Distribute Widely and Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It’s happening again.

And again and again and again.

Goblins and mutants of various descriptions and apparent motivations invade a public school or some other unprotected crowd somewhere, with whatever the politically incorrect Gun-of-the-Month happens to be, killing or wounding pupils, teachers, or others by the dozen.

Immediately (sometimes even before the fact, when the script girl gets her cues wrong), selected mouthpieces begin bleating that certain types of perfectly legal firearms must be outlawed, confiscated, or even that the Second Amendment itself be repealed. The national “news” media take up the cry, unimaginatively repeating each other word for word, and individuals like me, writers and activists who thought their struggle was happily over with the passage of Some Law or the election of Some Guy, have to go back to work again.

For me, it’s been 50 long, difficult years, exactly half a century, since the extremely photogenic murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. (reinforced in our memories by the still-unsolved assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy five years earlier). Those events very conveniently allowed some of the worst enemies of individual liberty in American history to force the 1968 Gun Control Act through Congress, inflicting untold damage on the Bill of Rights and American hopes for freedom for the first time since the repulsive Administration of communist-admirer Franklin Delano Roosevelt three decades earlier.

Aside from rounding up the actual villains who instigated them, the answer to preventing these atrocities, ending them for once and for all, is obvious. However the “authorities” and the “Dominant Culture” will not willingly relinquish their power over us. They’d rather see row after row of children mowed down like crops. They will do anything they can to prevent the implementation of a real solution to school- and mass-shootings because it runs contrary to their ultimate goal for humanity: pounding us all into harmless, helpless, huddling serfdom, making us slaves forever to outrages like income taxation and the Federal Reserve System. If they get their way, we all wind up wards of the state, cradle to grave.

Over the fifty-two years that have passed since the 1966 Texas University Tower shootings in Austin (the shooter, Charles Whitman, who had stabbed his wife and mother to death the night before, was found to have a brain tumor that may have affected his behavior; I’m sure this gave certain malefactors ideas), I have been very slowly and even more reluctantly forced to the grisly conclusion that a majority of the mass shootings we’ve witnessed in this more-than-half-century were staged— cold-bloodily arranged—by some group or groups in order to force the disarming and subjugation of the American people.

But because self-defense is an individual bodily function that can no more be delegated to somebody else than can eating, sleeping, making love, or going to the bathroom, the one and only real solution is training and arming the school kids themselves. I’ll say that again, so there can be no mistake: the one and only real solution is training and arming the school kids themselves.

Kids with guns. Before you dismiss it as unthinkable, remember I’m the author who predicted the widespread concealed carry that we see today, in my 1979 novel (still in print after 39 years), The Probability Broach.

It won’t be easy. The history of “gun control” in America is an ugly, bigoted one. It began as efforts, mostly by Democrats, to disarm various “undesirable” minorities—blacks, Italians, the Irish—and render them controllable, or at least less threatening to genteel folks. The 1934 National Firearms Act—the first federal gun law—had nothing to do with machine guns in the hands of gangsters, as is often claimed. It was written and passed because the “transformative” (for which, read “socialist”) Roosevelt Administration got frightened out of what little wits they collectively possessed by the 1933 “Businessman’s Revolt” (which, according to author/lecturer Robert LeFevre, compelled FDR to change his leftist cabinet appointments), and the 1934 “Bonus Army” which was put down in a panic by brutal military force .

It’s widely believed that the 1968 Gun Control Act was passed to keep inexpensive, affordable guns (“Saturday Night Specials”) out of the hands of black families, at a time when American inner cities were in flames, leaving them dependent on the police, and with an eye toward disarming Asian street gangs beginning to form up on the West Coast. The so-called “Brady Bill” passed when Congressmen noticed that the majority of handguns in America were being purchased and held by women. The present effort seems to be directed at preventing young people from learning to shoot. So much for “shall not be infringed”. Who needs to repeal the Second Amendment when our putrescently corrupted courts will simply let you ignore it?

The method is relatively simple. There are thousands of potential subjects to do the shooting or the bombing or whatever for evil entities—mental patients, the homeless, drugged-out and disaffected kids, individuals duped into believing they’re doing the bidding of jihadis, sitting around, collecting disability and watching daytime television. When things aren’t going their way the bad guys simply activate one of these near-zombies they’ve been storing up, pre-conditioned with drugs, hypnosis, or electroconvulsive “therapy”, and the public slaughter happens. The killers all turn out to have long histories of run-ins with the law or of psychiatric “treatment” that nobody seems to notice until it’s too late. If they die in the act, so much the better for everybody, all around.

Can I prove any of this? Of course not—it’s specifically engineered not to be proved. But it’s at least instructive that the less well the drama works, the fewer people who are panicked by it, and the less flurry that’s kicked up by events like this—the more of them there are, and the more frequently they occur. It’s exactly as if their architects (you probably know who they are by now) are saying to Americans, “The more you resist gutting your Constitution and surrendering your rights, the more of your children we’re going to kill.”

The fact that, in this time of deadly danger, the school system fails to teach kids how to effectively defend themselves (and others) amounts to nothing less than criminal neglect and child abuse. Many an ancient classical civilization would laugh and point and wonder how such a culture as ours can hold itself together. Every time it’s proposed that we simply arm school teachers, I have to laugh, myself, and shudder at the same time, remembering vividly what incompetent klutzes most public school teachers I’ve known were.

The only workable solution to school and mass shootings is to train and arm everybody, as the Constitution and history as we know it mandate. I was 11 years old when I started shooting competitively, reliably producing tiny groups the size of pinky fingernails at 50 yards with a big old heavy iron-sighted Winchester Model 52 .22 rifle rigged to be a single-shot.

Presently, thousands of U.S. combat veterans (stay with me here, I’m not changing the subject) tragically can’t find a place for themselves in everyday civilian life (mostly, I think, because liberals are afraid of them) and are falling victim to alcohol, drugs, and suicide at astonishing rates. Some of them are even doomed to be used as zombies.

These veterans could be quickly approved by self-defense schools around the country (paid for by philanthropists recruited for the purpose) and assigned to the nation’s public schools to instruct teachers and students alike in “Civil- and Self-Defense”, a new course of study right alongside “History and Moral Philosophy” as recommended by author Robert A. Heinlein. Weapons-carry certificates (not permits—you can’t permit a human right) should be automatically issued at age 16, and if the public education system resists this, it should be defunded and summarily abolished, its buildings emptied out and razed to the ground so that not a single stone remains standing on another, and salt sown on the ruins.

Anti-Constitutional movement leaders like the one we call “Danny Pigg” (you know who we mean) should be sent to Cuba—not to Guantanamo, but parachuted gently into Havana as socialist refugees from capitalist individualism as they aspire to be. Let their communist comrades figure out what to do with them.

As for the rest: child demonstrators, deliberately kept ignorant of history and the law, who rail against the Bill of Rights, should be spanked and sent to bed without their suppers.