The Kevlar Klass
Why is it that the victim disarmament industry -- which cares so little for human life that they'd rather see a women raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand -- only pretends to care about what happens to individual police officers when pretending to care can do the most damage to the Bill of Rights? Read more
Another Shocking Miscarriage
Under brand new ruling by a federal judge, U.S. v. Olofson held in Milwaukee Wisconsin, if you take your great-granddaddy's double barrel shotgun out, pull just one trigger, and both barrels go off, it's a machinegun. That ancient side-by-side damascus-barreled blackpowder-only smokepole becomes a machinegun -- and you become a felon -- if it just gets worn or broken enough.
What?! Read more
Catch Twenty-Three
Imagine you're a fireman in a small town where you know everybody. You rush into a burning hotel, and there, unconscious on the floor of one of the rooms lie a pair of people you know to be a politician and a prostitute. You're by yourself, and you can only rescue one of the two.
Question: which one do you save? Read more
Sheep From Goats
in the third installment of "What's It Gonna Take?" author and essayist L. Neil Smith offers historical evidence and common sense facts to help JPFO's readers avoid popular misconceptions about the Bill of Rights in particular and freedom in general. Neil discusses what the Second Amendment is really all about, why the Founding Fathers included it in the Constitution, and how certain gun laws make no sense in that context. Read more
How Bad Does it Have to Get?
In the second part of his new three-part essay for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, "What's It Gonna Take?", novelist and columnist L. Neil Smith lays out some pretty ugly examples of what almost certainly awaits us -- what may be done by the government to the American people -- unless enough of us begin to act effectively now. Read more
What's it Gonna Take? (Part One)
In his latest opus -- a three-parter, this time -- here at Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, award-winning author and essayist L. Neil Smith asks his readers an old, familiar question: "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them [meaning
us] under absolute despotism," what will it take to get you and your fellow Americans to rise up and put an end to the police state we all live in?
Read more
Celebrate
The Bill of Rights Every Day
December 15, 1791 marks the most
momentous day in human history. On that day, the
first ten amendments to the then-new United States
Constitution were ratified, placing severe limits
-- for the first time in in thousands of years
-- on the power of government over the individual.
Neil explores the true meaning and significance
of this document to every American and how it
is so important we do everything to protect it,
and so our freedoms.
Read
more
Contemplating
Mass Murder in Omaha
Is there a reason -- aside from
the hardware politicians and the mass media always
love to put the blame on -- that violent atrocities
like this week's bloody shopping mall shootings
keep occurring? In his most recent observations
on history and human nature, "Contemplating
Mass Murder in Omaha", novelist and essayist
L. Neil Smith suggests three -- one that almost
every gun owner in America has already thought
about (but with a twist that may take your breath
away) -- and two that don't seem have occurred
to anybody else before. Read
more
Gun
Control and the Supremes
Despite the pathetic lies of ideological
opponents to individual weapons ownership and
the act of self-defense, what the Founding Fathers
intended the Second Amendment to express is abundantly
clear. All that anybody needs to understand it
is to put himself in their position. Would it
even occur to you -- especially since the Revolution
started when the government attempted to confiscate
privately-owned weapons -- to write a Constitutional
amendment guranteeing to the
government,
not the individual, the right to keep an bear
arms? Precisely how stupid or crazy do gun prohibitionists
think everybody is?
Read more
Is
it too Late for America?
That's the question novelist and
columnist L. Neil Smith asks about the monetary
cost of this administration's undeclared wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan in his latest essay for
JPFO, "Is It Too Late For America?".
And that's before other, higher costs are accounted,
such as the loss of individual liberties in America,
and the ugly rise of fascism. Happily, there's
more than just gloom and doom to report. The bad
news, Neil observes, is forcing a kind of convergence
to occur between people on the right, like Patrick
Buchanan, and people on the left, like Naomi Wolf,
whose highest value turns out (surprisingly) to
be freedom.
Read more
The
Big One
Because they live on the unstable
surface of a planet with an energetic atmosphere
and an even more energetic interior, human beings
sometimes find their circumstances violently altered
by things like hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis,
hailstorms, volcanos, and meteoric impacts. What
will it be like when "The Big One" finally
happens and half of California suddenly leaps
fifty feet northward, as most geologists expect
it to do any day now, or a hunk of space-rock
slams into the middle of Ohio, creating a new
Great Lake (we're 15,000 years overdue for that
one)?
Read more
Global
Warming, and Gun Control
Global warming has been totally
and thoroughly discredited as the shameless, heartless
fraud that most of us knew it was from the very
beginning. That's not really what this article
is about. A lot of otherwise politically savvy
gun owners have believed until now that we have
no interest in all of that global warming malarky.
They couldn't be more mistaken. The individual
right to own and carry weapons is among its primary
targets.
Read more
Justice
Not Just Miscarried, But Aborted
The word "infringe"
also carries a connotation of sneaking up, of
gradually violating, or taking something away
just a little bit at a time -- sort of like what's
happened to the right to keep and bear arms. I
mention all of this so that you will understand,
right from the beginning of this essay, why I
insist that the entire structure of federal, state,
and local weapons law is itself illegal, making
those who have passed it and those who enforce
it criminals. Never forget that. Read
more
Another
Glimmer of Hope
More than six years have passed since Aaron Zelman
and I wrote Hope, a novel about the first libertarian
president of the United States. In our book, Alexander Hope, Vietnam
veteran, retired computer magnate, history professor, and author,
was elected in 2008 after the incumbent Republican Vice President,
running for the presidency, was arrested for child pornography,
and the Democratic candidate, a United States Senator and former
First Lady, was killed in a horrible highway
accident. Since that time, as the playwright Edward Albee put
it, there's been a lot of blood under the bridge. Read
more
A
Glimmer of Hope
Over the thirty year course of my career as a
novelist so far, I have made a good many predictions about the
future that have come true. Those predictions include computer
imaging in criminal forensics, wall-sized television and computer
screens, laptop computers, handheld devices like the PDA and iPod,
the Internet as we now know it, the popularity of .40 caliber
handguns, the effect of civilian weapons carry, concealed and
otherwise, on the crime rate, and the collapse of communism. Read
more
NI4D:
Dangerously Stupid or Stupidly Dangerous?
They (the bowtie and propellor beanie types,
not the coyotes) call themselves the "National Initiative
For Democracy" or "NI4D" (add a dot com to that
to find their website for yourself) when they aren't calling themselves
"Philadelphia II", and it appears that they got their
big idea from former United States Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska,
one of the few in recent political history who makes Al Gore --
or Jerry Brown, for that matter -- look like a staid conservative
statesman. Or a model of sanity. Read
more
Toward
an International Bill of Rights Union
The internet is an interesting thing. You can
be communicating with somebody across town today, somebody in
another state tonight, and somebody on the other side of the world
tomorrow, all with equal ease. In fact if their e-mail address
doesn't show it, and you don't know how to read that routing gobbledygook
at the top of the message, you can be doing one of those three
things and not know which one it is. Read
more
"I
Need My Pain!"
[W]hat I discovered during my stint on this particular
radio station, is that many conservatives aren't interested in
solving their problems. In fact, they actively resent anybody
who is foolish enough to present them with ideas useful in defeating
the enemies of liberty. Read
more
Wouldn't
It Be Nice? Part III: A Time for Choices
Timothy Daniel "Big Tim" Sullivan, sometimes
called "King of the Tenderloin" was a man who was allowed
to live longer than he should have. It could never have happened
in a Bill of Rights Culture. Read
more
Wouldn't
It Be Nice? Part II: Living Off The Interest
Depending on who you happen to listen to, some
two-thirds, or three-fourths, or nine-tenths of the United States
government is illegal -- meaning that what it is and what it does
it falls outside the limits prescribed by Article I, Section VIII
of the Constitution, listing the powers of Congress and, therefore,
of the government as a whole. Read
more
Wouldn't
It Be Nice? Part I: The Rule of Law
Has it ever struck you as a little odd that in
a country with a Thirteenth Amendment that outlaws "involuntary
servitude of any kind",there's also a "Selective Service"
system that forces men, on pain of imprisonment or death, to join
the military whether they want to or not? Read
more
Compromise:
Political Poison
When I was growing up, people around me -- public
school teachers, national and local political leaders, the broadcast
and print media, other useless busybodies -- were very enthusiastic
about the idea of _compromise_. Read
more
Bringing
the "Boys" Back Home
More and more these days, one hears that the best
way to support our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the hundred
and umpty-odd other countries they're stationed in around the
world is to bring them all home.It's very difficult to disagree
with that sentiment, or with the thinking behind it. However for
me, at least, it's equally difficult to agree without some amount
of trepidation. Read
more
The
NRA Disgraces Itself -- Again
One of the most unexpected and disheartening discoveries
I made as a youth is that there are different kinds of courage.
A man who shows admirable valor on the battlefield, for example,
may be paralytically unable to talk to women. Similarly, in a
world where people often say they would rather die than make a
speech, and the terror invariably first or second on their list
is of personal confrontation, the same warrior-type may be unable
to stand up to the pressure of political processes... Read
more
