The urgency in Congressman Steve King’s words sent me searching for a 1984 movie I hadn’t seen since, well, 1984 — on VHS.
If what the Kiron Republican insisted in Orange City the other night is not mere campaign clutter but skin-shivering clairvoyance, we need to be locked and loaded, our eyes trained to the horizon for intruders, our suspicions piqued for the confederates among us, in our schools, our Rotary Clubs, and most especially, within Obama for America county headquarters.
The reason we have guns isn’t for mere hobby, the hunting of deer, or even to protect ourselves on the streets of Carroll where the most dangerous thing most people do in a day is leave the popcorn unattended in the microwave. We need guns, goes King’s reasoning, so we can collectively function as an ad hoc militia against potential tyrants.
“We hunt, we target shoot, we do self-defense,” King said in a 4th District congressional debate at Christ Church on the Northwestern College campus. “Those three with guns that are Second Amendment guarantees, those aren’t the reasons why we have the Second Amendment. They’re the benefits we get from the Second Amendment. The reason we have the Second Amendment is to guard against tyranny because our Founding Fathers understood that if you did not have an armed populace, a tyrant could take over America so we have a responsibility not just to defend the Second Amendment in words, but do so in deed by hunting and target practicing and also self-defense.”
So your family hunts Christie Vilsack? Big deal.
You once had to pre-sweep your own house of shotguns, Mrs. Vilsack, so Vice President Al Gore’s protective detail wouldn’t toss your sons or husband, Tom, up against a refrigerator when the Secret Service spied the barrels and bullets in your closets. Hah, what do you know, lady?
No, the King household is armed, with AR-15 semi-automatic weapons, as the congressman told us the other night in Sioux City, for a more revolutionary reason: a tyrant is coming. Hunting pheasant is just spring training for the real shooting.
Which is why any patriotic Iowan will rush to their Netflix account and immediately start streaming the movie “Red Dawn” to absorb potentially life-saving tips from Patrick Swayze’s Jed or Charlie Sheen’s Matt, the fictional Colorado high school students who battled Soviets and Nicaraguans and Cubans as they came from the sky in remote rural reaches in this imaginative Cold War-era film. The movie must still be an inspiration for King.
Where will the attack come in western Iowa? Perhaps that odd Loess Hills formation in Turin? It’s surely a good place to parachute and hide before marching on Onawa or Dow City.
Maybe the tyrant won’t be an outlander but a Manchurian president or some real-life incarnation of Sgt. Brody on Showtime’s “Homeland.”
King spent a couple of years in Maryville, Mo. Does he know something we don’t about the Show-Me-Staters, who were, after all, represented by a star on the Southern flag? Is Missouri looking to resurrect resentments from 1863 and move on Clarinda, occupy Red Oak?
I can’t get over that terrifying insistence in King’s voice that seemed to suggest the imminence of an attack on our freedom, the rise of a tyrant — whom King not so subtly suggested is already in the White House.
So is King serious? Is civil war coming? King’s passion on the subject warns that those of you who don’t own guns should think again. And quick.
“I wouldn’t suggest that at all, and hopefully that isn’t a message taken from here,” King said in an interview after the Northwestern debate.
The cheering in Christ Church from what King termed a “Second Amendment crowd” told us otherwise.
You could sense the fingers itching for triggers.
Reader Comments
Posted: Sunday, October 14, 2012 Article comment by: Bambi Buchowski
During the course of the 20th Century, over 170 MILLION PEOPLE were slaughtered BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS.
In each case, the victims were first disarmed by government edicts - then gassed, gunned down into mass graves, hacked to death with machetes or otherwise killed... not by invaders... but BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS.
King may sound paranoid until one understands that these wholesale slaughters did NOT take place against ARMED populations, but against people who had given up their right to bear arms.
Historically, King is precisely correct. The Founding Fathers had just won a war against the world's reigning superpower. The war was started when British troops marched to confiscate cannon, powder and shot at Concord. In short, the match that touched off the fuse in the Revolutionary War was a British attempt at gun control. Our Second Amendment was a protection of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms that the Founders viewed as absolutely essential to restraint of government.
During the Revolutionary War, only 3% of the population ever took the field against the British. Today, if 3% of American gun owners were to actively oppose a feral Federal government, they would constitute the largest army in the world and would outnumber America's Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard - combined - by 2:1.
An armed citizenry is America's best guarantee against government savagery. Attempts at gun control may as easily trip the wire today as it did in 1776.
Posted: Saturday, October 13, 2012 Article comment by: Barry Hirsh
The author laughs it off at his own expense. I am reminded of the Twilight Zone episode about the prescient dude who built a fallout shelter amid the mocking ridicule of his neighbors, only to have them beating at his bunker door in psychotic panic when the sirens went off. No laughing THEN, nosiree.
The First Principle of the societal right to cast off a tyrannical government is just that - a principle, and principles are timeless. This one happens to be at the core of this nation's soul.
Unfortunately, too many people ignore the obvious.
(typo correction)
Posted: Friday, October 12, 2012 Article comment by: Peggy Staley
Did Obama ignore our Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion with his HHS mandate? Did he violate the Constitution by enacting the DREAM Act? Did he vote four times to withhold medical assistance to babies who survive abortion, snuffing out their right to life? The answer to all of these is a resounding yes.
The US Constitution obviously means nothing to Barack Obama, a mere document to which he chooses to adhere, or not, based on his personal whims.
Steve King has a keen intellect he is neither shortsighted nor naive. Our Libyan ambassador, who begged for increased security and was ignored, is dead at the hands of terrorists. Joe Biden claims that he and Obama knew nothing of the request. Just who is it who's living in the land of make believe?
IF Biden's claim is true, what does it say about their ability to lead?
This shows the power of the new media. The reader comments make the snarkey opinon of the writer appear silly and short sighted. If a source does not allow comments, it discredits itself
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