Dear Mr. Security Agent

The following is reproduced with permission. The author's opinions are his own, but certainly food for thought. LM

http://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/bracken-dear-mr-security-agent/

For widespread distribution, more cutting-edge commentary from Matt Bracken, former SEAL and

author of the Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy, along with his most recent novel, Castigo Cay:

Dear Mr. Security Agent,

Federal, state, or local. You, the man or woman with the badge, the sworn LEO or FLEA and those

who inhabit the many law enforcement niches in between and on all sides. This essay is directed to

you, because in the end, how this turmoil about gun control turns out will depend largely upon your

decisions and actions over the coming months and years.

I sincerely wish that members of Congress—who may soon be voting on new gun control measures—

would read this essay, but I realize that’s a pipe dream, considering the impenetrable bubbles around

those exalted entities. So I’ll settle for you, Mr. (or Ms.) Security Agent, since you already gobble

up everything on the internet, and I don’t have to seek you out.

A decade ago I wrote the novel Enemies Foreign and Domestic, a tale about how tragic events

involving the misuse of firearms can be used by an evil administration to misinform and mold public

opinion to support its malign anti-freedom policies.

No, my novel was not predicting “Operation Fast and Furious” a decade before that covert policy of

“pursuing gun control under the radar,” (which was President Obama’s explanation to Sarah Brady

for his lack of overt political action). That inter-agency gun-walking policy, remember, resulted in

the deaths of over four hundred Mexicans and two U.S. federal agents, murdered in an effort to

discredit the Second Amendment and lead to more restrictive gun control laws in America. (If

Nixon—or any Republican, for that matter—were in office, the intentional bloodbath would be called

Murdergate, but today’s collaborating Woodwards and Bernsteins are in on the cover-up.)

Instead of gun-walking thousands of AK-47s to Mexican drug cartel assassins (who would believe

that?), Enemies Foreign and Domestic begins with a sniper opening fire on a packed football stadium.

A thousand innocent fans die, some from the ninety bullets fired but most in the ensuing panic

stampede. In a traumatized America, the fictional stadium massacre results in the banning of all

semi-automatic rifles, with no buyback, no grandfathering of weapons already owned, and no sunset

clause. Citizens had to turn them in for destruction or face years in federal prison.

The page-one stadium massacre was simply a plot device chosen to launch the story in high gear and

set the stage to immediately and fully explore the main theme of the novel: the calculated

transformation of our Constitutional republic into a socialist police state. Since I prefer to write

tightly wound fiction transpiring at a rapid pace in a compressed time period, I examined the

imposition of totalitarian controls over the course of just a few weeks, not years or decades.

1. The TSA: On the road to the American police state

Consider: The TSA was born in the panicked backwash of 9/11, which is understandable given the

events of that day, when Muslim maniacs screaming allahu akbar murdered 3,000 Americans and

others in the name of Islamic global jihad. But a decade after 9/11, due entirely to political

correctness, it’s completely out of the question to profile Mohammed at the airport yet absolutely

necessary for that bloated agency to “randomly” select your pre-teen or teenage daughter for a

body search performed by a government matron in a TSA uniform. This frequently under-the-clothes

and against-the-skin complete body search may done in full public view, or in a hidden back room,

solely at the discretion of the TSA agents involved.

Meanwhile, Mom and Dad stand off to the side where they have been directed to wait, saying

nothing, scarcely moving, avoiding random eye contact lest a TSA security agent catch a wayward

smirk or utterance of protest. To pull out a cell phone camera at this time would surely invite arrest.

To walk over and grab the matron by the arm is out of the question. Defending your child from the

indignity would lead only to your being Tasered and handcuffed on the cold airport floor. After

that, your entire family may wind up in some TSA airport detention cells, conveniently located right

on your concourse and unknown to you until then. Better to stew in silence, let the incident pass, and

try to forget it.

So in the year 2013, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we stand with our eyes

averted, burning with humiliation, while our spouses or children are groped above and below the waist

by blue-gloved government prison guards—only we are in an airport in a free country, and not in a

prison!

Or are we? A virtual open-air prison, where government security agents can pat down ordinary

citizens at will is the accepted “new normal.” Did that happen often in East Germany, I wonder? In

the Soviet Union? Does it happen today in Cuba? Officially sanctioned crotch groping in the name of

“security?”

(Why, again, was it that the TSA was created? Oh yes, Islamic jihad terrorists destroyed some big

buildings and killed thousands of people in New York City on September 11 way back in the year

2001. It was because of that very bad day in lower Manhattan and many other acts of bloody Muslim

terrorism around the world going on for decades, especially hijacking and blowing up lots of airliners

full of people. It’s so easy to forget why exactly it is that we need to become a police state for our

own safety.)

And now we read that the TSA is yet again expanding and branching out, like an octopus on steroids.

This suddenly gargantuan federal agency is not only running routine checkpoints and stop-and-frisk

operations in airports, but at bus and train stations also. Eight thousand times in 2010, if you can

believe the government’s own accounting figures. Your papers, please! These checkpoints and mobile

searching stations are called VIPR Teams, a telling acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and

Response Teams.

Folks, you cannot make this stuff up. Well, actually, you can. Way back in 2002 in Enemies Foreign

and Domestic I invented FIST checkpoints, for Firearms Inspections Stop Terrorism. I leave it to

you as to which sounds more coolly ominous and plausible in fact and in fiction—VIPRs or FISTs.

The advance word is that at the next stop on this express lane to tyranny, we will be seeing the TSA

on our highways, setting up roaming vehicle checkpoints. For our “public safety,” of course. Watch

the recent YouTube video of the Texas state trooper digitally raping a mother and daughter by the

side of a Texas highway to see law enforcement checkpoint authority run amok, and wonder at the

future of our nation and our hard-won legacy of individual freedom. If you can stomach to watch it.

Welcome to the USSA, comrades! How in the world did this happen? When did we wake up to find

our freedom stolen in the night—and all in name of “homeland security” and “public safety”?

2. Nobody needs an assault weapon!

And now in the wake of yet another disgusting example of the worst human depravity, this time in an

elementary school in New England, we are told by the government that some firearms are simply too

dangerous for citizens to possess. We are told that limiting or removing these firearms from private

hands will increase the general public safety. We are told that it is a small thing to give up semi-

automatic rifles, which the political and cooperating media elites will dutifully call “assault weapons,”

even though nobody can quite define the term. In any case, we are told, nobody needs an “assault

weapon” with a thirty-round magazine.

Well, actually, almost nobody needs them.

Apparently, Mr. Security Agent and his comrades need them, lots of them. Tens of thousands of new

“assault weapons,” enough to shoot all of the billions (with a “b”) of .223 and .40 caliber hollow-point

bullets recently purchased by our federal law enforcement agencies in unprecedented new

acquisitions. Are we suddenly expecting a foreign invasion I missed reading about? Wouldn’t that be

the job of the military? Why do our federal law enforcement agencies suddenly need tens of

thousands of “assault weapons” and billions of new hollow-point (not training) bullets, many times

more than in previous years?

Evidently, it’s very dangerous on the Homeland Security front, and Mr. Security Agent needs a lot

of firepower to be able to put down all of the assorted troublemakers and problem children out in

the “uncontrolled spaces” of America. You can’t have too much firepower if you work for our

government law enforcement agencies!

But in the name of public safety the government is going to whittle your allowable firearms down

step by step, first eliminating semi-automatic rifles, then pistols, and eventually on down to the last

bolt-action hunting rifles and shotguns, which may be kept at a government armory, and signed out

for an approved day of hunting with a few shells. (Make sure to retrieve your empty brass for the

counting.)

So, step by step, the government is going to take away any ability the average citizen might have to

resist a rampaging mob or roving gangs of bandits during a breakdown in law and order, or any

demands at all made by a tyrannical government sometime in the murky future.

3. Trust us, we’re from the government.

So at the historical moment that our nation is turning into a police state, with no expectation of

privacy, even of our private parts in public airports or on public highways, we are commanded to

grant even greater trust in our government’s perpetual future benevolence, to have blind faith that

at no point in the future will our government turn tyrannical.

But in the year 2013, has the government already earned our trust, or our disgust, with its current

abuses of its police powers? In this environment of steadily creeping tyranny, should we comply with

government demands for our increasing disarmament?

I wrote Enemies Foreign and Domestic a decade ago with the hope that eventually anti-gun liberals

would discover it and it would provide them with a virtual road map to understanding conservative

thinking about firearms and their place in society. Additionally, I wrote the novel hoping that if it

were successful, it might provide me a platform and a microphone to discuss these issues at some

dangerous time in the future.

That time is now. Well-meaning, gun-loathing liberals need to understand that they are blindly

tossing matches into a dynamite factory with their threats to severely limit and restrict the Second

Amendment. They must understand the other point of view in order not to send America careening

into a deadly minefield, the existence of which they are, evidently, blissfully unaware.

4. The gun nuts

To many liberals, the popular American hobby of collecting and shooting guns is a bizarre and

shameful vice. Three or four pistols and long guns and a few hundred rounds of ammunition are

routinely described in the popular media as an “arsenal.” Perhaps in a Manhattan walk-up studio

apartment, where that handful of guns had to be smuggled in and hidden, it would be considered an

“arsenal.” But out past the urban beltway, out in Red State America, that is what many folks I know

keep in their car or truck for roadside emergencies, or impromptu plinking, or varmint-hunting

opportunities. And hell, isn’t that why we have guns out in Red State America? Damn sure is. Among

other reasons.

Millions of firearms aficionados in their later years have purchased a rifle, pistol or shotgun every

year or two for decades. In millions of cases, these add up to dozens of firearms per household. A

round dozen firearms of all types might be a good average. Some are hunting arms, some are military

antiques, and increasingly, many are defensive pistols and modern sporting rifles, and yes, both are

semi-automatic. For example, millions of AR-15 rifles have been purchased in just the last few years.

Note that I did not say modern hunting rifles. That is a separate category, but the important thing

to understand is that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, and anybody who says

it does is telling a lie.

Those of us who enjoy firearms feel it deeply when some lunatic misuses one to slaughter innocents.

Shooting ranges are virtually churches of gun safety, with safety rules posted everywhere, taught to

one and all, and enforced strictly. Passing down our tradition of safe and responsible gun ownership

from generation to generation is considered a sacred trust. When a firearm is misused by a criminal,

our greatest wish is always that we had been present with our legally concealed pistols to stop the

slaughter of unarmed, defenseless innocents. And more frequently than you might imagine, this

actually happens.

Consider this: the average number of victims per incident when the shooter is stopped by an armed

civilian: three. The average number of victims when the shooter is stopped by a policeman: fourteen.

Why? Because when every second is a matter of life and death, the police are still minutes away.

Think about those numbers. Eleven people die needlessly if the shooting takes place in a “victim

disarmament zone,” where legal firearms are prohibited. This is why deranged shooters head for

schools, malls, and theaters, where signs forthrightly proclaim that guns are forbidden. A “no

firearms” sign draws such a person the way that a starving wolf is attracted to a pen full of helpless

lambs.

But when the killer is stopped by an armed civilian, the mainstream media rarely or never mention

that fact, because it goes against their propaganda template: the inherent evil of guns in civilian

hands. So those stories are spiked and the typical American never hears of them. Did you know that

shortly before the tragedy in Connecticut, an armed civilian stopped a maniac in a packed shopping

mall after he had killed only two victims, instead of twenty-seven?

5. If it bleeds, it leads: The media love maniacs.

The same media that pointedly ignore frequent life-saving defensive uses of firearms consistently

pours hours and days and weeks of attention upon the latest maniac who chooses a firearm as his

tool of mass murder, so that the next potential insane villain cannot fail to notice the easy path to

fame and immortality that the misuse of a gun can bring. But the greatest fame will only attach if

they can beat the previous body-count record, a number constantly and loudly broadcast, so that no

one can fail to hear it.

The message to the unstable is clear: Come on, you crazy guys, can’t you at least murder your way to

thirty? The Virginia Polytechnic Institute madman is still leading the lone-wolf pack, but college

students might resist, so maybe find an easier target to rack up higher numbers. Find a killing zone

with younger and more helpless victims. The media’s lesson was clear, and it was well learned by

Adam Lanza when he set out to slaughter helpless little lambs instead of bigger and tougher sheep.

The mainstream media pour a Niagara of crocodile tears over the most recent child victims, after

doing everything for the killer but sign his name to their pre-written script. With such fanfare, is it

any wonder that there is no lack of new monsters playing “beat the kill record” on a regular basis?

It’s almost become a recurring television reality show.

Meanwhile, liberal politicians scheme about how to leverage the latest human tragedy into new gun

control laws, laws that by definition will be obeyed only by the law-abiding, not by criminals. “Never

let a good crisis go to waste,” to paraphrase Obama confidant Rahm Emmanuel. And no better

opportunity to trim the Second Amendment fangs and claws of their ideological enemies than in the

immediate aftermath of another massacre wrought by a madman with a gun.

But conservatives have also considered this phenomenon of grief exploitation for political ends,

although from a very different ideological perspective. We look back a century and even longer, and

see other nations and peoples that were also on the march forward toward “social progress” when the

need for mandatory gun registration suddenly became an urgent national priority.

6. So what’s the matter with gun registration?

To say that Turkey did not enjoy a smooth transition from being the seat of the collapsing Ottoman

Empire, through World War I and into the modernist Ataturk era, would be a massive

understatement. In those turbulent times, ethnic Turks, Muslims composing the vast majority of the

population, considered their Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, to be disloyal and

treacherous.

In 1911, a national gun registration law was passed in Turkey, with no apparent ill intention beyond

increasing public safety. In 1915, during the Great War, these gun registration lists were used to

disarm the Armenian and other Christian populations. Army battalions cordoned off entire towns

and did gun sweeps. Once disarmed, the official state violence visited against the Armenians

ratcheted up to murderous levels. Typically, on town-wide sweeps, all of the men and boys were taken

away by the Turkish soldiers, never to be seen or heard from again.

Only after these Armenian “enemies of the state” were disarmed and completely helpless to resist

did the final step begin: the officially sanctioned, ordered, led and conducted wholesale

“deportations” of the Christian minorities from Turkey. These “deportations” were in reality forced

marches into fiery deserts, accompanied by pervasive sadistic cruelty comparable only to the

Japanese “Bataan Death March,” and the less known but much more deadly death marches of the last

surviving Jews in Nazi hands as the Red Army closed in on Germany.

Three decades earlier in Turkey, rape, roadside torture sessions ending in death, and the entire

worst catalog of human abuses were standard procedure while the Christian Armenians were being

marched into the deserts to die of thirst, hunger, exposure, and sheer brutality. The stragglers who

could not keep up with the columns being force-marched without food or water by Turkish soldiers

were killed with bullets, bayonets, swords and even crueler means (for sport and variety), until the

columns were no more and the missions were complete.

Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half of the two million Turkish Armenians were murdered, along

with a half million Christians of other sects. The rest escaped from Turkey in one of the first great

diasporas of a genocided people in the modern era. There is no need to build gas chambers or slave-

labor gulag death camps in a country with ample deserts. In Turkey there is no Dachau or Auschwitz

to memorialize the dead, just bones scattered in the sand and rocks a century ago, a model of

efficiency that Hitler might have envied. (The Turks deny to this day that it happened, just as some

deny the later Nazi holocaust.)

But even after conducting this first modern mega-death holocaust, with diplomats and reporters

covering the genocide with daily wire reports, Turkey was not expelled in disgrace from the

community of nations. There was no Western boycott of the new Turkish state. Adolf Hitler noticed

this 20th-century indifference to genocide, and so did Lenin and Stalin and other despots. After

the horrors of the First World War, the West had little gas left in the tank for do-gooder

intervention just because some ethnic minority or other had been wiped out in Turkey.

A new low standard had been set. A nation’s leaders could commit genocide against a despised

minority, murder two million living souls in full view, and the world would not give a good damn. It was

an important lesson for future dictators, leading to even greater mass murders under the Nazis and

Soviets.

And the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists learned another crucial lesson from the Turks:

national gun registration laws could be passed easily in the name of dubious “public safety,” and the

registration lists could be used later to disarm selected minorities and then subsequently to arrest,

deport, and murder them by the millions after they were helpless to resist.

In the Turkish case, only a small clique understood the true purpose behind the gun registration and

gun control laws of 1911. If average Turks thought about the gun laws at all, they probably believed

they would actually lead to greater public safety, as advertised. That was also generally the case

with the Russians, Germans, Chinese, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Rwandans, and all the rest who were

required to register or even turn in their firearms for “public safety,” and who accepted the demand

at face value as a “reasonable” gun control measure, to their later regret.

American liberals who would like to see the Second Amendment torn out of the Constitution as a

problematic relic of a bygone era generally do not know—or pretend not to know—this well-

established historical pattern. But American Constitutionalists, who are more often than not

students of history, understand the pattern very well.

So, directly behind the insane faces of contemporary villains like Loughner, Holmes and Lanza, we

see the smirking faces of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, tyrants who did not murder individual victims by

the fives and tens, but entire populations by the tens of millions. And in each case, these national

genocides were preceded by gun confiscation that was made possible by national firearms

registration laws sold to a gullible population in the name of “public safety.”

(Interestingly, during the bloody French Revolution’s “Great Terror” of 1793 to 1794, it was the

“Committee of Public Safety” who condemned tens of thousands of French men and women to the

guillotine or other forms of summary execution without trial. After previously being disarmed, of

course.)

7. The case of Switzerland

Let’s look at another foreign country for a positive perspective on gun ownership. Although

surrounded by sometimes hostile neighbors, Switzerland has maintained neutrality for centuries. It

is an armed neutrality: nearly every adult Swiss male serves a short period of active military duty

and thereafter is a member of the home guard militia. The inactive reservist keeps his military-

issued fully automatic battle rifle at home, with plenty of ammunition and magazines, for the rest of

his life. If Switzerland were ever invaded, the invaders would immediately find themselves taking

accurate fire from many directions. Beyond personal rifles kept at home, field artillery, heavy

machineguns and other crew-served weapons were hidden in disguised barns and other public and

private buildings across the countryside, among the very citizen-soldiers who would man and fire

them.

An interesting story, but what does it have to do with this essay? Over those same centuries that

Switzerland has not been invaded by a foreign enemy, it has also never been taken over internally by

a dictator. Any would-be Swiss tyrant would face the same dilemna faced by an invading army: a

citizenry armed to the teeth with the latest military-grade, full-automatic-capable true assault

rifles, plus jointly operated crew-served weapons. A citizenry dedicated to preserving its freedom

from any tyrant, foreign or domestic.

Liberals might cite the example of Great Britain or Australia as countries that have created national

registration lists and then later disarmed their populations through confiscation, but without a

subsequent genocide. That’s true, but there is often a long delay between the stages of the

registration-confiscation-extermination progression. For example, national gun registration in

Germany was implemented in the 1920s, without any immediate dire consequences. Then Hitler was

elected and took dictatorial powers under the Enabling Act. Beginning in 1938, Hitler used the gun

registration lists to first disarm and then exterminate his enemies, primarily the Jews.

8. The Scapegoat Express

Scapegoating an unpopular group is standard operating procedure for budding socialist dictators

wrecking once-free economies. For the Soviets, it was the Kulaks; for the Chinese it was the so-

called “landlords.” I could list more recent cases to include Cambodia, Uganda, Guatemala, Rwanda

and others. Once disarmed and helpless to resist, the hated national scapegoats are slaughtered by

the millions.

Probably few Turks, Germans or Russians gave a thought to the ultimate aim of their new gun

registration laws, passed quite plausibly in the name of public safety. But national gun registration is

a slow-acting poison, sweet and easy to swallow, but potentially becoming deadly only years later,

when a tyrant takes the reins of power and inevitably sends for the list. He begins with his most

dangerous enemies and works his way through the list, marching the helpless scapegoats into deserts

or gas chambers or gulags after disarming them.

In America today, we are seeing the beginning of an insidious scapegoating process, with older

conservative white Christian males designated as the national Lucifer du jour, fair game for any

vicious attack. Famous black movie stars joke about murdering white folks and white liberal media

stars laugh along with them, conveying elite acceptance of the prevailing “evil whitey” meme.

Filled from birth on a steady diet of the pervasiveness of white racism in America, rage-filled urban

youths across the nation play “the knockout game” with often fatal results for their randomly

selected white or Asian victims. Meanwhile, the elite liberal media fail to notice the national scope of

the almost weekly occurrences. Google “the knockout game” and start reading the dozens of local

stories that the media refuse to connect or identify as part of a dangerous national trend.

And it doesn’t stop with knocking out random passers-by with sucker punches and then kicking them

in head until they are dead, disfigured for life, or in comas. Have you ever heard of “The Knoxville

Horror”? How about “The Wichita Horror”? Google them, read the local news articles about them,

and ask yourself how much national media attention those cases and others like them would garner

had the races been reversed.

When alternately trumpeting or ignoring crime stories based entirely on the races of the

perpetrators and the victims isn’t enough to convey the media’s full slant, they will invent stories or

lie freely, as we saw in the Trayvon Martin case, with video footage edited and spliced to

deliberately portray “white-Hispanic” George Zimmerman as a racist killer. Selectively covering or

ignoring crimes depending on the races of the victims and perpetrators is a vital part of the process

of scapegoating. The unspoken message is clearly conveyed: crimes against disfavored groups just

don’t matter. The violence prone absorb the lesson, and the result is a wave of racial attacks such as

those described under the rubric of “the knockout game.”

Or consider the types of cartoons that are considered acceptable today in mainstream publications,

portraying prototypical older white Christian men—presumably filthy-rich conservative

Republicans—as hate-spewing maniacal villains, complete with fangs, Confederate flags, prominent

Christian crosses and gigantic, threatening guns. Compare these viciously racist cartoons to the

vilest anti-Semitic cartoons created by Nazi propagandists before and during World War II. I am

not speaking of cartoons drawn by nobodies and posted on obscure fringe websites, I am talking

about cartoons printed in mainstream newspapers, cartoons that would be condemned if the

targeted group was any other than the scapegoat.

Cartoons are not serious, you say? Then how about a paper in an approved and sanctioned semi-

official U.S. military publication, written by a War College professor in good standing. Serious

enough for you? Google the “Small Wars Journal” piece entitled “Full Spectrum Operations in the

Homeland: A Vision of the Future,” by Colonel Kevin Benson, USA (ret), 2012. The “full spectrum

operations” envisaged for the Army in the homeland are not made against hypothetical hostile drug

cartels in the Southwest, or urban gangs, or the traditionally ambiguous and vague “Pineland

Liberation Group,” or “Orangeland People’s Front,” hypothetical stand-ins named to offend no one,

not even by accident.

This long-standing neutral naming protocol is tossed aside in “Full Spectrum Operations in the

Homeland,” where the new domestic enemy that the U.S. Army must crush is a neo-KKK, a white

racist “Tea Party terrorist” organization, headquartered in, of all places, Darlington, South Carolina.

Yes, the NASCAR Darlington. Anybody who has been in or near an actual Tea Party event or rally

knows the crowd is made up mainly of an older white population, a quiet group that leaves no mess

behind, not even a stray poster, and causes no fuss.

Yet “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland” postulates that these white grandpas and grannies

will be the very group that the U.S. Army will be called upon to crush in its first major battles on

American soil since 1865. The message this paper sends throughout the upper ranks of the War-

College-trained military, actually naming an ethnic group—Southern whites—as the national enemy to

“hypothetically” be crushed by the Army in the year 2016, is simply mind-boggling.

The path forward that is indicated by the media’s growing acceptance of these vile and outrageous

anti-white celebrity rants, cartoons, and articles is the same path that in previous eras led to the

guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber for the scapegoated populations. But the final solution—

genocide of the scapegoats—is only possible after the mob is sufficiently inflamed with hatred

toward them by the mass media, in collaboration with an evil government. And time after time, it

works.

We are seeing the opening stages of the scapegoating of white conservatives today, as the last

election seems to demonstrate to the left’s satisfaction that a crucial political and demographic

tipping point has been passed, and the ultimate power equations of raw tribal loyalty have changed in

a fundamental way—and now it’s payback time.

We have seen this play out before in other countries and times, and it is deadly serious. Once the

scapegoating gets far enough under way, it can pick up a life and a momentum of its own. For

example, if the economy ever truly crashes, and the EBT system that feeds fifty million Americans

goes down hard, leading to hunger, looting, and riots, (or we suffer other unforeseen problems of

similar crisis proportions), the scapegoats will always be dragged to the forefront as the pre-

designated patsy, to deflect blame from the government.

“It’s the traitorous Armenians! It’s the greedy Kulaks! It’s the filthy Jews! It’s the oppressive

Rwandan Hutus! It’s the white-racist rednecks! Let’s go get them, and make them pay!”

The end result of disarming a scapegoat population is as easy to follow as 1-2-3:

1. Registration. 2. Confiscation. 3. Extermination.

And in this cultural and social climate, with class envy and racial hatred being stoked by the

government and its willing partners in the liberal media against white conservatives, our socialist-

leaning administration now wants us to surrender our most useful and effective self-defense tools,

in the name of “public safety”!

9. Dear Mr. Security Agent…

Why is this essay titled Dear Mr. Security Agent, when it dwells mainly upon the media and coastal-

dwelling urban liberals and their utopian belief in the benefits of new gun control laws in the United

States? Mr. Security Agent will protest that he is no liberal, he is ex-military, he’s a cop, he’s a

fed—he’s one of the good guys! He took the same oath to defend the Constitution that you did,

Buster! He doesn’t need any lectures on defending the Constitution! So why single him out in this

essay?

Why? Because liberal bliss-ninnies in San Francisco and Boston are not issued flash-bang grenades,

battering rams, body armor, flex-cuffs by the gross, and MP-5 submachine guns. No, the dirty end

of the confiscation job will fall upon the shoulders of sworn law enforcement officers and gold-

badged federal law enforcement agents. The LEOs and the FLEAs. That’s you, Mr. Security Agent.

We really don’t want a problem with you, believe me. And there is no reason for us to have a problem,

because we both can read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and neither of us requires a team

of black-robed mystics to translate its plain English into Newspeak for improved comprehension. You

and I both understand what “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”

means, without requiring five out of nine politically appointed Supremes to tell us that it does not

mean what it very plainly states in black and white.

Now, as long as Mr. Security Agent remembers that he swore the same oath that millions of

Americans swore, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, he will

certainly not permit himself to take part in gun confiscation raids. But if he does, well, let’s be

frank: tens of millions of Americans would then consider him to be the very domestic enemy that

they swore to defend the Constitution against.

But Mr. Bracken—I can hear it now—this is the United States of America! Abuses like the ones you

hypothesize simply cannot happen here. Gun registration does not always lead to confiscation, much

less to extermination. We are not Germany or Russia or any of those other countries you mentioned.

This is the 21st Century. America is different, and it can’t happen here. You must lay your irrational

fears aside and place your trust in your government. It cannot, it will not, ever turn in the dark and

tyrannical direction that you imagine.

Oh, really? Google “wrong-address SWAT raids” and read any of the dozens of articles you will find.

We should trust the government not to abuse us even further, once we are disarmed and helpless to

resist them? Thanks, but I don’t think so.

In 2002, in Enemies Foreign and Domestic, I wrote a fictional account of future government agents

waterboarding American “detainees” in a clandestine “interrogation center.” In 2013, I think that we

are many steps closer to that reality. Today, we already see genital groping by federal agents and at

least one Texas state trooper who was caught on film. Their goal is not “public safety,” but public

humiliation, intimidation, and control. Cowing the peasants into meek obeisance to unchecked

authority. Can waterboarding American “detainees” in clandestine torture centers really be that far

behind?

We have recently learned, Mr. Security Agent, that your law enforcement comrades can read every

email we send or receive with no need for a pesky and outdated warrant. Today, our cell phones come

complete with undisclosed “back doors” for law enforcement use, allowing them even to be switched

on remotely, to serve as no less than a secret police microphone in our very own pockets.

Next year there will be drones patrolling the skies above America, keeping a watchful “Gorgon

Stare” (Google it) mega-eye out for our “public safety.” Please read “The Coming Drone Attack on

America,” by Naomi Wolf, to understand the grim implications of this development for what remains

of American freedom.

Facial recognition cameras are going up everywhere. Nearly all public and corporate video camera

networks have their feeds directed to dozens of new law enforcement “fusion centers,” whose very

existence is kept secret from the American people they were supposedly built to protect. (Google

“fusion centers” as well. Discover more news that the liberal mainstream media don’t think you need

to know.) Data-mining and Social Network Analysis by our “protectors” edges steadily toward the

“Department of Pre-Crime” foreseen in the science fiction movie Minority Report.

Next, project a decade ahead to what may be considered routine law enforcement behavior in 2023,

after millions of Americans refuse to comply with new firearms registration and confiscation laws.

Action will beget reaction. SWAT raids will spur armed resistance, which will spur “death squad”

reprisals by “off-duty” agents, exactly in the way I wrote in “Enemies Foreign and Domestic.” It is a

natural, almost organic progression, once started—and it has started. Secret detention centers will

proliferate like mushrooms in the night. The media will not report on them, even if screams are heard

around the clock by neighbors. Particularly brave reporters who break the media silence to report on

police abuses will disappear, or be found headless, as they are in Mexico today.

For that is what a modern “dirty civil war” looks like, in country after country, from continent to

continent. If present trends continue, America is going to experience a very old witch’s brew on her

home soil for the first time since the Civil War. This is my own very dark “vision of the future” (to

quote the subtitle of Colonel Benson’s piece) if new and restrictive gun control laws are passed.

So now we’re back to you, Mr. Security Agent, and your unique role in this high drama. Let me state

this very clearly, both for you and for the liberal agenda-setting elites who might accidentally

stumble upon this essay. Let there be no doubt about this. Let no one later say, “But we were just

trying to improve public safety. We had no idea that all these disastrous unintended consequences

would happen.”

I am telling you now that disastrous unintended consequences will happen if Congress passes new

laws banning presently legal firearms. To make it very easy to remember, and in the spirit of our

beloved Department of Homeland Security’s old color-coded security threat levels, let me spell out

three lines of demarcation.

The Yellow Line:

The yellow warning line will be crossed with national gun registration laws, including laws forbidding

private gun sales without government permission. When that law passes, millions of Americans will

feel that they have been pushed directly to the edge of the abyss above the mass graves of history.

Defenders of the Second Amendment know what happened in Turkey, the USSR, Germany, China,

and other nations that fell under totalitarian rule: in every case a necessary preliminary step on the

road to genocide was national gun registration, followed by confiscation. The Jewish survivors of the

Nazi Holocaust say, “Never again!” And so do we.

The Red Line:

The red line will be crossed with the passage of laws mandating that currently owned weapons,

ammunition magazines, and ammunition quantities above a certain number must be turned in to

authorities or destroyed, and thereafter their simple possession will be a felony. At that point, the

nation will be on a hair trigger, with a thousand flaring matches nearing a thousand primed cannon

fuses aimed directly at the next Fort Sumter.

The Dead Line:

The next line requires a bit of history to explain. In some primitive Civil War POW camps, where lack

of funding or logistical constraints did not allow the construction of proper fences, a knee-high

continuous railing of wooden slats encircled the prison grounds. Guards with rifles were positioned at

the corners and in crude towers. If a prisoner so much as stepped over the narrow plank, he was shot

dead without warning, obviating the need for a real fence to contain him. Hence the term “dead line.”

Cross the line and people die, right now.

And this is what liberal utopians must understand: after passing the yellow line with national gun

registration and transfer requirements, and the red line by making possession of currently legal

firearms felonious, the dead line will be breached with the first SWAT raids upon citizens

suspected of owning legal firearms made illegal by the new gun control laws. People will die resisting

confiscation, in large numbers.

Confiscation crosses the dead line, make no mistake about it.

So this essay is really for you, Mr. Security Agent, because it won’t be elite Manhattan or Malibu

liberals or Ivy League professors or politicians or columnists who will be ordered to strap on the

sweat-stained body armor and enforce the new gun control laws at gunpoint. No, that grim task will

fall to you.

But as long as you are an honorable agent of the people while an employee of the government, and as

long as you honor your oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, then you will encounter no

problems at all with gun owners. Why? Because you will refuse to take part in gun confiscation raids.

Period. End of sentence, end of paragraph.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the leading American law enforcement agency, at least in

terms of its long history and high prestige. Dear Mr. Security Agent, please consider that F.B.I. also

stands for Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. Soon, your fidelity to your solemnly sworn oath may be

severely tested. It will take a lot of bravery to make your personal integrity a higher calling than

following illegitimate orders, simply to maintain your steady paycheck and benefits.

On the other hand, if you no longer resemble the upstanding and honorable federal agents I have

known in the past, if that whole oath-to-the-Constitution shtick was a big fat joke to you and you

would accept a transfer to the old Soviet KGB or East German Stasi for a ten percent pay raise…

then we are definitely going to have a problem. So that oath you swore really matters, one way or the

other, and so does your personal sense of honor.

Dear Mr. Security Agent, let me spell it out. If you find yourself in the sub-basement of an annex to

a secret intelligence center on the far end of town, waterboarding citizens into revealing the

locations of suspected “illegal caches” of firearms, ammunition or ammunition magazines that were

legally owned in 2012, then know this one simple fact: tens of millions of Americans will most surely

consider you a betrayer of your sworn oath and a traitor to your country.

And so, if you find yourself silently dismounting a covert SWAT vehicle at zero-dark-thirty,

dressed all in body armor, counting down to the time-coordinated explosion of battering rams and

flash-bang grenades, on a raid against a sleeping household intended to result in the confiscation of

firearms, ammunition or ammunition magazines that were legal to own in 2012, millions of Americans

who also swore an oath to defend the Constitution will consider you their domestic enemy, and they

will resist you with force of arms. Just as the soldiers of King George were resisted on another

notable gun confiscation raid on April 19, 1775. It used to be called “The Shot Heard ’Round the

World.”

You may consider the sentiments expressed above to be absurd, hyperbolic, dangerous, ridiculous, or

simply wrong-headed. But please understand that tens of millions of Americans feel this way to their

cores, and they will not be disarmed without a fight. Well-meaning but naive liberals should

understand the certain-to-follow consequences of new gun control laws intended to disarm their

fellow citizens in the name of “public safety.” LEOs and FLEAs should understand the dire

consequences of participating in gun confiscation raids, in direct violation of their sworn oaths to

uphold the Constitution, including the Second Amendment.

The unintended consequences of this misguided utopian fool’s crusade to ban guns would include a

second civil war as agonizingly painful as the first one, if not more so, since there would be no front

lines and no safe areas for anybody, anywhere. Every sane American wants to prevent such a

calamitous outcome as a “dirty civil war” on United States soil.

But know this: those tens of millions will never be quietly disarmed and then later forced at

government gunpoint onto history’s next boxcars. If boxcars and detention camps are to be in

America’s future, then you, Mr. Security Agent, will have to disarm them the hard way first. Not

Piers Morgan, not Michael Moore, not Rosie O’Donnell, not Dianne Feinstein, not Chuck Schumer.

You.

Matt Bracken

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Disclaimer: The information and ideas presented in this column are provided for informational purposes only. Gun rights, like all other Constitutionally recognized rights, must be exercised responsibly. Firearms, like cars, kitchen knives and life itself all can be dangerous. You should get professional training as part of any plan to use firearms for any purpose. I have made a reasonable, good-faith effort to assure that the content of this column is accurate. I have no control over what you do, and specifically accept no responsibility for anything you do as a result of reading my columns. Any action or lack of action on your part is strictly your responsibility.