I have some friends who have guns they keep in the event the government comes to take away their rights.
My friends are misguided because that’s not the way tyranny works. Rights aren’t something you can lock up in a vault in your basement. The government can take away your rights without firing a shot, or you getting a shot at them.
This is how tyranny works, at least with decent tyrants, ones smarter than the wannabe evicted from the White House last November.
Decent tyrants consolidate power, typically by demonizing minorities, creating a single, dominant party within the government and courting the military. Stacking the courts with cronies also helps.
After that, it’s just a matter of disbanding the legislature through the minions the tyrant has established among its ranks and declaring himself Supreme Leader. Most Christian churches will fall in line because they’re all about a white messiah leading them to a promised land.
The Supreme Leader will cancel elections. Or he’ll give you the option of voting for a single party that just happens to be his. He’ll either close down those pesky newspaper and radio and TV stations that keep reporting on his misdeeds, or he’ll replace the editors with his friends who will report that all is well.
Then your most important and effective rights and freedoms will be gone. You’ll be free to keep as many AR-15s as you like and to surround your house with a 10-foot wall of razor wire. It won’t matter. As long as you’re not making trouble for the Supreme Leader, you’ll been neutralized.
What’s more, half of your friends will be too busy shining the buttons on their snazzy new uniforms to notice. Supreme Leaders know better than to appeal to the docile and meek. They rally to their sides the angry and the war-like folks who will say, “The pride of our nation is back!”
Most of your friends will buy the big guy’s argument that eliminating things like elections, free speech and assembly actually streamlines government. No more of those endless public meetings and hearings that accomplished nothing. One-man government is running government like a business: The CEO calls the shots and the trains run on time, and who could complaint about that?
Besides your stash of semi-automatic rifles, you can still have a monster truck and Big Macs and 700 channels to watch on TV. The Supreme Leader will just unburden you of attending school board meetings and trying to figure out who would be best to serve on the town council, and really, how much fun was that, anyway?
A decent tyrant doesn’t need your guns to take away your rights. He just needs your acquiescence. And he can get that without firing a shot.