Molon Labe! (53 page)

After a few seconds of pondering this riddle, the room begins chuckling as each person" sees the light." Preston then fanned the chuckles into roaring laughter as he describes what he had in mind.

To his personal secretary, Preston says, "Carol, I need to meet with Senator Haskins tomorrow morning. Tell her that I have an idea for a bill that the legislature should enjoy passing. Also, inform the Legislative Service Office that I will convene a special session for Monday 6 July."

"In the summer? Right after the weekend of the 4th? Are you certain, Governor?" asks his secretary.

"Carol, you're forgetting that Wyoming has an anniversary that week and there's already a celebration planned. Most of the legislators will be in Cheyenne on that Friday, anyway. Might as well put them to work while they're in town. Besides, they'll all get their
per diems
, so that'll help."

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Friday, 10 July 2015

The bill sails through a special session in just one week. Since there is concurrence on the language, the Joint Conference Committee is avoided. The bill is enrolled by the LSO and given a number, read by the Presiding Officers of both houses, signed in the presence of a quorum, and sent to Governor Preston. He signs it at once and presents it to the people precisely on the day of Wyoming's 125 year statehood anniversary.

The concept is elegantly simple, just as Preston said.

It worked like this: Taxation discourages the object, which affects personal habits. When personal habits are altered, people themselves are changed. Change a people and one changes a
nation
— all through taxation. A simple 357 member majority of the U.S. Congress can change an entire nation simply through taxation policy. Congress had learned this quite well from taxing the interest on personal savings, thus discouraging savings and encouraging hand-to-mouth consumption which shortened the time horizon of the electorate, not to mention destroying their self-reliance and ability to delay gratification. A proud, independent nation of hardy savers was transformed into a now-oriented,
Gimme!
flock of buzzards feeding on the public's rotting carcass. Since no citizen can be outside of the citizenry, America was, in effect, feeding on herself. Through taxation policy, we had been reduced to an indirect cannibalism.

Preston's idea is to use taxation policy, but in
reverse.

Effective immediately, anybody openly wearing a functional and loaded sidearm in a store is
exempt
from paying the sales tax of that particular transaction. Since the legislature had planned to cut sales taxes anyway, this indirect method seems a good first step. With an expected further reduction in crime it is reasoned that the commensurately shrinking police force neatly matches the loss of sales tax revenue. Besides, it is the
unarmed
who need police protection, so let
them
pay for the cops.

Overnight, the entire state straps on their handguns and revolvers. 21st Century Wyoming is now more widely-armed than it had been even in the 19th Century. In fact, it was the most well-armed region on the planet as far as actual gun-
bearing
went.

Some business owners and managers, however, find the notion of armed customers abhorrent and make a fairly big stink. They put large "No Guns!" signs in their front windows, but immediately lose business. Also, their stores are favored by the dwindling population of criminals. So, by a brutal combination of sales loss and increased crime, these stores quickly reverse their gun-phobic policy or go out of business.

Washington, D.C.

Friday, 10 July 2015

As to the abuses I meet with, I number them among my honors. One cannot behave so as to obtain the esteem of the wise and the good without drawing on oneself at the same time the envy and malice of the foolish and wicked, and the latter is testimony of the former. The best men have always had their share of this treatment, the the more of it in proportion to their different and
greater degree of merit. A man, therefore, has some reason to be ashamed of himself when he meets none of it.

— Benjamin Franklin, 1767

To be a liberal you have to be able to believe two contradictory things at the same time.

— Vin Suprynowicz,
The Ballad of Carl Drega
(2002), p. 669

Already chewing their elbows over Preston's
10 Points
of February, the liberal Democrats went nova.

Legal authorities were heatedly consulted in the hopes of learning of some constitutional recourse through the Department of Justice (DOJ), but the preliminary consensus was that no violation of civil rights had occurred. The 50 states still enjoyed, surprisingly enough, wide latitude in their domestic taxation policies and it was opined that Wyoming's sales tax exemption for gun-bearers was not unconstitutional — especially when this issue was contrasted with some of the more outrageous provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. The Federal Government was the master of pursuing "public policy" through selective taxation and regulation, so to accuse Wyoming of taxation favoritism was like the ocean calling the pond "wet."

Except for the unconstitutional "school-zone" prohibition (which had been overturned by the 1991 Supreme Court case
U.S. v. Lopez
), there was no congressional ban on the
intra
state bearing of arms, nor did such seem constitutionally possible. When it was suggested that the BATF enforce the school-zone ban, Attorney General Vorn exclaimed, "There's no point in shutting an empty barn after the horses ran off!"

President Connor tried to mollify the despair by offering, "Why not just let them all just wipe themselves
out
? Maybe they will come to their senses when blood up to their ankles is running in the streets!"

To D.C.'s stunned amazement, this did not occur.

Cheyenne Frontier Days

September 2015

For ten days Cheyenne is home to the largest rodeo on earth. Over 300,000 visitors from all 50 states enjoy professional displays of bronc riding, calf roping, and steer wrestling, as well as four parades.

Vegetarian and animal rights advocates from Colorado's front range drive up to protest the "cruel and inhuman treatment of animal citizens solely for the purpose of sport." They blanket pickup windshields with their flyers. James Preston, Jr. snags one and exclaims, "Hey, Dad! It's from
Boulder!
"

Life Isn't For Eating (LIFE)

So called "vegetarians" hide behind their proclaimed love for animals yet kill beautiful, helpless plants. This is like Axe Murderers for Gun Controlwhat hypocrites! Our organization LIFE has a slogan:

If meat is murder, then salad is slaughter!

Life is Life, and to consume Life for "food" is nothing less than Cosmic Cannibalism. (We were, until informed of its Nutrient citizenry, eating soil.) We must ban "harvesting" — which is nothing more than the wanton, systematic killing of plants for food. Many of these "vegetarians" even cultivate plots of carnage (which they call "gardens") in their own backyards! Cut down in their prime, plant butchers rip and shred Nature's most delicate and vulnerable of citizens, only to "toss" the dismembered bits in the air for their "salads." End the madness!

Think we're being hysterical? Well, have you ever noticed the violence inherent to the names of many "foods"? For example:

We propose the immediate registration of all:

(Some would say that registration of these "garden" and "kitchen" implements of death is but a stepping stone to their confiscation, but this is just not true. We merely want to know where they are.

There is much you can do, such as the boycotting of "popcorn." Take the moral high ground and refuse to heat our Kernel Brethren to 500° until they explode! For snacks! Orville Redenbacker is the Dr. Mengele of Corn — General Mills the Auschwitz. The caring substitute for "popcorn" are styrofoam packing "peanuts"beautifully inert — if you have the strength to lift them.

Before you prepare your dinner, look for LIFE's Seal of Inertness. Remember, start your day with a LIFE breakfast — a fresh, heaping bowl of steam! Mmmm, good!

Wyoming

October 2015

G.K. Chesterton is much more concerned that children are being deprived from developing riches of nobility. For Chesterton, all boys must play games — cops and robbers, Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and cowboys and indians. Boys must play at being the knight or the soldier in order to develop the noble virtues of courage, justice, discipline and self-sacrifice. If boys are not allowed to develop these virtues when they are young, they will not develop them later. To deprive children of bows and arrows is to form men and women without courage, conviction or commitment. For Chesterton, possessing bows and arrows, in fact, weaponry of all kinds, is not some sort of an eccentric, aberrant or deviant behavior, It is rooted in a most precious human attribute, the inspiration to act nobly. Chesterton admits that bows and arrows can be instruments of destruction, but the good they do is greater by far than their potential harm, because they are instruments by which children are naturally inclined to reach a higher human potential.

— Dr. Andrew Tadie

As to the species of exercise I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind.

— Thomas Jefferson, 19 August 1785

An unforeseen new industry arose. Simply owning and wearing a sidearm did not mean that you knew how to use it, and Wyomingans enrolled themselves by the thousands in the many new defensive shooting schools. Their quality was generally very good, as most of these schools were taught by graduates of Thunder Ranch, Gunsite, and other prestigious firearm academies. Depending on the training, expertise, and teaching skill of the instructors, the schools offered anything from Basic Handgun to Team Tactics to Urban Battle Rifle to Precision Rifle. One school, jokingly called "Half-Inch Harvard," specialized only in training students with their .50BMG target rifles at ranges up to 1500yds. Thousands of gunowners began to learn the extent of what they
assumed
they knew, and it was a rather humbling experience to confront one's own ignorance. As a result, negligent discharges (called "accidents" by the uninformed) became more uncommon, and the safety of gunhandling increased dramatically.

The
"rash of gunfire"
predicted by
TIME
magazine never happened, nor did
Newsweek
's forecasted
"daily Main Street shootouts."
Conservative political pundits reminded the public that such wild and unfounded predictions previously had been made about those 36 States which had enacted
"shall issue"
concealed carry legislation.

Street crime, always low in Wyoming, became virtually nonexistent. Each newly armed Wyomingite created his/her own new "crime-free zone," and criminals, for once in their wretched lives, just didn't feel "safe" anymore. As Wyoming became (to paraphrase Robert Heinlein)
"an armed and polite society"
the demand for local police and sheriffs' deputies fell by about 2% per month. Law enforcement personnel began looking for other work as the armed Citizens became, in a sense,
de facto
peace officers.