter to a Gun-Grabber: The Wrath To Come
By Victor Milan
[email protected]Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise
I'm here to deliver an indictment -- and a warning.
You speak of "gun control legislation." What a world that conveys! Ah, democracy, the Great Insulator: it enables you to commit crimes without exposing yourself to physical or moral payback. You can impose your will on others at gunpoint -- which is rape, and also politics -- but without having to dirty your precious palm with an actual gun, not to mention risk actually getting hurt.
Our society calls this "citizenship." I name it cowardice and hypocrisy.
Let's get real: what you want is for mercenaries -- paid in part by wealth looted from gun owners -- to do your bidding by disarming us at gunpoint: kicking down our doors, stomping our pets to death, killing us and our families if we resist complying with your desires. That's about the size of it, isn't it, Mr. Democracy?
Because we will not flop onto our backs and let you stick it in. The gun owners of America will not disarm themselves. If you want our guns you must come and take them.
I take for granted that you won't try this yourself: that would be exposing yourself to harm. And it would be, rest assured.
Instead you'll send hirelings. Or should we perhaps call them scapegoats? For you imagine they can absorb your sins -- including the additional sin of exposing others to risks you're too craven to take yourself -- and leave you pure and safe and infinitely holier than Neil or Vin or I or scum of our ilk.
We will not be disarmed peaceably. It is illegal. It is immoral. Ultimately it would be fatal. For if we are disarmed, our property and lives become entirely dependent upon the judgement and humanity of those who rule us.
For some reason this puts me irresistibly in mind of the "medical" experiments carried out in Nazi concentration camps. That's what happens when humans are placed irremovably under the control of others. When the minions of the benevolent State can act without any fear of consequences.
Don't imagine it's any different here. You obviously believe there are evil, slavering, kill-crazy freaks in the world -- it's how you see us gun owners, no? It's how Charles "Julius Streicher" Schumer and Morris "Goebbels" Dees portray us. Are you absolutely confident that no one who resembles your vision of us will ever occupy a position of power in your disarmed America?
Dream on.
Consider Waco. Passing up opportunities to capture David Koresh on his frequent and predictable solo trips out of Mt. Carmel, declining an invitation from Koresh to come out and inspect his guns, BATF deliberately chose to stage a firefight at a church filled with women and children -- the flashier and bloodier, the better the media play. They were willing to kill kids for appropriations.
Maybe you're still in denial over Waco. Maybe you think it's all "right wing anti-government hate;" the pro-government hate groups certainly want you to believe that. So maybe you're a good German and accept what you're told.
But I challenge you: look into a mirror. Look into your soul. Do you really want the men who made the plans, sent the troops, or pulled the triggers at the Seventh Day Adventist Church outside Waco to have absolute power over you? Would you like for the confessed felon from the FBI who destroyed an internal critique of the Bureau's handling of Ruby Ridge -- for fear that the man they had set out to destroy every bit as thoroughly might be able to use it to ensure himself a fair trial -- to have the power to poke his finger against your name on a computer screen and say, "This one dies"? That's the power you want to give him.
Think it'll never come to that? You're probably right. Let's say you win: your mercenaries disarm us. Then what? You have the votes, and the warm fuzzy sense of accomplishment.
They have the guns.
In which case you're slaves, motherfucker. As we are, so shall you be. You shall know the feel of a suppressed MP5 muzzle in your ear and a jackboot's cock up your ass. That's the price of being conquered, always.
Though you will have raped us, plundered us, enslaved us, and killed us by proxy, by proxy we will have our vengeance. Through the agency of your own myrmidons. Your hash will be settled long before you have to worry about Michael Kahoe or Larry Potts in charge of the Bureau of Population Reduction.
Yes, the world is becoming more "democratic." It's also filling up with strife. Your democracy is upheld by bayonets -- like all political power. The brute truth we see around the globe -- from Somalia, where US and UN troops disarmed the common folk and left them to be butchered in thousands by bandits, to central Africa where megamurder is brewing fresh, to Kabul where over a million unarmed citizens cower in shadows praying for deliverance from a few thousand religious cranks with Kalashnikovs, and that their deliverers don't exact a greater price than Taliban -- is this: only those with guns count. The rest are livestock.
So hear my warning: fear the wrath to come.
And it's not even ours. We'll never hurt you, unless testosterone poisoning actually induces you to get off your futon and try to grab our guns yourself. And we both know that won't happen.
You are bringing on a civil war. You are, because of your sick need to dominate, because you cannot bear to let others live who are different from you. You will not like the results.
Because if civil war does come, you'd best hope we win. That's specifically we libertarian types; in the society we'd build, you would be perfectly free to spew your anti-gun hate: only if you tried to put your ideas into effect would you be at risk -- like any violent criminal. If the populists or conservatives dominate -- well, you'll just have to go along with whatever they want, because they have the guns and you have your self-righteousness, and guess which wins.
But above all things pray your side doesn't win. Because then you'll learn the hideous truth: your selfless servitors, those ninja-clad upholders of democracy, are really Jeffrey Dahmer with a Black & Decker, and you're an Asian teen.
Prometheus Award-winner Victor Milan is the author of over 70 novels, including the just-released CLD from AvoNova and War In Tethyr from TSR.