Category: Big Thoughts

“A new age has begun, an age of freedom. And all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it.” – 300

One night I heard a noise on the deck.  A raccoon was bringing me back a book that I had lost a few years ago.  “It’s a miracle!” I said.  “Not really,” said the raccoon, “your name was written on the inside cover.”

The dogs barked.

The dogs never bark, unless a Terminator® is here yet again looking for that stupid Sarah Conner.  The dogs were safely in their crates for the night.  I’ve spent thousands of hours (yes, thousands) downstairs writing hundreds of thousands of words at night after the family was safely asleep, and not one time ever (yes, ever) had our silly dogs ever barked.

As they barked, I heard something on the deck above.  It sounded like a piece of deck furniture sliding.  Yeah, sure, you say, there aren’t a lot of burglars that move furniture to announce their presence, especially not at 1 AM.  You’re right.

But . . .

There is one thing that I do know – if there was an actual burglar upstairs, the consequences could get bad, and quickly.  Nonviolent burglars try to rob you in the day when they think that nobody’s home.  But a burglar that’s coming into your house when they know that someone is there?

They mean you harm.

Bad guys at night are actually looking forward to doing bad things.  The sound of a shotgun ratcheting a shell into the chamber will scare the Schumer out of a daytime burglar, but it won’t deter an attacker at night.  They’re looking for violence, and fully expecting to kill everyone in the house.

I blame violent video games, or maybe gluten or high fructose corn syrup, or worse yet, them playing video games about violent gluten while snorting high fructose corn syrup.

Regardless, I got up from the solitude of writing on my couch and got a pistol.  Oh, sure, you may leave pistols lying about your palatial residences like we Wilders leave our PEZ® on the coffee tables for the crowned heads of state that come by to feel the perfect shapes of our skulls, but we keep ours out of the public areas.  Mine are in places that I would normally sleep, like under the dining room table, in the hot tub, or behind the wheel of my car while driving to work.

Oh, yeah, I left one on the bridge!

So I went upstairs.  I quietly opened my bedroom door and had to decide:  the .45ACP or the 9mm?  I chose the 9mm.  Why?  It was closest to the door, and all it required was a longish reach upwards.  Could anyone else in the house reach it?  Nope, but is a 9mm all that dangerous anyway?  I mean, if a Pope can survive it, it can’t be that bad.

I pulled it out of its case as I walked towards the back door.  As I got near the back door, I activated the best feature of the 9mm – the laser mounted right under its barrel, which I bought for $10 from Amazon®.  The idea of the laser mounted on a pistol, for all three of my readers that never saw Terminator®, is to show the shooter right where the bullet is going to go.  In my case, I turned it on because any actual person on the back deck, seeing a laser, would probably think twice about their “invading Wilder Manor” plan.

9mm – what I teach my daughters to shoot gnats with.

The dogs were still unsettled as I reached for the doorknob.  As these dogs are really not dogs, but barking rats that have tails that wag when you call them a good boy, they’re really always unsettled.  I turned on the outside lights and painted every piece of deck furniture with the laser.

Nothing, except for the overly ambitious spider that builds a web face-high across the back door every day.  I didn’t really expect there to be anything, since I live in Modern Mayberry.

In checking the crime statistics to prepare for this post, I looked up Modern Mayberry.  It shows up as being a crime-ridden area, since there actually was a murder here in 2016.  It was, as I recall, a guy who killed his girlfriend (or vice versa) over infidelity.  But random murders?  Not here.  Gang violence?  Not here, since the closest thing we have to a gang is the pre-school soccer program.  I hate those monsters.

I believe there are petty burglaries that occur here, but those are almost all during the daytime.  Why?

Everyone here has guns.  Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  But I would estimate that at minimum, 10% of the households could be armed and lethal in 2 minutes or less.  I would estimate that 50% could be armed in 10 minutes or less.  And I would estimate that 80% would have a gun in their hands in 20 minutes or less, but by then you’re dead or the cops are here.  However, if you are a criminal, this isn’t good.

Why?

Me.  And my neighbor.  When he moved in, he had no idea that he was living next to The John Wilder, but he showed me his latest toy – a nice AR tricked out with a green laser and a bunch of other bling.  I have no doubt that he’d be happy to explain to the Sheriff why he perforated someone breaking into his house.  That explains most of the residents of Modern Mayberry.  And you can be certain that the District Attorney is one of us, too.  He declined to prosecute a homeowner for emptying a magazine into a criminal that had shot the homeowner, even though the homeowner had shot the fleeing criminal in the back more than once.

Would this be a neighbor you prefer?  Put me in the “yes” category.

The homeowner is a valued member of the Modern Mayberry community.  The criminal?  In jail.  The criminal’s civil suit against the homeowner?  Yeah.  That was dismissed.  Nobody could be found guilty of that here.

If you were to try to rob a house here at night, the next time you took a drink of water you’d look like a fountain.  A fourteen-year-old kid trying to boost a bike at 3 in the afternoon?  Probably not going to get shot.  But that same kid at 3AM?  You have as much chance of surviving the night as a Snickers® bar does at Rosie O’Donnell’s house.

And let me stress again:  no one here has a problem with that.

But that’s not how it always was.  It used to be that violence was the exclusive right of our rulers.  And it was so not only for legal reasons, but for practical reasons.

Plus who knows how much for hair spray.

Let’s go back to the middle ages.  Technology had advanced to the point where a knight in a full suit of armor was pretty much only going to be at risk from another knight, and they never fought except over who got the remote control at Knight School.  Their armor was strong steel, and penetrating it was difficult.  To a normal citizen serf of the day?  A knight might as well have been a superhero – there was no reasonable way a normal citizen could hurt a knight.

What did it cost to outfit a knight and his horse?  In the area of $500,000 to $3.5 million.  The higher cost was probably due to the need to decorate it with the 15^th Century equivalent of Hello Kitty® stickers, but $500,000 was daunting.  Even the armor of a “man at arms” was probably in the range of $20,000 or more, but one of those would be a poor competitor for a mounted knight.

Swords were huge, double-handed affairs.  Why?  To penetrate the armor of a knight you had to swing a heavy mass of steel at them.

Until.

Until the English longbow came to the front.  The beauty of the English longbow is that, when fired all at once, a mass of them could penetrate all but the best armor of the day.  At Agincourt, Henry V’s archers and knights took down 10,000 French, to (possibly) fewer than 500 English deaths.  It is written on Henry V’s tombstone about conquering the French:  “Look, Ma, no panzers!”

Oh, sorry.  I’ll leave you to go back to smoking, Ma’am.

A longbow takes, in modern times, at least six weeks to learn to shoot well.  A sword?  Years.

The longbow made warfare more accessible to the common man.  The result is well known – increased freedom for the common man.  Before the king required Englishmen learn the longbow, a knight got pretty much what he wanted.  After the longbow?  A bit more difficult, because if the knight’s demand was too much?  A group of men could make his demand as null and void as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s womb.

This levelling of force included fortresses.  A tall castle with stone walls was impregnable short of a long siege, having been designed to resist stone thrown from catapults.  But after cannon, castles were as done as Facebook® to a teenager after grandma started “Liking” their posts.

This trend continued.  Soldiers shed armor, and the most potent weapons became affordable by even the most common man.  By the time of the Revolution®, any American could hold in their hands the equivalent weapon of a British soldier.  And not be trained in years like a swordsman, or in weeks like an archer, but in days.  The investment in money went down, too – a good musket would cost about a month’s earnings for an American around the time of the Revolution™.

The Second Amendment wasn’t written about this – it was written about freedom.

People talk about democracy?  In this way violence was democratized.  Never in the history of mankind had a place been as free as America, but only part of it was philosophy – the rest was applied engineering.  The Brown Bess was a British weapon, but it was the most common weapon used on both sides of the Revolution.  Ordinary American citizens had the same weapon as the best armed British soldier.  The result?

Tyranny lost.  Arbitrary will could not be imposed upon free men.  The Congress was stopped from legislating tyranny not only by the Constitution, but by the willingness of good men to accept the legislation.

This situation of increasing freedom kept going.  “God created men.  Sam Colt made them equal.”  Any American could put 12 rounds in a pair of Colts® on his hips after the Civil War, plus another 15 in a Winchester™ in the scabbard on his saddle.  Was the Old West© a killing field?  Well, yes.  In Dodge City, the murder rate at its peak was probably a little over twice what it is today in Baltimore today, but at least there wasn’t any rap music.

Where’s Selleck?  This picture needs more Selleck.

Today, legal firearm ownership is through the roof.  The weapons are of high quality:  these firearms are nearly the same ability as firearms used commonly by the military.  In many cases, a family home is better armed than the local police department – I’ve been to Modern Mayberry’s office and wouldn’t trade.  We’re better prepared, too.  It might take me three minutes to have an AR ready to go, but it would take our local police twenty minutes at least to mount an effective force to come “save” me.  More than likely if I were unarmed, they’d just be there to photograph the bodies.  Police aren’t the first responders.  Police are second responders.

Prepared or not:  you are the first responder.

In no case have I ever seen a cop do anything but get ready to fill out paperwork.  The good news?  You’re on your own.

There is no nation on Earth as armed as the United States.  Modern Mayberry is a good example of that, where I’d expect 90% of citizens have more than one gun, and the cost of a decent firearm is $500 or less.  Are we free here?  Certainly.  Do we fear our neighbors shooting us?  Certainly not.  I could toss a pistol on my hip and the biggest thing most people would worry about would be that I got to the counter at Burger King™ to order before them.

Ten drones hit the Saudi oil processing plants recently, taking out millions of barrels a day of the world’s oil production.  Ten drones.  And from what I can see, the drones cost a few thousand dollars each to make.  Today, the parts and programming to make those drones isn’t hard to come by.  Even the GPS tracking wouldn’t add much to the cost.  The ability to destroy targets from hundreds of miles away is less expensive than a used car.  A crappy used car.

Hey, he went on to drive the Pork Chop Express.

Millions of barrels of world oil production was taken down for less than the cost of a new Camaro®, and a new Camaro™ won’t even get you a date with the local meth tramp.

The implications on freedom of drone technology aren’t clear.  I’d expect, however, that a government would have to take into account the fact that, at least in the United States, they govern a people that that wishes to be governed.  This puts in place limits on government.  The second the government wants to push the people too far, the calculus of violence will rapidly favor the people, and not the government.

Despite all of the nonsense-bragging from the left that a dozen people from flyover Red States aren’t equal to an aircraft carrier, I know who I’d pick.  I’m not stupid, I’d pick both of them – I want the people and the aircraft carriers.  But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the dozen people from flyover states.  They won’t shoot down many F-35 fighters, but I’d be willing to bet if you asked any soldier if he’d rather fight Afghans or Red State Americans unleashed, he’d want to go up against the Afghans any day.

When a country’s leaders want to enforce tyranny, the first thing they do is to take away the weapons of the common man.  After that, atrocity is the playbook.  A free people, with arms, will not suffer tyranny.

Here is Vladimir Lenin’s order to his henchmen in about (I haven’t found the date) 1918:

“Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.

1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain from them.
4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.

Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: “they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks”.

Telegraph receipt and implementation.

Yours, Lenin.

Find some truly hard people”

Would Lenin’s order work in Texas?  Would that work in Kentucky?  Would that work in Indiana?  In Michigan?  In Ohio?

No.  Not in 2019.

The war on guns isn’t about keeping schools safe – that’s actually trivial to do without taking guns away.  It’s trivial to do without Red Flag (Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote) laws.

I hear that Lenin’s ghost wants universal health care.  But with rope.

The only thing taking guns away from Americans does is to make it easier for the Lenin Squad® in the House to take whatever they want.  And if Americans are disarmed?  They will take whatever they want.

In Modern Mayberry, it was likely a raccoon or an opossum on my deck.  But if it wasn’t, the red dot of the laser playing across the forest near my house probably convinced the bad guys that this house certainly wasn’t worth ending their life for.  More than likely it convinced a raccoon that a world-famous blogger was willing to fight him to the death for the rights to lick a cat food can clean.

He didn’t have to worry.  A raccoon going after a cat food can isn’t what I worry about – even though it might scare the dogs.

But if it was a government raccoon?  Hmmmm.