You can be sure that brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers will use the latest school shooting to try to restrict our right to own guns, despite the fact that the right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. They will say, “AR-15s and AK-47s are military-style weapons. People shouldn’t be allowed to own them.” But we need weapons like this to protect us from a tyrannical government.
As Michael Gaddy pointed out when Obama was president, “’Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.’
While we stumble along economically with bailouts, buyouts, and poor sales in almost all sectors, two products in America are seeing dramatic increases in sales: guns and ammo. People who never owned a gun before are buying; people are buying multiples of military style weapons and ammo is being bought by the case instead of by the box.
Many explain this away as folks simply worried that Obama will move to ban certain firearms, especially those referred to by the ignorant as ‘assault weapons,’ I believe the motivation to buy firearms and ammunition goes much deeper.
More and more Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the storm that is brewing on the horizon, a storm driven by the possibility of a complete economic collapse.
The more astute are reading the handwriting on the wall: military combat units being assigned for stateside duty to quell domestic disturbances, a militarization of law enforcement, and the fear of what will happen when the state is no longer able to provide monthly checks to the millions currently living on government handouts labeled as ‘entitlements.’
Americans are purchasing firearms and ammunition in record numbers, not because they believe 2009 will offer unusually good duck hunting, but because they fear the fallout from the coming economic storm and the state’s reaction to that fallout.
The larger question is: how many of those who have gone out and purchased firearms and ammo will actually use them? I believe a large number would bring those weapons to bear against criminals who would steal and threaten their families and property, but, how many would use them against the criminal state as it moves to seize their weapons, as was done in New Orleans, when the next ‘emergency’ occurs, be it an economic meltdown or terrorist attack?
Rest assured, there will be a great majority who will not stand against tyranny. Those who have ‘gone along to get along’ and those who have continually voted for the ‘lesser of two evils’ will capitulate and surrender their weapons, as cowards normally do. They will rue the day they failed to support those who stood for liberty such as Ron Paul. Remember, they were offered liberty, but chose instead to support the status quo, because, in their eyes, liberty could not be elected.
Those among us who are afraid to be free will surrender their guns, their families, and their freedom to tyranny. Do not place your freedom or trust in their hands or depend on them to cover your six.” See this.
Gaddy also has some words of wisdom on AK-47s: “Then there are those bastions of liberty in the pro-gun crowd who question why anyone would want to own an AK-47 or any other of those dastardly assault weapons. They contend there is no ‘legitimate’ reason to own one. Let me make this as simple as I can: I own a legal AK-47 and several other assault weapons so I can assault the tyrant who seeks to deprive me of my rights granted by my creator, or any other criminal who attempts to take that which is mine, or harm me and those I love. Simple enough?
From past experience I know I am going to catch a lot of flak for my opinion of concealed carry laws, because I believe them to be another form of registration. Gun owners who claim they are totally against ‘registration’ of firearms have no problem in registering themselves as gun owners. Most egregious is their paying the state to bestow on them the rights they already possess as free men.
If the true purpose of the Second Amendment is to provide the means to resist a tyrannical government, where is the logic in begging and paying that same government to allow us to possess the weapons to protect ourselves from their tyrannical pursuits? Groveling at the feet of tyrants is no reflection of courage.
Not only do concealed carry permit holders place themselves in a database available to all bureaucrats whose goal is to disarm everyone, they place themselves in the database of all law enforcement agencies. How convenient it must be for the cop who runs your drivers or vehicle license number to immediately know you are armed, what you drive, where you live, and in some cases, what type firearm you have.” See this.
The great Dr. Ron Paul makes the essential point with his characteristic eloquence: “Can anyone seriously contend that the Founders, who had just expelled their British rulers mostly by use of light arms, did not want the individual farmer, blacksmith, or merchant to be armed? Those individuals would have been killed or imprisoned by the King’s soldiers if they had relied on a federal armed force to protect them. In the 1700s, militias were local groups made up of ordinary citizens. They were not under federal control! As a practical matter, many of them were barely under the control of colonial or state authorities. When the 2nd Amendment speaks of a ‘well-regulated militia,’ it means local groups of individuals operating to protect their own families, homes, and communities. They regulated themselves because it was necessary and in their own interest to do so.
The Founders themselves wrote in the Federalist papers about the need for individuals to be armed. In fact, James Madison argued in Federalist paper 46 that common citizens should be armed to guard against the threat posed by the newly proposed standing federal army. Today, gun control makes people demonstrably less safe — as any honest examination of criminal statistics reveals. In his book ‘More Guns, Less Crime,’ scholar John Lott demolishes the myth that gun control reduces crime. On the contrary, Lott shows that cities with strict gun control — like Washington DC — experience higher rates of murder and violent crime. It is no coincidence that violent crime flourishes in the nation’s capital, where the individual’s right to defend himself has been most severely curtailed. Understand that residents of DC can be convicted of a felony and put in prison simply for having a gun in their home, even if they live in a very dangerous neighborhood.
The DC gun ban is no joke, and the legal challenges to the ban are not simply academic exercises. People’s lives and safety are at stake. Gun control historically serves as a gateway to tyranny. Tyrants from Hitler to Mao to Stalin have sought to disarm their own citizens, for the simple reason that unarmed people are easier to control. Our Founders, having just expelled the British army, knew that the right to bear arms serves as the guardian of every other right. This is the principle so often ignored by both sides in the gun control debate. Only armed citizens can resist tyrannical government.”
An attorney who worked for the government wrote an article published by the Department of Justice that acknowledged guns enable the people to resist tyranny. This is from the Office of Justice programs of the US Department of Justice: “
NCJ Number
160180
Author(s)
A M Gottlieb
Date Published
1992
Length
8 pages
Annotation
The primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure that should a tyrannical power overtake the Nation, Americans will be able to defend themselves; because this danger always exists, gun control should be prohibited.
Abstract
The necessity of an armed populace was so unanimously advocated in the early Republic that it played a central part in the arguments of both sides in the debate over the Constitution. The writings of some of the framers of the Constitution show that they valued the right of individuals to possess arms for their personal and property protection as well as for the common defense. Those who would limit the interpretation of the right to bear arms only to an organized State militia argue that technological changes since 1791 have rendered an armed citizenry irrelevant for either national defense or resistance to domestic tyranny. They also argue that the amendment’s central purpose has no meaning in the modern age of weaponry, since a citizenry having only small arms would have no chance of defeating a modern army. This argument collapses under the lessons of history, which show that a revolutionary people with only small arms have defeated a modern army, such as in Iran and Nicaragua. Further, a people who enter an armed conflict with small arms can secure more sophisticated weaponry from outside sources. It is also important that in a free country the citizenry have arms to deter any renegade military leader who might consider challenging the popular government.” See this.
Let’s do everything we can to protect our right to own guns. Our life and liberty depend on it.
About the Author
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and . Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Article cross-posted from Lew’s blog.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
