Down With Power Audiobook!


L. Neil Smith's
THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 810, February 22, 2015

Serve your church, your country, your community.
your family, not by invading somebody else's
civilization, but by taking care of yourself.
It's as simple as that. It really is.


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Behind Every Blade of Grass
by L.Neil Smith
[email protected]

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Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

This has been an interesting week—interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times." My current desktop wallpaper consists of a photo I found online, sent out by some civil rights organization, announcing that Connecticut gun owners were ignoring the new, Draconian laws intended to disarm them, and that only 4% of the weapons and ammunition affected by the law had been registered.

Four percent of the people of Connecicut are cattle.

To emphasize this point they have provided a portait of an extremely personable young girl-next-door, lying on her belly in a field of harvested corn, a grim expression on her face, and a clearly civilianized AR-15 rifle at the ready, confirming Isoroku Yamamoto's pre-World War II warning to his own people never to contemplate invading the United States because, if they did, they would find a rifleman—and woman, now—waiting for them "behind every blade of grass".

I have always believed there ought to be a "People's Rifle" of some kind, a weapon of moderate power that could be used to good effect by anyone, man, woman, or responsible child, to defend themselves, their homes and families, and their country, neighborhood by neighborhood, something like the ultra-user-friendly M1 Carbine issued by the military in World War II and Korea, only manufactured for a better cartridge (it would't be hard) like 10mm Auto. These guns would be distributed without record around the country like surplus cheese, in partial reparation for the soul-grindingly constant threat we have endured for over 60 years of a government scheming to disarm us.

But while I was theorizing, an amazing sociological event was occurring. Gun-wise Americans had exploded in their numbers, and they had clasped the bizarre little Stoner carbine that their sons and brothers and fathers carried in Vietnam, somewhat fragile and failure-prone, and cursed with a massively ineffective cartridge, to their bosoms, overcome many of its failings, and made it their own. The "People's Rifle" I sought was already here, and it was called the AR-15.

But now, we hear that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives in an instance of completely lunatic overreach, would like to forbid .223 Remington/5.56 NATo ammunition to civilians, the very kind of fodder used by the young lady's rifle and those of the millions of other Americans interested in civil and personal defense. I'm sure some preening bureaucrat is trying to take credit for this profoundly idiotic notion, unaware that forty years ago, in a fit of drunken stupidity, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan drafted legislation with much the same objective. His fetish was "Saturday Night Specials" so he wanted to outlaw .25 ACP, .32 ACP, and .380 ammunition.

Meanwhile, some legislative genius has just noticed and begun screaming that "people are arming themselves against the government", unaware, thanks no doubt to his public school education, that this is not only an altogether appropriate response to a malignant entity that does nothing but steal from you, lie to you, and take your children away, but that the nation's Founding Fathers had learned this lesson well, and intended for the people to be well-armed against the government,

We also got to witness that paragon of anti-gun hypocrisy, the overly-protected former Mayor of New York City, poster-boy for what President Theodore Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth", and part-time racist, Michael Bloomberg, proclaim that there ought to be a law forbidding young urban men of color their right to own and carry weapons "to save their lives". Before we grow too smug, this is not so different from what Ben Carson, nominally a champion of liberty, has proposed.

Finally (not really, I regret to say) a body appointed by the governor of Connecticut (he'd want me to mention his name) and claiming somehow to represent the people of Newtown, site of an alleged school massacre about which many questions remain unanswered, but actually representing the same old political afterbirth of such events, has announced that it demands outright confiscation of weapons, presumably by hired goons, and no more of Bloomberg's "song and dance". To them, I would say what the Spartan king Leonidas said to Xerxes, king of Persia at the Battle of Thermopolae: come and get them.

Yourselves.

This does not make me a "constitutionalist" or describable by any other such monicker that prissy victim disarmers and their bought-and- paid-for blackhearts want to hang on me. It makes me an American. And it makes them criminals. These days they often lean on excuses like "potential terrorism". But the most effective response to any threat, real, imagined, or fabricated, like "terrorism", is a population physically and mentally prepared to deal with it, unimpaired by forces formally sworn to protect them, but eager to betray that oath. As it is, the people of this country find themselves with two enemies, the terrorists, to any degree that they actually exist, and a renegade regime, which would strip them of any real defense they have against attack. It is long past time to call a halt to all this nonsense, and here is a way to start. When you know that an individual is a member of one of the many oppressive and unconstitutional agencies with which we've been saddled since World War II, and especially 9/11, don't feed him (or her). Don't sell him (or her) doughnuts. Don't sell him (or her) groceries. It will add subtly or not-so-subtly to the burdens of his (or her) day. It may not be much, but it's a beginning. They'll notice and anything they do in response—pass laws, go to court, threaten you—will only make the situation worse for them, and more public.

Next, I suggest that the Oath Keepers generate and distribute simple posters, to be put up everywhere; "This is the Oath you took. (insert standard oath of office, swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.) Are you still keeping it?" Gentle confrontation and public education in one stroke.

Power-hungry politicos have always found some mostly fraudulent threat to scare their fellow Americans with to enhance their swollen wealth and power: Catholics, Freemasons, anarchists, communists, "cultists", conservatives. Now that the embarrassingly phony threat of "global warming" is wearing thin, all that the monsters and mobsters who think they own us have left to fall back on is "terrorism". If ISIS didn't exist, they would have had to invent it—and probably did. But terrorism, if it even exists, is a solved problem, that most dire of threats to politicians everywhere. Put a .380 in every pocket or purse in America, an AR-15 in every living room, and resume real life.

Serve your church, your country, your community. your family, not by invading somebody else's civilization, but by taking care of yourself.

It's as simple as that.

It really is.


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