Part 2
They all had laughed, and the conversation moved on, but Bill Dodd's words now came back to Bob loud and clear. He looked at the windows, he looked at the sign, and he looked up and down the street. Nobody. Nothing but the street lights going through their paces for traffic that wasn't there. But what to use for a rock?
The streets of Hobbs, New Mexico, are pretty well kept. On any other night, the plan that was forming in Bob Stone's angry mind would have failed for lack of ammunition. But as it so happened (and later Bob ascribed it to none other than divine intervention) there at the curbside was a piece of broken concrete which had dropped off the back of a demolition company's truck about ten o'clock the previous morning. Somebody, Bob decided, wants me to do this.
Bob Stone picked up the chunk of concrete. Smooth on one side, it had been part of the parking lot of an old greasy spoon south of town that had been demolished to make way for a new BP super-station. He hefted the chunk. Yep, he decided, just about right.
Even so, Bob hesitated. He wasn't a vandal by training or inclination, and if a car had come by just then, even as angry as he was, he'd have given the whole thing up. But in hesitating, another thought came to him: How would anyone know WHY he had thrown the stone through the Republicans' window? If he intended to make a political statement, the rock would have to be accompanied by a message lest the act be dismissed as ordinary juvenile hi-jinks. His hands went to his jacket pockets, finding (and instantly rejecting) his note pad. First of all, it had his company logo on each sheet (now wouldn't that be bright?), and secondly, he had no way of attaching it to the chunk of concrete. Tape and rubber bands were not items he routinely carried. But when his right hand found the felt-tip marker he always carried in his left breast pocket, he knew that the missile would be the message.
Moving a few steps to take advantage of the street light, Bob rotated the chunk so its flat side was up, and wrote across the top of the flat, "Second Amend." (he ran out of room). So he wrote underneath the first line in smaller letters: "Shall Not Be Infringed." He re-capped the marker, and placed the pen back in his jacket pocket.
His resolve had returned. He was going to do it now, even if a car came by. Even if a cop came by. He was going to send the Republicans an old-fashioned Sons-of-Liberty message. He didn't even check again to see if the street was clear, though it was. He positioned himself at what he judged was the proper distance and heaved the concrete telegram as hard as he could. With what seemed to him to be an atomic crash, the chunk sailed through the window easily. No alarm went off. Hobbs wasn't that kind of town. But Bob Stone began to run away.
He ran west down East Broadway, passing the Martin Boot Company, then crossing over to the other side of the street. He kept on running-- laughing, scared, and immensely proud of himself. He ran until he was winded, past where East Broadway turns into West Broadway. A thought occurred to him then that it was probably a stupid thing to be running down the streets of Hobbs at just past two in the morning. If anybody did drive by they'd rightfully conclude he'd been up to no good. And he didn't have the right shoes on to be able to convince a curious cop he'd been out jogging.
So when he caught his breath, he began to walk west on West Broadway at a normal pace. He passed Desert Guns, his favorite local gunstore, owned by one Mark Stone (no relation, unfortunately, for Bob wouldn't have minded a family discount). He wanted to put as much distance between 509 East Broadway and himself before he made the wide turn that would take him back east to home. So he continued a block or so past the Western Motor Company, when he realized with a start that his night's work was not yet done. For there in front of him was 604 West Broadway: The Democratic Party Headquarters of Lea County, New Mexico.
It was true that the Republicans had taken his money, his time, and his support only to sell him out. Bob supposed that that was why he was so angered at the Republican betrayal-- he expected more of them. You didn't expect your so-called friends to stab you in the back. But the Republicans in truth were only half the problem. It was the Clintonista Democrats who had brought the country to this state. And while it was true that Democrats could no more be blamed for stealing the rights, liberties and tax money of their fellow citizens than rattlesnakes could be blamed for biting (it was, after all, their declared mission in life), their windows deserved breaking nonetheless. Indeed, Bob reflected with a silent laugh that although he had killed many a rattlesnake in the desert around Hobbs he had not as yet killed a Democrat, although Democrats were an infinitely a greater threat to peace and the Republic. Well, there's a time and place for everything, Bob decided. Tonight, he would merely break their windows.
And as he stood contemplating the windows at 604 West Broadway, he noted to his satisfaction that they were nice big, expensive plate glass windows. It would cost the Democrats much more to replace these than it would the Republicans to fix their modest, old-fashioned window panes. This, Bob Stone thought, was more than fitting. But the breaking need a bit more preparation. Bigger rocks, perhaps. No, not bigger rocks, just more preparation. Bob fingered the automatic center punch in his work jacket pocket. Yeah, he decided, just the right instrument of destruction for these tempered-glass targets.
He went to the alley behind the building foraging for ammunition and found two new bricks pre-positioned there by what Bob Stone was now convinced was the hand of the Almighty. It could not have been by accident, of that he was certain. Bob pulled out his marker and wrote, lazy-dazy, winding the letters around the holes in the brick: "Second Amendment-- Shall Not Be Infringed."
Somewhat stealthier now, he checked the street before sidling up to the windows. To each he gave several preparatory hits with the automatic center punch. Spiderwebs of fractured glass appeared on each window. Then, checking the empty street one last time, he backed away from the windows and heaved the bricks one after the other with all the speed his overage pitching arm could muster. If the Republican window had sounded like an atomic bomb, these sounded like two hydrogen bombs, and Bob gave into his fear just long enough to run across the street. As the last shards of the windows were still falling, giving way to gravity and dropping with lesser explosions, Bob began to control his fear and slowed to a walk.
And so it was that he walked casually all the way home. As he passed one of the cross streets he noticed blue lights down toward East Broadway. He smiled, and walked just a bit faster. His wife stirred slightly when he eased himself back into bed, but Bob Stone had cured his angry insomnia and, happy now to be a criminal, he fell instantly asleep. Sleeping, he would later say to himself, the sleep of the just.
It all might have ended there had it not been for an editor at the local paper, the Hobbs News-Sun, who along with his college education had acquired a virulent liberal bias about things such as gun-control. Determined to show-case the "lawlessness" of gunowners, he assigned himself as the reporter on the story and also wrote the first of several (he thought stinging) editorials. The story was picked up by the state Associated Press, and eventually made its way to USA Today and the New York Times.
As if to prove that the Law of Unintended Consequences was alive and well, it was when the story went national that strange things began to happen. In Marion County, Ohio, somebody who read the USA Today story decided that breaking the windows of Democrats and Republicans was a pretty good idea. So did all his buddies at the Whirlpool plant.
As a matter of fact, it was about a baker's-dozen Buckeyes who first decoyed the cops, then smashed every window in both party headquarters the next night. Some were broken with nicely inscribed smooth stones that, like little David, they had fished out of a stream. On each was written the entire text of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Windows too high, small or inconvenient to reach with stones were finished off with ball bearings fired from slingshots or baseball bats.
In lightning raids two nights later, the same crew smashed the windows of both party's' headquarters in three neighboring counties. It was bipartisan vandalism, and more news stories were generated. Fearing that the rock-throwers would come to his house, the chairman of the Marion County Republican Party resigned. When his Democrat counterpart did not, someone broke the windows in his house, too. One of the more thoughtful vandals taped the business card of a local glass company to his front door.
With "The Marion Incident", window-breaking on behalf of the Constitution began to spread. In about four weeks, 194 local headquarters of both parties were "ventilated" with rocks, bricks, concrete blocks, shotputs, lead weights, tire irons, antique civil war cannon balls and in the case of one Democratic party headquarters in Michigan, a twenty-pound brass jackass of unknown origin. Attached to, or written upon, each was the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Similar missiles found glass targets at the homes of no fewer than 56 politicians of both parties who had been prominent supporters of gun-control.
Rewards were offered-- none was collected. Only in a few cases were the perpetrators caught, and most of those were teenage sons of well-known gun owners. In one case in Texas, the windows were broken publicly by a citizen who sought arrest for his civil disobedience. In a jury trial, he was quickly acquitted.
"The Window War" became nightly fodder for the television talking heads. And with more publicity came more broken windows. Commentators on the left condemned "vigilante justice" and "lawlessness" and called for political window-breaking to be classified as a "hate crime." Commentators on the right spoke against lawlessness more softly, pointing out that it was the Clintonistas who had made a business of flouting the rule of law (most recently in the case of Elian Gonzalez), and that destroying windows was probably a lesser crime than destroying the Constitution. And everyone agreed with MSNBC's "Hardball" Chris Matthews, a life-long Democrat, when he observed: "These are all gun-owners breaking the law. I suppose we should be grateful they're using rocks."
The polls sent the politicians mixed signals about how the public felt about The Window War. Initially overwhelmingly disapproving of such vandalism, the numbers began to shift as the "War" went on, the issues that had prompted the window-breaking became better known and nothing but windows were being harmed. There was a natural sympathy streak in many Americans for those who fought city hall.
Exactly one month after Bob Stone broke his first window at 509 East Broadway, copy-cat incidents were happening ten or twenty times a night with no end in sight. After two buckets, one containing rocks and the other containing a mixture of tar and feathers, were delivered to the Mississippi home of Senator Trent Lott, the Majority Leader decided, (with the concurrence of "Dubya"), that the political price of Republican gun-control had grown too high. It wasn't the implied threat that got to Lott so much as the fact that the card which accompanied the buckets was signed by some of his campaign contributors, one of whom was a distant relative. With the help of several relieved Democrats, Lott killed the bill.
With the Window War threatening to muddy up his campaign for President, Candidate "Dubya" called Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America (it was widely recognized that the "rockers" were not listening to the National Rifle Association, which they regarded as a sell-out organization) and quietly promised that if he was elected he would sign a bill that rolled back all of the Clinton-era gun control laws if Pratt could just guarantee that no more windows would be broken. Since the window-breakers weren't under his control either, Pratt said he couldn't promise anything, but he would try.
Three days after Senator Lott killed the bill, the last "shot" was fired in the Window War by twenty members of a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in New York who snuck up on the home of the Empire State's virulently anti-gun Attorney General while he was away and peppered it with Revolutionary War musket balls fired from Gamo "Wrist-Rocket" slingshots. Police responding to the alarm found a big folding sign-board blocking the driveway. It read: "Sue this!"
Across the country, the volunteer soldiers of The Window War read the papers, talked among themselves, and decided to await further developments with a truce. The only Americans who were sad to see the rocks stop flying were the owners of the nation's glass companies.
The howling of Clinton, Gore, Schumer, Feinstein and Company sounded like a banshee chorus but it could not resurrect the bill. Nor could they make it an effective campaign issue against Bush--he had condemned the vandalism in the strongest terms. After George "Dubya" Bush was elected President, and the Republicans retained control of the Congress, the tide of gun control receded. It wasn't that Dubya and his GOP colleagues had "discovered" any principles, they were simply smart enough to recognize that that particular political skunk was best left in the bucket. The reminder that political decisions sometimes have personal consequences acted like a tonic on Republicans and Democrats alike.
The Window War was won, and to the astonishment of many gun owners, no one had been killed. It had long been thought that bloodshed would be required to make the liberals understand that God-given rights are not compromisable. All it had taken was a few hundred rocks and other missiles and one brass jackass.
Many men and women would later claim to have been window-breakers, ten times as many as there probably were. But back in Hobbs, no one ever knew who broke the first window in the gun-control war, and that was just fine with Bob Stone. The only person he ever told was his wife, Amy. Together, they decided to keep Bob's foray into petty crime just between themselves. Neither of them was sure just how they could explain their Daddy's night of window-breaking to the kids.
Author's Postscript: The story above is one possible future for this country. There are others far worse. As J.R. Nyquist recently wrote of the Elian Gonzalez federal kidnapping:
"Specific events, regardless of their actual importance to history, sometimes capture the human imagination. In doing this, they become rallying points for masses of people. They become pivotal to political careers. Such events can bring about the collapse of governments or determine the outcome of elections....Except for clueless and apathetic persons, America has been split into two hostile ideological camps. One is the anti-communist or anti-statist camp, which looks to traditional moral values, the Constitution, a strong family unit and the free market. The other camp is socialist or "progressive" in its outlook, globalist and environmentalist in its policies."
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There is no reconciling the two futures these camps represent. One or the other will win in the end. The war up to now has been waged in the political and social arena. The time is fast approaching when this political and social "war" will spill over into armed conflict-- real civil war. If it does, it will happen mostly because everyone thinks it impossible. For sixty years, the liberals have used our respect for the law against us. Each time they moved the line of law to further their agenda, breaking off a bit of the Constitution, we, as law-abiding citizens have backed up grumbling but complying. And why should they stop pushing us back from our God-given liberties? We've never pushed back to stop them. We have been TOO law-abiding.
Remember one thing: Adolf Hitler was elected, and the Nazis passed laws justifying every horrible act they later committed. In such a country, law-breaking is not a crime but a virtue. Before we get too far down that road, perhaps a little window-breaking is in order. Waiting too late to oppose tyranny has always led to bloodshed. Let us avoid that if we can. But history holds such windows of opportunity open only so long, and ours is rapidly closing. Perhaps by breaking the window now, we can escape the horrible alternative. And if in the unlikely event my modest story should become fact, somewhere The Sons of Liberty will be smiling.
KABA NOTE: The above is obviously fiction and is in no way intended to tell people to go break windows. Any socialist ding dong who just read this whole thing and thinks otherwise should really study the history of this nation to understand that -- if the anti-rights people keep pushing -- windows will be the least of their concerns.