The Bracken Anthology (17 page)

Instead of gun-walking thousands of AK-47s to Mexican drug cartel assassins (who would believe
that
?),
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
begins with a sniper opening fire on a packed football stadium. A thousand innocent fans die, some from the ninety bullets fired but most in the ensuing panic stampede. In a traumatized America, the fictional stadium massacre results in the banning of all semi-automatic rifles, with no buyback, no grandfathering of weapons already owned, and no sunset clause. Citizens had to turn them in for destruction or face years in federal prison.

The page-one stadium massacre was simply a plot device chosen to launch the story in high gear and set the stage to immediately and fully explore the main theme of the novel: the calculated transformation of our Constitutional republic into a socialist police state.  Since I prefer to write tightly wound fiction transpiring at a rapid pace in a compressed time period, I examined the imposition of totalitarian controls over the course of just a few weeks, not years or decades.

1. The TSA: On the road to the American police state

Consider: The TSA was born in the panicked backwash of 9/11, which is understandable given the events of that day, when Muslim maniacs screaming
allahu akbar
murdered 3,000 Americans and others in the name of Islamic global jihad. But a decade after 9/11, due entirely to political correctness, it’s completely out of the question to profile Mohammed at the airport yet absolutely necessary for that bloated agency to “randomly” select your pre-teen or teenage daughter for a body search performed by a government matron in a TSA uniform. This frequently under-the-clothes and against-the-skin complete body search may done in full public view, or in a hidden back room, solely at the discretion of the TSA agents involved.

Meanwhile, Mom and Dad stand off to the side where they have been directed to wait, saying nothing, scarcely moving, avoiding random eye contact lest a TSA security agent catch a wayward smirk or utterance of protest. To pull out a cell phone camera at this time would surely invite arrest. To walk over and grab the matron by the arm is out of the question. Defending your child from the indignity would lead only to your being Tasered and handcuffed on the cold airport floor. After that, your entire family may wind up in some TSA airport detention cells, conveniently located right on your concourse and unknown to you until then. Better to stew in silence, let the incident pass, and try to forget it.

So in the year 2013, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we stand with our eyes averted, burning with humiliation, while our spouses or children are groped above and below the waist by blue-gloved government prison guards—only we are in an airport in a free country, and not in a prison!

Or are we? A virtual open-air prison, where government security agents patting down ordinary citizens at will is the accepted “new normal.”  Did that happen often in East Germany, I wonder? In the Soviet Union? Does it happen today in Cuba? Officially sanctioned crotch groping in the name of “security?”

(Why, again, was it that the TSA was created? Oh yes, Islamic jihad terrorists destroyed some big buildings and killed thousands of people in New York City on September 11 way back in the year 2001. It was because of that very bad day in lower Manhattan and many other acts of bloody Muslim terrorism around the world going on for decades, especially hijacking and blowing up lots of airliners full of people. It’s so easy to forget why exactly it is that we need to become a police state for our own safety.)

And now we read that the TSA is yet again expanding and branching out, like an octopus on steroids. This suddenly gargantuan federal agency is not only running routine checkpoints and stop-and-frisk operations in airports, but at bus and train stations also. Eight thousand times in 2010, if you can believe the government’s own accounting figures. Your papers, please! These checkpoints and mobile searching stations are called
VIPR
Team
s
, a telling acronym for
Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Teams
.

Folks, you cannot make this stuff up. Well, actually, you can. Way back in 2002 in
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
I invented
FIST
checkpoints, for
Firearms Inspections Stop Terrorism
. I leave it to you as to which sounds more coolly ominous and plausible in fact and in fiction—
VIPRs
or
FISTs
.

The advance word is that at the next stop on this express lane to tyranny, we will be seeing the TSA on our highways, setting up roaming vehicle checkpoints. For our “public safety,” of course. Watch the recent YouTube video of the Texas state trooper digitally raping a mother and daughter by the side of a Texas highway to see law enforcement checkpoint authority run amok, and wonder at the future of our nation and our hard-won legacy of individual freedom. If you can stomach to watch it.

Welcome to the USSA, comrades! How in the world did this happen? When did we wake up to find our freedom stolen in the night—and all in name of “homeland security” and “public safety”?

2. Nobody needs an assault weapon!

And now in the wake of yet another disgusting example of the worst human depravity, this time in an elementary school in New England, we are told by the government that some firearms are simply too dangerous for citizens to possess. We are told that limiting or removing these firearms from private hands will increase the general public safety. We are told that it is a small thing to give up semi-automatic rifles, which the political and cooperating media elites will dutifully call “assault weapons,” even though nobody can quite define the term. In any case, we are told, nobody needs an “assault weapon” with a thirty-round magazine.

Well, actually,
almost
nobody needs them.

Apparently, Mr. Security Agent and his comrades need them,
lots
of them. Tens of thousands of new “assault weapons,” enough to shoot all of the
billions
(with a “b”) of .223 and .40 caliber hollow-point bullets recently purchased by our federal law enforcement agencies in unprecedented new acquisitions. Are we suddenly expecting a foreign invasion I missed reading about? Wouldn’t that be the job of the military? Why do our federal law enforcement agencies suddenly need tens of thousands of “assault weapons” and billions of new hollow-point (not training) bullets, many times more than in previous years?

Evidently, it’s very dangerous on the Homeland Security front, and Mr. Security Agent needs a lot of firepower to be able to put down all of the assorted troublemakers and problem children out in the “uncontrolled spaces” of America. You can’t have too much firepower if you work for our government law enforcement agencies!

But in the name of public safety the government is going to whittle your allowable firearms down step by step, first eliminating semi-automatic rifles, then pistols, and eventually on down to the last bolt-action hunting rifles and shotguns, which may be kept at a government armory, and signed out for an approved day of hunting with a few shells. (Make sure to retrieve your empty brass for the counting.)

So, step by step, the government is going to take away any ability the average citizen might have to resist a rampaging mob or roving gangs of bandits during a breakdown in law and order, or any demands at all made by a tyrannical government sometime in the murky future.

3. Trust us, we’re from the government.

So at the historical moment that our nation is turning into a police state, with no expectation of privacy, even of our private parts in public airports or on public highways, we are commanded to grant even greater trust in our government’s perpetual future benevolence, to have blind faith that at no point in the future will our government turn tyrannical.

But in the year 2013, has the government already earned our trust, or our disgust, with its current abuses of its police powers? In this environment of steadily creeping tyranny, should we comply with government demands for our increasing disarmament?

I wrote
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
a decade ago with the hope that eventually anti-gun liberals would discover it and it would provide them with a virtual road map to understanding conservative thinking about firearms and their place in society. Additionally, I wrote the novel hoping that if it were successful, it might provide me a platform and a microphone to discuss these issues at some dangerous time in the future.

That time is now. Well-meaning, gun-loathing liberals need to understand that they are blindly tossing matches into a dynamite factory with their threats to severely limit and restrict the Second Amendment. They must understand the other point of view in order not to send America careening into a deadly minefield, the existence of which they are, evidently, blissfully unaware.

4. The gun nuts

To many liberals, the popular American hobby of collecting and shooting guns is a bizarre and shameful vice. Three or four pistols and long guns and a few hundred rounds of ammunition are routinely described in the popular media as an “arsenal.” Perhaps in a Manhattan walk-up studio apartment, where that handful of guns had to be smuggled in and hidden, it would be considered an “arsenal.” But out past the urban beltway, out in Red State America, that is what many folks I know keep in their car or truck for roadside emergencies, or impromptu plinking, or varmint-hunting opportunities. And hell, isn’t that why we have guns out in Red State America? Damn sure is. Among other reasons.

Millions of firearms aficionados in their later years have purchased a rifle, pistol or shotgun every year or two for decades. In millions of cases, these add up to dozens of firearms per household. A round dozen firearms of all types might be a good average. Some are hunting arms, some are military antiques, and increasingly, many are defensive pistols and modern sporting rifles, and yes, both are semi-automatic. For example, millions of AR-15 rifles have been purchased in just the last few years. Note that I did not say modern
hunting
rifles. That is a separate category, but the important thing to understand is that
the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting
, and anybody who says it does is telling a lie.

Those of us who enjoy firearms feel it deeply when some lunatic misuses one to slaughter innocents. Shooting ranges are virtually churches of gun safety, with safety rules posted everywhere, taught to one and all, and enforced strictly. Passing down our tradition of safe and responsible gun ownership from generation to generation is considered a sacred trust. When a firearm is misused by a criminal, our greatest wish is always that we had been present with our legally concealed pistols to stop the slaughter of unarmed, defenseless innocents. And more frequently than you might imagine, this actually happens.

Consider this: the average number of victims per incident when the shooter is stopped by an armed civilian: three. The average number of victims when the shooter is stopped by a policeman: fourteen. Why? Because when every second is a matter of life and death, the police are still minutes away.

Think about those numbers. Eleven people die needlessly if the shooting takes place in a “victim disarmament zone,” where legal firearms are prohibited. This is why deranged shooters head for schools, malls, and theaters, where signs forthrightly proclaim that guns are forbidden. A “no firearms” sign draws such a person the way that a starving wolf is attracted to a pen full of helpless lambs.

But when the killer is stopped by an armed civilian, the mainstream media rarely or never mention that fact, because it goes against their propaganda template: the inherent evil of guns in civilian hands. So those stories are spiked and the typical American never hears of them. Did you know that shortly before the tragedy in Connecticut, an armed civilian stopped a maniac in a packed shopping mall after he had killed only two victims, instead of twenty-seven?

5. If it bleeds, it leads: The media love maniacs.

The same media that pointedly ignore frequent life-saving defensive uses of firearms consistently pours hours and days and weeks of attention upon the latest maniac who chooses a firearm as his tool of mass murder, so that the next potential insane villain cannot fail to notice the easy path to fame and immortality that the misuse of a gun can bring. But the greatest fame will only attach if they can beat the previous body-count record, a number constantly and loudly broadcast, so that no one can fail to hear it.

The message to the unstable is clear: Come on, you crazy guys, can’t you at least murder your way to thirty? The Virginia Polytechnic Institute madman is still leading the lone-wolf pack, but college students might resist, so maybe find an easier target to rack up higher numbers. Find a killing zone with younger and more helpless victims. The media’s lesson was clear, and it was well learned by Adam Lanza when he set out to slaughter helpless little lambs instead of bigger and tougher sheep.

The mainstream media pour a Niagara of crocodile tears over the most recent child victims, after doing everything for the killer but sign his name to their pre-written script. With such fanfare, is it any wonder that there is no lack of new monsters playing “beat the kill record” on a regular basis? It’s almost become a recurring television reality show.