Guns Are Like Algebra

If you don't use them, you don't know what you don't know.

I’ve had a martial education. It wasn’t liberal. It wasn’t conservative. It was practical. It was about learning what I didn’t know and thus rethinking what I thought I knew. I have written quite a bit about it. I’d like to take a different angle.

Today I’ve had a moment to reflect about funerals and the claims made by clerics of all sorts about the power of God. Clearly there is much to be said about the psychological aspects and benefits of faith as well as the economic and political consequence of taking the advice, for the sake of personal empowerment, the poetic flows of charismatic leaders. Nevertheless, I want to talk a moment to those skeptics of all that mumbo jumbo, those of you have have neither the patience or the stomach for anything that is rhetorically enticing and ultimately not disprovable. Or provable. I forget exactly how logicians describe such syllogisms that tend to raise the ire and contempt of large ‘A’ Athiests. To them I say “Stick ‘em up!”.

We all know that it wasn’t Nietzsche who killed God. He proposed the concept and millions flew at the bait. Being who he was, he couldn’t imagine that many were intellectually capable of filling the God shaped hole and that into that moral abyss, lesser men than he would inevitably fall. Men who can live in the shadow of excuse making would feel liberated to muck about a godless planet without recourse. Clearly Hobbes was familiar with their ilk and planned to reserve the biggest guns for the greatest minds, or mind. Hobbes was just, in that way, replacing God with a manmade power significant enough if not exactly godlike, the Leviathan.

I have not lived in a neighborhood that might beg the question of the necessity of deadly force but I’ve often traveled through such areas. My brother, Doc, did so on the regular as an LAPD officer. So I’ve seen and heard all of the ugly stories, but like the overwhelming majority of Americans who think they do by watching TV, I have had no real clue about dealing with the nastiest aspects of human behavior. I haven’t had to live with it. So while I have a couple of pistols but I don’t feel any pressing need for hair trigger home defense. Therefore I do not have a shotgun. I’ve used one and I found it fairly simple and even entertaining. In fact, I analogized my first use of a shotgun at a Boy Scout shooting range outing to losing my virginity. I approached it with much anticipation and trepidation obsessed with how much might go wrong, but I was quite surprised at how natural, easy and fun it was. I couldn’t wait to do it again, but only for fun. I wasn’t about to make an expensive purchase just for the sake of having my own personal Leviathan. Either way, you’ve got to admit “Leviathan” is a great name for a shotgun.

Gun control activists are like incels. They wear their disgust at the rest of us like a badge of honor. Of course they spend all of their time obsessing over how much has gone wrong in the past and cannot wait to unleash an ice storm of undeniable facts upon us throbbing boneheads. They have every deprecating adjective to pair up with firearms except ‘my’. They have no idea about what they don’t know which is a proper experience, and they don’t believe ours are indeed proper. They are insufferably sad little prudes, aren’t they?

This morning I read a rant by somebody who says that ‘Class-First Leftists are all wrong’ arguing that identity deserves to be the top priority. It was the wonkiest thing I’ve heard in a while. I hope he understood my reply about the nature of Black Power. Essentially Negroes decided to be Black in defiance of all care about what other people thought about their identity, they were on the march for power, meaning money. Civil Rights were not enough and it was time to get militant over money. Many people have no idea of how bitter the strife was between Negroes and Blacks. The militant Marxist Black leaders were in greatest conflict with the Negro Church for the mindset of the liberated African American soul. It’s a bit ironic that today’s Left believe they have a good grip on that black radical flavor. They perhaps should recall the apotheosis of that Black Nationalist rhetoric, Public Enemy which truly set the stage for all badass rap to follow. What immediately comes to mind was ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’.

Don’t you know I caught a C-O
Fallin' asleep on death row
I grabbed his gun - then he did what I said so

That’s a long way from a letter from a Birmingham jail. I’m sure there are legitimate gripes from Leftists that there should be some kind of soft revolution that gets the means of production over the the benighted victims of capitalism’s evils, but COINTELPRO happened for a reason. That reason had to do with the militant economic demands of Black Nationalists who were not be satisfied by mere civil equality. Strains of those demands remain today, seeding oversized calls for more than mere equality. The Black Nationalists wanted land. Real estate, and more than just 40 acres and a mule although that would be a good start. You and I know that the way Black Lives are supposed to matter today is more important to such activists than All Lives. The righteous retribution fueling some radicals on either side of the intellectually broke Woke is violent. All this is to say this is not ultimately appealing to Providence or the Grace of God or the Wisdom of the Ages. What is being invoked is Leviathan.

Over here in my gated community, I have had a moment to consider breaking out my pistols and checking to see how much ammo I had. This summer when mobs were in the streets I figured it was time. I got out to the range and was gratified to find that it took me almost no time, even after 18 months without practice, to be as accurate, smooth and deadly as I ever was. I also knew that pistols would not suffice for any scenario in which our gates were stormed by mobs of any sort. We would need to present what is colloquially known as the Rooftop Korean Option. That means rifles on high ground. I know this from my martial education. But I also know from Civics class and California law that I can get such a rifle on short notice.

It makes rational sense to me as it should to anybody who possesses confidence beyond the obsessions of a gun control virgin that prayers to God would be insufficient to save one’s life in the hour of chaos. I have about as much confidence in those who say that it can’t happen here in America as I have in those who say that it is inevitable; it being the violent revolution radicals have been promising my entire life. It takes a lot less than an actual revolution to pose a deadly threat as it similarly takes a lot less than a rocket launch to require mathematics. In the great scheme of things, as the opponents of individual gun rights never fail to remind us, one shotgun and a couple of pistols are a mere drop in the bucket against a hostile government. I’ll take my chances with that drop over a spiritual meditation. Do I have a prayer? Actually I think I have much more than a prayer, that is, if gun control activists have even the slightest bit of truth on their side when it comes to the argument that guns are a menace. Yes they are a menace and they are designed to be lethal. So is my mind. So is my will. I actually didn’t need Nietzsche to tell me that. I learned what soldiers could do with rifles watching a black and white TV show about someplace called Hanoi when I was 5 years old. Every Friday they would tally the numbers of dead and then say goodnight Chet, goodnight David and then play Beethoven. Those were times when grownups were closer to our everyday lives, and then we started having long, hot summers. I think the Viet Cong taught the world a lesson, one not lost on the American Negro.

The spirit and letter of the law of the USA holds that no matter of identity is to be a barrier to the defense of rights which includes our lives and property. That is, although in dispute in some corners, what common sense tells us is the meaning of the pursuit of happiness. I clearly have an ideological dispute with those arguing that my happiness has less to do with my life and property than with my identity - my race, my gender, my sexual preference and any number of things to which I’d prefer the law be oblivious. In fact, all of that identity crap is getting in the way. This contingent is aiming to redefine justice as ‘social justice’ and clearly their political ideas about how to run police departments demonstrate their aim includes the apparatus of the Justice System. Because everything to them is ‘systemic’, right?

If I were devoid of my martial education, if I couldn’t actually do math, I might be stuck in the intellectual box these activists would have me in. As the idiot rich cool kids say “Nobody does algebra in real life.” Yeah nobody but your trust administrators that manage the payments for your expensive, ass-backwards logic. I must say I’m beginning to think that way of anyone who is paid enough to attend America’s elite universities where such Progressive identity dimensions are employed to aggregate analyze and summarize the meaning of minority life.

Political fanatics, religious fanatics, identitarians and charlatans of all sorts and sour flavors are ever on the prowl to win over converts. Facebook and the other media don’t worry about the gates of my community. We pay them for their asynchronous download services which come by the bandwidth bucketload while our upload speeds are but a fraction. I’m sufficiently secure of mind to remain poison free. While I hear the echoes of Martin Niemoller “When they came for the Jews..” a lot more regularly these days, I am reminded to practice my algebra. I remember all of the leverage I have in my life and I take an inventory of what I might someday have to provide for myself. Because life isn’t fair, because it is full of men who don’t play fair, and some who did but are dead.

What are the stakes?

I live with daily presumption that there is no need whatsoever for me to do anything more than deal the the cartoon violence of videogames and Christopher Nolan movies. I live in a neighborhood where kids can leave their bikes in the front yard and the chalklines in the street are for hopscotch. I have no fear of anyone abridging my rights. I also know that the sewers that run beneath my streets are just the same as those in Compton. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi I also am a gentleman force practitioner. None of us are so far removed from the dark side of human agency. Not only can it happen here, it has happened here. I have no hesitation in using every bit of the force as is my self-evident right. That’s not a prayer, that is a martially educated promise. That is not a political posture, that is a rational conclusion. That is not whimsy. I’ve done the math.