My default position about how many guns and how much ammunition you should have is "more." We'll talk about that and other stuff in this very special edition of my exclusive Townhall VIP column.
Buy Guns and Ammunition
So, the country is on the verge of shutting down and I am driving past my local freedom dispensary – as opposed to the kush dispensaries for the local dope smokin' morons – and there, lined up in the rain like a bunch of sodden suckers, are a couple dozen folks waiting to get into the gun store to purchase guns and ammo. What a sad sight.
The time to get the equipment every healthy, law-abiding America citizen needs – nay, is duty-bound to possess – in order to personally secure the safety and liberty of himself, his family, his community and his Constitution is before the crisis begins. How can you do your duty if you are unpacked, unstrapped and generally emasculated like some twee goateed Vox scribbler who finds those AR-14s Joe Biden babbled about scary?
Here's my failure to have a gun story. I was stationed in Germany and had some guns, like a CZ-75 I still miss. Off I go to Desert Storm 1.0; then when I come back to Stuttgart, I'm about to ETS (that means get off active duty, civilians). But shipping guns was a pain, so I go to the Rod and Gun Club (all the old USAREUR hands are going "Oh yeah") and sell them off. I end up in Pasadena, attending law school, and I had just joined the California Army National Guard's 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry.
In Inglewood.
So, I'm getting ready for finals and the TV starts showing the Rodney King riots going off, and the unit tells me we are not getting mobilized. I had been active duty long enough to know I needed to pack my stuff, which I did, and sure enough, I got the call to come in.
To Inglewood.
Inglewood is nice in 2020. In 1991, not so much. Oh, and a lot of it was on fire.
So, I end up driving into the riot zone in my crappy Chevy Beretta without a Beretta, or a .45 1911A1, or anything other than a Swiss Army knife. The LAPD guy with the Remington 870 thought I was insane for proceeding past his roadblock to get to my unit. I wasn't insane. I wasn't brave. I was a lieutenant. It was a miracle I didn't get lost.
And when I got to the unit, every one of my soldiers had his own piece. Good thing. At the time, the field grade geniuses had decided it was better to store our ammo 200 miles north because…well, welcome to the Army. But NCOs overcome adversity and field grade foul-ups. SGT Lujan dumped a bunch of weapons out of a duffle bag and invited me to pick one. Oh, the punchline is that SGT Lujan was a postman.
Anyway, when I finally got off duty three weeks later (we got our ammo within 12 hours, and thereafter I carried an old school M16A1 without a sissy burst setting for the rest of the operation), I headed to Turner's Guns and solved that problem.
The lesson? Don't be wet and useless. Be prepared when duty calls. Have guns. Have ammo. Be trained. You're an American citizen and you can't do your most important job if you aren't prepared.
We Gotta Pull Together
Ignore the dillweeds of the media (actually, I'll probably write a column excoriating them soon, so I won't use up my calumny here) and remember that you and I and the rest of our fellow citizens are going to make or break this bizarre Chinese coronavirus response. The president has things to do, and so do the governors and the doctors, but you and I need to do our parts. One of our parts is helping out fellow citizens.
I'm trying to order out as much as I can. You go by a restaurant and they are hurting – and not just the local ones. A lot of those brand-name McDonald's and Burger King-type places are franchises, and therefore, small businesses. They need us. We should step up where we can. If you can't go eat or get your nails done or whatever, you can get a gift card and get the service later.
We don't need the government to tell us to help out. In fact, when the government does, it is inevitably less effective in delivering help, but it is very effective in taking our liberty. Your church or synagogue knows who needs help, like which old or sick folks could use someone to make a Safeway run. That's where we demonstrate what kind of people we are. And I did enough disaster operations (including the aforementioned LA Riots) to know that normal Americans really do tend to rise to the occasion when adversity strikes. Those idiots in the viral videos doing MMA over Charmin rolls are interesting because they are the exception. No one is going to circulate a clip of you watching your neighbor's kids who are out of school while your neighbor does her shift at the ER. But that's the truth of who Americans are, not the clowns or whiners or dimwit hoarders with a storage unit full of Purell.
We are in this together. We have faced much worse. We will get past this. And we will be stronger than ever.
Okay, enough of being the voice of reason. Now we will return to my regularly scheduled sarcasm and abuse of liberals and Fredocon losers!
There's a potential pandemic in my conservative thriller Wildfire. Of course, the real threat is leftism, as my latest novel Collapse, and the two other entries in the best-selling series, People's Republic and Indian Country, describe. America splits in two, largely because some people took my advice, bought guns and ammo like men, and refused to knuckle under to liberal fascism. So, basically, my books are "how-to" manuals for freedom. Get them all, and also check out my Townhall VIP podcast, "Unredacted" every Monday as well as my new Hugh Hewitt-affiliated Salem podcast, "Fighting Words"!