Coming To Get Your Guns

First of all, no, they aren't.

YET.

And hopefully, not ever, but that has to do with a few things. None of which are "because they'd never do that".

It isn't because the government has too much respect for your rights. Typing which sentence almost ruined a perfectly good keyboard here.

Flashback a few scant years to 1941 here in sunny Califrutopia. Our AG and future governor agitated for "rounding up the Japs", the Army agreed, the president decreed, and in short order hundreds of thousands of loyal American citizens meekly complied with being rounded up like cattle and shoved into tar-paper shacks in remote concentration camps, facing biting winters in nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Nota bene that the government didn't go to their homes, and round up their notebooks, sketchbooks, binoculars, and short-wave radios that the presumed disloyal spies were using to abet the Japanese domination of the world.

They rounded up entire families, including infants, collected them in stables, and shipped them to distant deserts, lied about what they were justified in doing all the way to the Supreme Court, which happily acquiesced in the rape of the Bill of Rights, and only after decades and decades did they finally admit they'd screwed the pooch, the Constitution, and everything else, purely out of twin motives of bigotry and greed.

It isn't because "we are a nation of laws", which statement to me today occasioned this particular rant this morning, too good to waste:

As to living in a nation of laws, I'm not seeing what you are. Last I looked the only amendment to the Bill of Rights that wasn't bleeding from being buttraped was the Third Amendment. There are something like 20 million illegal aliens merrily going about their lives here, including the president's aunt, and the AG has announced he's not going to enforce some laws, at his sole discretion, 535 congressmen and senators, 236 years of history, and his oath of office be damned. It's been years since Heller, and yet DC has yet to issue a single handgun permit, despite two Supreme Court cases. DHS has been wiretapping the AP, the IRS is auditting political enemies, and the president and his followers have given Congress the finger on coming clean about how the only American ambassador, representing bodily the entirety of the nation and people of the United States, who has ever been killed, got that way. I pay approx. 50% of my gross pay in taxes every year, Warren Buffet pays 12%, and GE pays none. The government may seize my house to give it to a developer who'll build a mall on it, and it's legal, but if my daughter in the Brownies opens a lemonade stand in the driveway, she's subject to arrest and draconian maltreatment, and the HOA can have me thrown out of my own house. If I punish her I can lose all my kids forever, go to prison, and be forced to attend mandatory anti-violence re-programming, including if she lies about it, but she can get birth control pills paid for with my taxes, or even get an abortion, and I'm not allowed to even be consulted. PG&E can vent radioactive steam in a neighborhood of 200,000 people, and nothing happens, but if I shoot a squirrel with a lead bullet within an area the size of South Carolina, I can go to prison. I can get the shit kicked out of me in the ER any night of the week, and no one gets even arrested. Under Obamacare, they can then complain about their time there, and the amount the .gov will reimburse my hospital will then be cut, which costs real jobs to real people. But if I speak sharply to a flying cocktail waitress, or take too long in the bathroom, I'm on a terrorist list for life.

Which, frankly, just scratches the tip of the iceberg.
We're not a nation of laws, we're a nation of a crushing, burdensome, explosion of laws, tons of them, yards of them, and most in confict with other laws - usually including one or more clear precepts in the Bill of Rights, at minimum - all of them enforced casually, arbitrarily, and maliciously, with no regard for common sense or justice. Strictly because it pleases the current mandarins in power, or some subset of their cronies and constituents.

If you expect that type of legalism to save you, or your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, let alone the pre-existant natural law right to defend your life, you're not just monumentally stupid or foolish, or even just both.

You're also wholly ignorant of a drumbeat of propaganda that makes "gun owner" the functional equivalent of "Jap" in California in 1942, or "Jew" in Nazi Germany from 1933-1945.

Granted, dictatorships like those make the trains run on time.

But some few of us, who are students of history, recall the barbed wire enclosures that always lie at the ends of those tracks.

So understand, with crystal precision and clarity, that no one who hates you having guns wants to come and get your guns.

They want to come and get YOU.

I hope that wasn't too subtle for anyone.

YOU are the problem, with your antiquated notions of having the right to defend yourself from crazys, crooks, crusaders, and tyrannical governments composed of all of the above.

For decades, the gun lobby has pointed out, correctly, that guns don't kill people, it's other people who're the problem. Not the inanimate objects. So why would anyone be so foolish as to be surprised that the minions of tyranny get that lesson?

When they come to the door, they aren't coming for a list of prohibited toys.
They'll be coming to collect up all the poisoned souls who would ever want to own those toys, and they're going to want to rid humanity of your scourge and corrupting influence, forever, for the common good. For the children.

"One people, one government, one leader" is, and always will be, their motto.
And it means that you're not one of the cool kids.
Suck on that.

You might toy with letting them in your tent, but they have a different idea of what to do with you.

So if you have some mental reservations about becoming a lampshade, waiting until they come to your door to institute a plan is a wee bit late, and thinking they'll only be coming for the toys is short-sighted beyond description.

Getting onto the trains will be far too tragically late to think "If only I'd dug that pistol out of the garden before they came."

And the only reason they aren't coming for you now, is the thought, however nebulous or partially formed in their little reptilian brains, that some of you, or even a lot of you, won't be handing your guns over, or burying them.

They aren't coming, because you'd shoot them getting out of the car at the curb, and keep shooting them until they were all dead, and then go strip their bodies for more guns and ammo.

And to them, that lemon just isn't worth the squeeze.

It's ultimately the only thing that stops that sort of nonsense, and sometimes even that isn't enough to keep it at bay.

Three score of dead white male property owners understood that, in their bones, back in both 1776, and again in 1787.

And 77 guys knew it too, standing on a dewy wet meadow in Lexington one cold April morning, facing down the representatives of the most awesome military power in the world. They didn't blink, they didn't "let George do it", and they knew they could end up in prison or dead, but they still showed up for the party, and ended up winning the day that day, and afterwards.

So you can trust the good intentions of your government, or your own best judgement.
You can be the guys on the lawn, or the people rounded up at the train depot.

The choice is entirely yours.