Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Among the potential threats that America’s Founding Fathers feared most were insurrections and mobs. That’s one reason they opted for a republic, rather than a democracy.“Your People,” Alexander Hamilton famously enunciated, “Is a great beast!”—demonstrating that a even a broken clock can be right at least twice a day.

The United States Constitution is the highest law of the land. Its Amendments, it therefore follows, are the highest of the high. Read the Second Amendment for yourself. It forbids the government from infringing on the individual right to own and carry weapons. Now look up the word “infringe” in a decent dictionary. Not a single federal, state, or local gun law of any kind, from 1917 until today, is Constitutional.

You can forget the counter-Revolutionary whimpering of crooked, cowardly politicians, the maundering of corrupt statist lawyers, and the latterday pontifications of cross-dressers in black robes. For now we may be stuck with their illegal limitations on our inalienable liberties—for now. However, the times we’re living through at the moment demand an exception be made to the statutes that illegitimately keep American citizens from being armed as the Founding Fathers intended, meaning just as well as the government. The President could decree it. Our lives and those of everyone we care about depend on it.

Confronted with ravening mobs of violent, arsonous Democrat likely voters, provoked and led by trained Marxist operatives perversely determined to obliterate Western Civilization, what is needed now in every American home—and racked by the dozen in every police station in the land—is an equalizer that will allow decent individuals to protect themselves, their families, and their property from the murderous “Progressive” Marxist, Leninistg, Stalinist, Alinskyist hordes. It would also act as a splendid deterrent. I hereby formally propose a “cutout”, an exception to a law—which should never have been written in the first place—for the fully-automatic 12-gauge shotgun.

Such outlandish super-weapons do exist. The late, lamented Remington Arms released a limited production of their experimental Model 7188 in Vietnam. There are also fully automatic 12-gauge AK-47s. And I believe that some number of the “Streetsweepers” of days gone by—illegally pressured off the market by the vile Brady Campaign in criminal collusion with that most homicidal of outlaw government agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—were automatic, as well. All in all, such guns could well be the ideal militia weapon against the raging hordes the Founding Fathers envisioned. Adequate magazine capacity, recoil, and weight do stil represent something of a problem.

A few years ago an extremely interesting device called the “A&W Diverter” was developed, which was something like a horizontal choke, that screwed onto your shotgun muzzle and spread the shot pattern out sideways (it’s ordinarily round), to deal with the exact problem we have today, confrontational and violent mobs. The rumor at the time was that the BATFE illegally suppressed them, too. There is absolutely no place for a renegade organization like BATFE in a free society, and it important that it be abolished. (But I digress.) Diverters still on the market today go for about $230.00, about ten times what a simple, machined object like that is actually worth.

Lest anyone complain that it’s unseemly, somehow, to prepare to kill someone who has expressed a desire to kill me, when I was a young auxiliary police officer, I was instructed to “shoot the street” if I were ever threatened by a mob, meaning aim my shotgun at the concrete or asphalt just in front of the crowd. The buckshot’s velocity would be greatly reduced by its contact with the ground. It would then ricochet horizontally and more or less harmlessly pepper your assailants’ legs. Emphasis on “more or less” and “legs”. The shot would also be salubriously deformed. It would be a good idea, as well, to equip the weapon with a bayonet lug, like a World War One Winchester Model 97 “trench broom”.

Later on, I encountered the late, great Mel Tappan and his immortal work, Survival Guns (which just enjoyed another printing). While the police mostly seem to prefer 00 (double-ought) buckshot in their shotguns (each of the nine-to-twelve pellets in a shell is about .33 caliber), Tappan advocated the use of #4 buck (twenty-seven .24 caliber pellets fit in certain Federal ammunition), advice I have followed ever since.