Book Seven concerns the decision of the federal government to put an end to the private ownership of guns and its arrogance in pursuing this political agenda. 

As the story opens, twenty-two battle-geared agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) conduct a late night raid on the house of an ordinary citizen who was reported as having an unlicensed machine gun.  What he actually had was an AR15 semi-automatic rifle which, while it was being shot by a friend, malfunctioned and went full-auto.  Before the owner of the rifle could take it to a gunsmith for repair, his door is broken down, guns are stuck in his family’s faces, his wife is knocked unconscious, his jaw is broken, his children are terrorized, and his is house virtually destroyed by the BATF search for the offending rifle. 

Three old men read about the raid on the house and the treatment of the family, followed by the arrest and prosecution of this hapless gun owner, and they decide that they did not serve in World War II to sit idly by while their own government acts like Hitler did fifty years ago.  They formulate a plan in which they will hire Sam and Nick to act as their communicators with the BATF.  Their message is that either the BATF backs off of the prosecution of this gun owner or the old men will start shooting BATF agents.  The BATF declines the offer and the old men start shooting.

What follows is the prologue to the story.

Prologue

The right to “keep and bear arms” as provided for in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, has been interpreted recently by the United States Supreme Court in District of Columbia et al v. Heller , 554 U.S. ____, (2008), to mean that a citizen has the Constitutional right to possess a firearm in his home for self-defense, although that right is subject to reasonable regulation by the government.

Critics of firearms ownership ask “Self-defense against what?”  The most immediate threat is, of course, criminal attack.  But there is another threat as well.  That threat is attack by an out-of-control government.  The Declaration of Independence states: “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [supporting the basic rights of man] it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government. . . .”

Our founding fathers envisioned that the government of the United States might become tyrannical, and if government—our government--became oppressive, they envisioned  we would rebel, with violence if necessary against tyranny.  Many people find this notion ridiculous because they cannot imagine a tyrannical federal government, and they cannot imagine opposing the United States government or its army with individually owned small arms.  But the people who started this country had no trouble imagining either.  That should tell us something. 

That armed citizens are not likely to prevail in a direct confrontation against the United States Army does not negate the viability of armed resistance.  For one thing, the government of the United States, in this age of instant information, will be loath to use massive military force to subdue individuals and risk the ire of twenty million outraged, armed citizens.  For another thing, armed citizens operating in small groups present a difficult problem for any oppressive government.

But it’s more comfortable for us to forget history than remember it.  In 1895 more than 200,000 Armenians were killed inside Turkey.  There was almost no protest.  Then in 1915 the Turks initiated a genocide in which more than 1,500,000 Armenians were killed.  Just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians.”

The answer to Hitler’s question was, no one.  People want to forget, and so when Hitler began to invade neighboring countries, some Europeans insisted that Hitler was not really a threat, that he would stop after he invaded one or two countries.  The idea, as Lloyd George said, was to secure “peace in our time.”  But Hitler did not stop, and instead created one of the most oppressive regimes of modern times.  There was no peace, and once that became clear, it was too late for the population as a whole to resist. 

Hitler and his Nazi Party identified Jews as enemies of the state, confiscated their property, uprooted them from their homes, and herded them into cattle cars so packed with bodies that many of them died standing up, unable to breathe, and soiled by their own filth.  Those who did not die on the trains were transported to concentration camps where they were worked to death, starved to death, or exterminated.  Their bodies were incinerated or buried in pits sometimes dug by the victims themselves.  Other groups of prisoners were made to stand naked at the edge of mass graves where they were shot, their bodies tumbling into the void and tangling helplessly with others already there and still others that would follow.

Lest the killing of the Armenians and the Jews be regarded as an aberration not applicable to our times, consider the deaths under Stalin, probably exceeding 17,000,000, in the 1930s and 1940s; the killing fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in the 1970s; the ethic-cleansing murders of Bosnia in the 1980s; and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.  The potential of governments to be murderous is undeniable and these events have not occurred so long ago that they are irrelevant to modern life. 

In fact, oppressive government action presented itself to citizens of the United States just recently when, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, police armed with M16 rifles arbitrarily demanded that citizens in New Orleans surrender their firearms.  To make sure the police got all the guns, people were rousted out of their houses, their cars and their boats at gunpoint and required to turn over their firearms, without receipt or explanation.  This police-state action was finally stopped by a court, but not before thousands of guns had been stolen by the police, most of them never to be returned.  This disarming was carried out when the police were, by their own admission, unable to protect the population from looters and violent criminals.

The other threat—that posed by criminals--speaks for itself.  Society is permeated with deadly crime, organized and unorganized.  Ordinary citizens have been shot down in carjackings, robberies, kidnappings, rapes, home invasions, extortions, and at random by a newly minted criminal performing his gang-initiation rite. 

Those who oppose the use of deadly force in countering violent crime believe the average person could not defend himself with a gun in a criminal attack and that calling the police is a better alternative.  Armed citizens counter that it is their right to defend themselves rather than become complicit in their own murders.   Law enforcement officials acknowledge that typically they arrive only after a crime has been committed.  Police investigate crime; they do not prevent it.

Gun owners are adamant about Second Amendment rights not only because they rely on firearms as tools for self-defense, but also because many are part of an enduring tradition of gun ownership that stems from an earlier time when the population was not concentrated in urban areas.  This tradition, in fact, is a culture in its own right--a gun culture.  Grandfathers teach their grandchildren to shoot, take them hunting, and buy them the traditional first single-shot rifle or shotgun.  Annual gatherings at hunting camps are social occasions featuring wide-eyed youngsters listening to tales told by old men over steaming bowls of chili, huge sandwiches, and freshly made pies.

But the gun culture is not merely multi-generational and oriented to hunting.  It reflects an appreciation for firearms in general.  This can include the skill required to build custom guns, experimentation with loads for accuracy and effectiveness, and the development of tools relevant to this enthusiasm, such as computer programs for ballistics, devices for measuring range and the speed of bullets, testing media, ammunition loading tools, innovative reactive targets, powders, bullets and primers that perform different tasks, wildcat calibers, precision-made sights and triggers, and the written lore of big game hunting, the building and use of firearms, and firearms as used in war.

The anti-gun culture, on the other hand, ignores this tradition and sees only the urban killings associated with crime and gang activity.  The rationale of the anti-gun culture is simply that if there were no guns, there would be no gun violence.  Lives would be saved. 

Pro-gun people resist the notion of giving up their rights because other people don’t know how to behave.  They argue  that guns cannot be banned in the face of the Constitutional right to own firearms.  They argue that if the population is disarmed, it will be as vulnerable to an overreaching government as the Jews were to the Nazis.  And they argue that if the firearms of ordinary citizens were destroyed, criminals would retain theirs, and gun violence would be even worse, as it has proven to be most recently in Australia, where more than half a million guns were destroyed and violent crime increased dramatically.

The single most important factor that has caused the political left to demand an end to private firearms ownership is that the underclass has, over the last fifty years, expanded exponentially, bringing with it an exponential increase in crime.  Many of these criminals come from the single-parent families encouraged by the welfare system, a dysfunctional government give-away favored by the far left.  The absence of fathers has led large numbers of children to seek gangs as a substitute for parenting not available at home.  Not content with having created an entire class of welfare-bred criminals, the political left now seeks to protect this underclass by rendering ordinary citizens defenseless against crime perpetrated by these criminals.

Gun owners do not feel the need to protect the underclass from firearms used defensively against criminal conduct.  In fact, gun owners cannot grasp why the underclass should have been encouraged to expand its numbers through the bottomless pit of the welfare system, and they cannot understand why violent criminal conduct is not met with extreme violence rather than counseling, special programs, and the disarming of potential victims.  Common sense suggests that if criminals know they may be shot while committing crimes, they may find a renewed interest in getting  jobs.

Ruling-class politicians in the United States who favor gun confiscation in any of its many forms intentionally portray their opponents as a fringe population of gun-nut rednecks.  They like to dismiss as misguided millions of people who insist on their right to defend themselves with firearms against crime and government oppression.  Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, born in Romania under communist rule with parents who are Holocaust survivors, feels differently:

[Some feel] that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll.  But the simple truth—born of experience—is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people.

Silveira v. Lockyer, (No. 01-15098) (Ninth Cir. May 6, 2003), Kozinski, dissenting.

Ruling-class politicians notwithstanding, the millions of gun-owners who live in the United States are not inclined to regard themselves as “misguided” and are found in every occupation, every economic class, every age group, every neighborhood, every part of the country. 

The story that follows involves the killing of police officers participating in a government plan to seize privately owned firearms.  The story is not intended to condone the killing of law enforcement officers, but to raise the possibility that if compromises are not reached, this undesirable result may occur.  Tyranny begets violence and police officers, innocent themselves, are likely to be employed as the expendable tools of a tyrannical government.  Anti-gun politicians need to understand the roots of gun ownership are deep, not shallow, and if they propose to uproot gun ownership, either directly by banning guns, or indirectly by imposing unreasonable conditions on their ownership, they will have their work cut out for them.

Steel City 7 is available Aug 1, 2010.