Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

In the winter of 2030, in the middle of his second term in office, President Donald J. Trump, Jr. became as fed up and disgusted as any American with the crushing poverty in California, brought about by idiotic Marxist policies, with the rampant crime rate—burglaries, rapes, and muggings—and the massive rioting, thanks to Anti-fa and similar bands of anti-individualist barbarians.

Like his father, Trump was a negotiator. However, having failed to persuade California Governor Gavin Newsom or his State Legislature to do anything rational to remedy the situation, Trump mobilized several dozen special units of the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps, home at last from their unexpectedly swift and decisive victories in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and sent them to the west coast on a unique mission.

Leaning on historical precedents established long ago by those who served before him in office, he issued orders to his troops. In 1957, President Dwight David Eisenhower had called on segments of the 101st Airborne Division, and ”federalized” the Arkansas National Guard, to enforce the civil rights of black school children in Little Rock. In 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had similarly employed the Alabama National Guard and federal troops to enforce the rights of black people to vote and to march without fear, demanding that right.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Wilson Reagan had ordered millions of pounds of surplus cheese—originally purchased and stored by the government to support farm prices—given away ”off the back of a truck” to anyone who wanted it.

In the early twenty-first century, President Barack H. Obama, in his effort to build a civilian defense force ”as large and well-armed as the military”—which many suspected was preparation for a coup de’tat against the armed civilian populace of the United States, whom he could not abide, had allowed the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration to purchase nearly two billion rounds of small arms ammunition, mostly .40 S&W hollowpoints illegal for military use, causing nationwide shortages.

As the twentieth-century social scientist John Lott had put it in his classic treatise, ”More Guns, Less Crime”. It had become a byword with both Trump and his illustrious father. The shelf-life of modern cartridges being virtually limitless. Trump ordered the military to distribute the fifteen-year-old ammunition like surplus cheese to ordinary Californians who had been illegally stripped by their government of their means of self-defense. To accomplish this, the G.I.s would drive two hundred decommissioned M548 tracked combat cargo carriers into various California municipalities from San Diego to San Francisco. The vehicles were obsolete and they could be left behind if tactically necessary.

Each cargo carrier would be loaded with four and a half tons of small arms ammunition and be accompanied by a pair of less expendable M1126 ”Stryker” Infantry Vehicles to protect the cargo and crew from rioting looters as well as forces of the California state government. The skies overhead would be patrolled by Apache helicopter gunships, with occasional fly-bys by F35b vertical-landing fighters from an offshore aircraft carrier. President Trump was absolutely determined that everyone involved should understand how seriously he took the Second Amendment rights of Californians.

At the same time, also from San Diego to Sacramento, squads of Marines would be dispatched—their latest”dynamic” body armor, a product of NASA Mars research, would protect them from the theoretical opposition’s outdated 5.56x45mm, 7.62x39mm, and 7.62x51mm (.223, .30 Russian, and .308) weapons, while they’d be firing back with their brand new M999s, a titanium and magnesium M14 variant, shooting 8.8x51mm (.358 Winchester)—to break into police arsenals and storage facilities the entire length of the state, remove confiscated pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns, and distribute them to the people. If ”more guns” really means ”less crime”, California was on its way to becoming as crime-free as Switzerland.

History would record that Governor Newsom had been arrested, frantically paddling an inflatable dinghy out to a Venezuelan submarine. A California, fully restored to Constitutionality, would make a grand talking-point for Don’s sister Tiffany’s Presidential campaign in 2032.