>TAKING THE MAG PLEDGE
>
>By L. Neil Smith <[email protected]>
>
>See it soon in _The Libertarian Enterprise_
>http://www.webleyweb.com/tle
>
> I’m sitting here at my kitchen table looking at three semiauto
>pistol magazines manufactured by a company I happen to respect and
>admire.
>
> I can’t say the same thing for the magazines, however. Through no
>fault of the company in question, they’ve been rendered “politically
>correct”, mutilated in a crude and unconstitutional attempt to limit
>their capacity to no more than 10 cartridges apiece. The sides of the
>rectangular steel tubing have been saw-cut laterally about an inch and
>a quarter from the floorplate, leaving only a deeply depressed dimple
>fore and aft that allows a modified follower and its spring to pass
>by, but not the additional cartridges these magazines were supposed to
>hold.
>
> The result of this alteration — make that vandalism — performed
>at the illegal command of a government that has long since overstepped
>its constitutional bounds, is a gun I don’t wholly trust, dependent as
>it is on two tiny quarter-inch spans of sheet steel (already badly
>stressed by the process of making them into dimples) that could fail
>me the very next time I slap a magazine into the weapon, or when I
>shoot it (like most of my favorite guns, this one has substantial
>recoil), spewing unfired cartridges and magazine parts all over the
>neighborhood, leaving me a small, expensive iron club to defend myself
>with.
>
> This, of course, is _exactly_ what the authors of Bill Clinton’s
>illegal ban on “ugly” guns and magazines intended. They aren’t at all
>interested in stopping violent crime; if they were, they’d be passing
>out handguns like this one (with decent magazines, mind you) on every
>city street corner in America. They’re not interested in stopping
>accidents; if they were, they’d quit badgering that tired old whore,
>the NRA, and let her get on with doing the one thing she does right,
>teaching people — especially little children — to handle firearms
>safely.
>
> No, the authors of Bill Clinton’s adequate magazine ban want me,
>and everybody like me, _dead_ — the sooner the better — if not from
>calamitous mechanical failure, then from a 12-goblin street gang when
>all I’ve got is 10 rounds in the magazine and one more in the chamber.
>California’s legislature — not one member of which would have lasted
>five minutes at the Nuremburg tribunals — has even tried to make it a
>crime to carry a spare magazine. They want us dead because we — and
>our guns — are nothing but a noisy, unaesthetic obstacle in the way
>of their establishing the well-planned, _well-disciplined_, planetwide
>socialist Utopia that is the focus of all their wishes, hopes, and
>wetdreams.
>
> And everybody else’s nightmares.
>
> It’s worthwhile in this connection to recall that the current law
>was first advocated by that fine, feathered fascist William Bennett,
>supported by the wimpy blubberings of George Bush, rammed through by
>the parliamentary chicanery of Brady Bill-Bob Dole — and that Sarah
>Brady is a lifelong Republican. That’s just the top of a long list of
>lying, traitorous criminals like Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson,
>Colorado senator Wayne Allard, New Jersey governor Christie Whitman,
>Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, and the spectre haunting Utah,
>Senator Orrin Hatch, the most evil figure in American politics. Now
>tell me again, who is it who’s been wasting their vote all these
>years?
>
> Unlike our former Republican allies, who reef their sails at the
>slightest indication of a change in the wind, no amount of argument,
>no compendium of facts, no detail of history or the law can swerve the
>socialists who call themselvs liberals from the course their moral and
>political ancestors plotted for them more than a century ago. (In the
>60s, they’re the morons who babbled incessantly about the Revolution;
>now they know it’s their last shot before Alzheimer’s sets in and all
>they can babble about is DentuCreme and Depends.) To them, human
>nature is plastic, something that can be squashed, kneaded, rolled
>out, and remolded to their liking — as long as it isn’t fortified by
>inflexible materials like blued steel, and polished walnut, and the
>Constitution.
>
> You can’t change their minds, they haven’t any.
>
> The only way to stop them is to sink their little boat.
>
> All these nautical metaphors remind me of an old song I rewrote
>lightly and had my characters relive in my novel _Henry Martyn_. “_The
>Golden Vanity_” was a merchant ship, all but harmless and pursuing its
>own business when it found itself being overtaken by a pirate. The
>situation looked hopeless until a little cabin boy volunteered — he’d
>been promised a pile of valuta and the captain’s daughter — to swim
>over and drill holes in the enemy ship with his “little brace and
>auger”.
>
> The plan worked perfectly. The pirate vessel sank and the _Golden
>Vanity_, her crew and cargo, were saved. Of course the captain, being
>a major contributor to the Republican National Committee, rewarded the
>heroic cabin boy by refusing to pull him back aboard and letting him
>drown. But the point here is that one hand, one tool, or one idea can
>sometimes reverse the motion of what may seem like vastly greater
>entities.
>
> That’s why I’m calling now on firearms companies that do business
>in the US and Canada to make a solemn public pledge that, once this
>evil, stupid law is repealed, nullified, or otherwise set aside,
>they’ll replace every one of the mangled feed devices they’ve been
>forced to sell, with full capacity magazines, at no charge to their
>customers.
>
> We’re not talking about anything that will cost anybody much. The
>customer sends his mutant magazine in. He gets a new one back — it’s
>probably the same follower, spring, and floorplate outfitted with a
>fresh tube — by return mail. The expense is nothing compared to the
>good will engendered, and can be written off as advertising, in any
>case. The important thing is to make the pledge right now, while it’s
>politically incorrect to do so, not later when it’s safe and therefore
>meaningless.
>
> I know that the gun companies — with a handful of disgustingly
>conspicuous exceptions like Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Mossberg, and Colt
>– aren’t responsible for this evil, stupid law. And yet, in the post-
>Clintonian, post-socialist era to come, there will be a new cast of
>characters on the firearms manufacturing front. In the past, outfits
>like Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Mossberg, and Colt felt they could afford
>to stab their civilian customers in the back because they had police
>and military sales to fall back on. In the future, federal and state
>governments under the control of Bill of Rights enforcment advocates
>won’t do business with such companies. There may be laws forbidding
>transactions with corporations that aren’t completely Bill of Rights
>compliant.
>
> In this and any other part of the market you can point to, there
>have always been good companies, operated by intelligent, principled
>individuals, and bad companies operated by dishonorable idiots. My
>intention is to drive a permanent wedge between the two. From this
>moment forward, gun companies will identify themselves publicly as
>being firmly on the side of their civilian customers and the Bill of
>Rights, or on the side of overreaching, insatiable, voracious, brutal
>statism.
>
> More importantly, this will establish in the minds of friend and
>foe that there _is_ a post-Clinton, post-socialist, post-gun control
>era coming, that it can’t be stopped, that it should be anticipated
>and planned for. The sooner we do that, the sooner that era will
>arrive.
>
> So how about it, gun companies?
>
> How about taking the mag pledge and telling us whose side you’re
>on?
>
>—————————
>Please e-mail or snail-mail this article to your favorite gun company.
>It originally appeared in 1999 in _The Partisan_.