When SCI FI Becomes a Reality, the 2nd Amendment Will Feel Cosy

America has now decided to employ the same drones used to kill terrorists in Yemen above our own skies. Combine this decision with the fact that the Administration is now hiring people who meet psyche profiles that will allow them to more easily kill our own citizens and it makes a good scifi movie.

Every city is now being outfitted with cameras at road intersections for traffic control. Every state security center is being outfitted with facial recognition software and computing power to recognize any individual that passes through these videos. Every cell phone is now by law a listening device for law enforcement to be used without warrant. Every security center can listen to every phone conversation in America and with enough artificial intelligence can create dossiers on every individual in America summarizing their speech. Every cell phone GPS can be matched by location to every suspected crime scene, mob, demonstration or assembly to monitor and assess probabilities of being connected to action against the state. Every security center can add every credit card transaction to dossiers to scan for probabilities of terror or crime. EVery public form of transportation, every banking transaction, even your use of electricity can be monitored and compared to the norm for suspected illegal activity.

Add to this immense detection power, growing exponentially and connecting interagency, interstate, and internationally, a computing and analytical capacity that is breaking through previous paradigms of what is possible faster than our policing laws can be changed to keep up with them and you have an immense, almost inconceivable capability to determine the DNA of our citizenry in real time.

Now take this microscopic surveillance and add it 30,000 drones operated by sociopathic twenty somethings that have sworn to remotely joy stick their contraptions in grid formation and to trigger their kill switches to employ deadly lazers with precise accuracy anywhere in their assigned grid and you have a Orwellian destruction machine awaiting he who would be king.

Now as a law abiding citizen, I am ambivalent of such policing power. The love part of my thinking is that this artificial intelligence strength can be used against that not so mythical future terrorist organization that plots to take down our country through weapons of mass destruction. Such immense policing force could not have been accepted by our government at all levels were it not for the very real possibility and high probability that our government and/or financial structures could be incapacitated by ideological organizations possessing nuclear or other means of destruction within our borders.

As this power that is now flying up the curve of capability begins to pin point and prioritize those individuals amongst the 310 million of us moving within the boundaries of America that might perpetrate these most heinous of crimes, we will all watch in amazement at how much more easily our law enforcement continues to apprehend individuals set on perpetrating terrorist crimes of all levels of sophistication. For that terrorist that might one day attempt to destroy an entire city in a lunch pail, it will give America a fighting chance to find this needle in a haystack and to stop such an atrocity of unspeakable scale before it is triggered.

The mistrusting part of my ambivalence feels this power could be used to enslave our nation through a rising tyrannical government of ideological extremes almost as easily as it could be used to protect us from destruction by a rogue terrorist bent on destroying what they feel is an evil hegemony that enslaves the world. America now debates the use of automatic pea shooter ak-47s that might one day have to fight a 30,000 headed, lazer breathing dragon in the sky bent on destroying every human within the border whose dossier meets predictive probabilities of becoming an enemy of the state.

 

This scifi thriller above would be out on the lunatic fringe if it weren’t so real.  Advocates of gun control say that the whole concept of the 2nd amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But mankind is capable of some pretty way out lunacy.

The trillions of dollars the United States and others have spent on nuclear weapons that can destroy the entire planet many times over is even farther out on the lunatic fringe, yet our societies marched in lockstep out to the fringes as we taught our children to make sense of our lunacy through the exercise of climbing under their school desks. 

The North and Central American holocaust, EuroAmerican slavery, the rise of the Nazis, the killing fields, ethnic cleansing, Chinese re-education and so many other atrocities, these are all so lunatic as to be deniable to the human condition, if it were not so that they actually occurred. 

Are we on this planet going to be so deluded as to think that in the next 5,000 years of human history, if mankind is lucky enough to figure out how to deny its own extinction, that we will not time and time again repeat of our horrific nature on civilizations yet to rise? 

Yes, the 2nd Amendment is out on the lunatic fringe. But when the world is confronted by its next lunatic existence, this one simple protection of the right to bear arms might just seem normal. It might just be that as we meander through the burned out cities in our roving gang of hunters and gatherers, that we look back at that band of elite eighteenth century farmers that gave us the 2nd amendment with a solemn reflection to thank them from the pit of our hearts for the bit of sanity they gave to our now post apocalyptic chaotic world.

First They Came for the Assault Rifles

First they came for the assault rifles,
but I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a second amendment zealot.

Then they established gun free zones
in all areas where population exceeded 100 per square mile,
but I didn’t speak up,
Because I lived in the country.

Then they established laws against hunting
and banned all guns,
But I didn’t care,
Because I was a vegan.

Then they came for the religious crazies,
Who defended their churches and synagogues with sticks and knifes,
But I didn’t speak up,
For I wasn’t bound by organized religion.

Then they came for the home owners,
Who demanded to live in privacy,
But I didn’t speak up,
For my work dormitory was filled beyond government quotas.

Then they came for those congregating in town squares,
Who demanded government representation,
But I didn’t speak up,
For I was a party loyalist.

Then they came for local militia and police,
Who were the only local gun registrants left,
But I didn’t mind,
For I supported international peace keepers.

Then they came for the barterers,
Who left the grid to find economic security amidst the community,
But I didn’t speak up,
For I lived sufficiently on my government rations.

Then they came for my federal government,
That was taken without firing a single round from its national armament,
But I didn’t speak up,
For I could adopt to shifting geographical borders and foreign governors.

Then they came for the woodsman, the farmer, the fisherman, and the foragers,
And interned them in re-education camps.
But I didn’t speak up,
For my security rested in complying with new world order.

Then they came for me, little old subservient me,
Who had bent like a reed to every new rule if it meant survival,
But by that time there was no one
Left to speak up for me.

God Save Our Liberty

Stewardship…it used to refer to one who was paid to look after the belongings of another. We now hug the term and give it a whole new meaning, referring graciously to the ethical responsibility we freely accept for something that we do not own and that is not central to our immediate selfish needs. What draws us to steward certain abstractions and not others? Are the objects of our stewardship of any more or less import than those chosen as responsibilities by our fellow man?

Christians speak of stewarding that given to them by God including family. Environmentalists see great import in stewarding the world for future generations yet unborn. Global warming advocates are challenged to steward the climate so that it may keep the world inhabitable for our grandchildren. The Tea Party feels great passion in stewarding America’s credit, realizing that it is the engine of our future prosperity. Liberals are equally passionate about stewarding the path for progress toward civil equality and personal freedoms.

Why is it that we choose to place our stewardship above those of others? Why is it that we choose to be blinded by the cause of others that choose to steward America’s future from tyrannical leaders that would steal the freedoms of their subjects? We know that every nation that has existed for enough time has been tested from within from tyranny. Are we so naïve as to think that America will escape this phenomenal historical record? I hope and expect that it will not occur in mine or my children’s lifetimes. Yet the time will come when a charismatic leader will ride the wave that is now tightening our freedoms in the name of security. It is for this distant time that freedom lovers everywhere stand guard of the 2nd Amendment.

When that time comes, I hope that we have not given up our arms. I hope that the hundreds of millions of guns and ammo have not been rounded up in the name of gun control for the safety of our present in exchange for the demise of our posterity. I own no gun. They scare me. Yet I am proud of the wall of steel they present to those that would harm America from without or within. God save our liberty.