Imagine, for a moment, that the unthinkable actually happened.
Not a comet. Not a civil war. Not another "once in a generation" spending bill with a patriotic title. Something rarer. Small-government minarchists won. Real elections. School boards, sheriffs, statehouses, Congress, up the ladder to the White House. The people who still treat the Constitution like an operating manual instead of a mood board took the keys and took the car out of the garage.
The cameras come down first. The Flock poles, the AXONs, the fusion centers, the "community safety" electronic vultures that just happen to sit outside of gun shops and ranges countywide. The administrative state does not get a tasteful remodel. It gets an order of being unsafe for human habitation. Whole agencies discover that "essential" really means that. NGOs collapse. The welfare office becomes a vacant suite with a faded motivational poster, a rather odd smell, and a coffee maker nobody wants. Warrants mean warrants again. If the government wants to look in your sock drawer, a judge has to say so in writing, even if the sock drawer only contains socks. If a cop wants to look in your trunk, he has to get a warrant, and can't even suggest you "just consent" in the interests of time.
This is the part where the usual suspects start hyperventilating. If you shrink the police, the streets will run red. If you kill the surveillance net, the bad guys will pin a medal on you. If you stop paying people not to work, civilization ends!
Maybe the bad guys feel a little emboldened for a week. The professional thief, the smash-and-grab artist, the guy who has spent his adult life treating other people's property as a public resource, looks around and notices fewer cruisers and fewer glowing boxes on poles. He might even tell his friends the country got soft.
Then he notices something else. His friends come up with a bad case of the dead. Some other friends recount tales of breaking into a random home, only to be staring down the barrel of a suppressed automatic weapon. They realize a defending homeowner isn't bound by rules of engagement. Bob who owns that split-level colonial down the street never signed the Geneva Suggestion and thinks Miranda is that lady on Nick at Nite with the fruit hat.
The country did not get soft. It got armed. Not "armed" in the suburban sense of a dusty Taurus in a biometric box that nobody can open when it matters. Armed in the traditional sense. The yeoman sense. Every man (and woman) a Minuteman sense. The sense Tench Coxe meant when he wrote that the terrible implements of the soldier were not a government perk.
Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American… [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
— Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, February 20, 1788
That is the deterrent. Not a camera that emails a deputy three counties over after your prized heirlooms are already in a duffel bag. The deterrent is you, or a neighbor who can end the conversation at the fenceline. A shopkeeper who is not waiting for a 911 operator to finish the script. A culture that treats defense of life, family, and property as the default adult obligation.
The armed citizen does more than stop the violent crime. He keeps the peace in the gray zone the law cannot touch. Things that might be technically legal but in rotten taste stay at home, because the man who might have to look you in the eye tomorrow is also the man who owns a rifle and knows how to use it. Manners make a comeback when rudeness has a price. The implied moral code is not a church pamphlet. It is the knowledge that the people around you are competent, armed, and uninterested in being anyone's victim.
And that immigration crisis? It does not require a new agency, a new wall appropriation, or a new slogan. End the enforced welfare state and the magnet rusts. People move toward opportunity and away from a vacuum. If the only thing on offer is work, voluntary charity, and the expectation that you will carry your own weight, the calculation changes overnight. You do not need a surveillance state to notice that. You need a country that stopped paying strangers to become dependents, a country that will have a reputation as hostile to nonsense and heavily armed. They'll think we're all gun-toting and mean? Good.
Night Watchmen, Not Social Workers
The police do not disappear. They get honest about the job. Don't defund the police, they have their place. The mission just needs to change.
The night-watchman model is the original product. Police exist to keep the peace, to pursue people who have already broken it, and to show up after the citizen has done the hard part. They are not your marriage counselor, your mobile homeless outreach team, your vice principal, or your roaming therapist with a badge.
Less on-the-books law means less excuses for the department to spend Tuesday mediating and escalating a dispute that should have been handled with a private conversation and a closed door. When you stop criminalizing half of adult life, you stop needing an army of officers to process the paperwork. The remaining force can do the things only a state actor should do: serve warrants, investigate assaults/theft/murders, and hold the line when a riot tries to become a civil war.
Every search and every seizure, no matter how small or "trivial," requires a warrant. No "exigent circumstances" invented in the parking lot. No "community caretaking" doctrine that just happens to include looking through your phone. If it is not serious enough for a judge, it is not serious enough to pull you over. That single rule kills more of the surveillance state than any privacy bill ever written, because the whole Flock model depends on the opposite assumption: collect everything now, invent the justification later, i.e. "show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
This is minarchy, not anarchy. Courts still exist. Contracts still bind. Force is still on the table for government employees, but in the narrowest sense of defense of life. Police no longer get to lawfully draw their weapons just because it's a Tuesday and it's raining. What dies is the idea that the government is a parent, a priest, and a product-recall department. What lives is the idea that adults are adults.
A lot of people who call themselves conservative will hate thinking this way. They want a small state for the agencies they dislike and a muscular state for the agencies they enjoy. That is not conservatism. That is progressivism with a different set of bullet points and stronger opinions about the Second Amendment. Real conservative thought starts from the same ugly fact the Founders started from: government is a necessary evil that grows like kudzu the moment you stop cutting it. If your politics require a permanent bureaucracy to make your neighbors adhere to your ways, you are not a conservative. You are an HOA harridan who found some slightly different nagging points. The world is not yours to convert into a Toll Brothers abomination.
The Law Has to Mean What It Says
Deterrence does not work if the law treats the defender like a suspect and the attacker like a client.
Defense statutes in this country have been sanded down for decades by people who have never been punched in the face and never will be. "Proportionality" sounds civilized until you are the one on the ground bleeding from a head wound. A punch can kill, even directly. The idea that a man who initiates violence against you is entitled to a matching level of force is a law school fantasy. It is also an invitation. Predators shop for victims who have been trained to hesitate. If someone attacks you, even empty handed, it means they have no regard for your well-being. Extend them the same courtesy, but with the confidence that you can permanently stop them and be legally "safe".
In the arrangement we are talking about, the law tolerates potentially lethal force in defense of life and property. A man kicking in your door at 2 a.m. is not entitled to a debate about whether being shot over stealing a TV is moral. A man who puts his hands on you in the parking lot is not entitled to a second swing while you perform a legal analysis. A city punk playing the knock-out game shouldn't be given the courtesy to continue on while you wonder if his family is going to sue you if you choose to fight back.
If someone punches you, it should be unquestionably lawful to stop him with a gun. That is not a dare. It is a bright line. Bright lines are how you keep the peace. Fuzzy lines are how you keep lawyers employed. Fuzzy lines are where shysters like Gloria Allred, Al Sharpton, and that Better Call Saul-looking dude on the billboard live.
The message this sends is not "shoot first and let God sort it out." Offensive violence and theft are not to be a cost of doing business in a free country. They are a career-ending, and possibly life-ending, mistake on the part of a criminal. Wide-ranging tolerance of armed self-defense is the cheapest crime-prevention program ever invented. It does not require a new camera, a new grant, or a task force with a clever acronym. All it requires is you, your tools, and your knowledge.
The burden of deterrence falls on the citizens. That should not scare you. There is no more noble task than defending your own life, the lives of the people you love, and the property you earned. Access to every terrible implement of the soldier does not complicate that task. It simplifies it. The alternative is the current arrangement, where you are expected to be a good witness and a patient victim while a camera logs the license plate of the car that just left with your priceless family memories, and that gun you just paid for is cooling it's heels at the FFL because of an arcane waiting period.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (1948)
Heinlein was writing fiction, but his message is grounded in reality. The sentence resonates because people actually do behave differently when others around them are free to use violence to enforce peace. That is not bloodlust. That is manners with backup. Predators avoid areas where they risk becoming the prey.
Being An Armed Citizen Has A Cost
If the state steps back, even if their services were lacking to begin with, you have to step up. That is the deal. You do not get to demand a minimalist night-watchman government and then crash out on the couch and watch football, hoping that some form of herd immunity will kick in. Bob next door with his AR has zero obligation to defend you. Bob doesn't become the police when the police step back.
At minimum, the armed citizen should be equipped like an adult who lives in the real world. A modern sidearm — a GLOCK 19 or your S&W/H&K/SIG/etc equivalent — on the body, not in a safe, not "in the car," not "around here somewhere." A modern select-fire rifle such as a suppressed FN M4A1, because the soldier's tools are a birthright, not a museum piece, and because a free people do not restrict effective firearms to the same institutions they just spent a decade shrinking. If the government gets one, so do you. Sufficient ammunition on hand to feed both for a sustained period at a moment's notice. Not a viral photo of a pallet. A working stock you can actually reach for when the power is out and the roads are ugly.
Equipment without education is a liability. The armed citizen knows his weapons the way a carpenter knows his saw. That means live fire, dry fire, malfunction drills, low-light work, and the unglamorous business of hitting what you are aiming at when your heart rate is not a restful 60. It also means knowing when specifically it is morally justifiable to shoot someone in self-defense, even under a minarchist framework.
Here is the part the action-movie producers skip. You know the scene. Charles Bronson blasts a thug who tried to steal his camera, and the whole neighborhood cheers, and Charles just acts like it's a trip to the county fair.
Just because you can shoot someone in self-defense and legally walk away does not mean you should default to that response. Using force on a human being, even when the law is on your side and the facts are clean, is a weight you carry for the rest of your life. It is supposed to be. If you shoot at someone, a little bit of you leaves the barrel of the gun that day along with the bullet. A culture that treats a defensive shooting like a high-score screen is a culture that will eventually produce people who should not be armed.
Maj Toure has been teaching this to people since the get-go of his organization. His de-escalation and conflict-resolution work is not an add-on to a motivational seminar. It is the adult half of the armed-citizen job. You win 100 percent of the fights you are not in. You walk away from the insult. You leave the parking lot. You do not turn a drunk's bad night into a homicide scene because your pride got involved. The gun is for the moment when leaving is no longer available and the threat is real. Everything before that moment is a judgement call. If that punch connects, that knife stabs, or that gun comes out, be prepared to end it decisively. After the dust settles, get yourself right with God, see a therapist, or whatever methods of peaceable solace you choose.
The tool does not make you righteous, your actions and decisions do.
The Rest of the JD
A rifle and an on-call Grok Bot with extensive legal knowledge aren't a survival tactic in and of themselves.
The armed citizen knows first aid that goes past rushed Youtube videos. Tourniquet, pressure, block the box, stop the bleed chest seal, the ugly basics that keep a person from bleeding out in a driveway while everybody films and plays armchair medic. He grows some of what he eats, or he is skilled in the ways of agriculture. A tomato plant on a patio is a good start, but won't feed the family. More importantly it blows open the urbanite notion that food comes from the supermarket.
He stays fit enough to move his own body under stress. You cannot outsource your cardiovascular system to a night-watchman state. The beer and the couch are pleasant. They are also how you become the man who calls for an ambulance after trimming the hedges.
He reads. History, law, the arguments of people he disagrees with, the manuals of the machines he owns. Armed and ignorant is a dangerous state of mind. A free country that cannot produce literate citizens will not stay free.
And he participates. The reason government got this big is that we let it. We handed school boards to people who treat children like a profit center. We handed county commissions to people who haven't been punched in the face. We handed Congress to people who cannot define a woman or a deficit. Minarchy is not a nap. It is a chore. Show up. Vote like it matters, because in a small government it actually does. Speak at the meeting. Read the agenda. The administrative state loves a busy population that outsources life to sociopaths.
If this gives you pause? Good. This quest will be no easy task. You may not live to see the results of it. But your kids will.
For the record, no one is asking for everyone to be a Bear Grylls. Even Bear Grylls will admit he's not that. However, just getting off the ground with the basics, and working on improving oneself, puts you way ahead of the curve. Right now the bar is low. Just knowing how to change your own oil puts you above 80 percent of the population of the First World. Buying a stick-shift car is an anti-theft device to all thieves under the age of 30, ha ha.
The Exit Ramp
Some people will read the last few sections and get the cold sweats. They'll panic because they can't watch the latest Hollywood slop on Netflix. They'll panic because they could be out in the garden, but the game's on. These reactions force someone to take stock in their lives.
If you are not cut out for self-reliance — if the idea of owning the tools, learning them, staying fit, feeding yourself, and standing up in a room full of neighbors sounds like a punishment instead of a life — you are not trapped. Canada is north. Europe is east. Both places will be happy to offer you a thicker administrative state, no Second Amendment, and a cultural script in which the first instinct in an emergency is to wait for a man with a pension and a radio and likely an arrest warrant with your name on it, because your assailant is from the "Global South" and you called him a name. Pack accordingly. No hard feelings. A free country is not a hostage situation. You are free to leave.
What a free country will not do is rearrange itself around your handicaps. The deal is not "we keep the cameras and the welfare office so you can watch Full House." The deal is "competence is the price of admission, and the door is unlocked in both directions." Again, you don't have to be the badass suburban commando, but just knowing a few things and having the desire to learn more about them is a huge leg up.
That sentence will be called cruel by people whose entire politics is a demand that someone else remain on duty so they can remain on the couch. Let them call it cruel. Then point at the last fifty years of "just let the government handle it" and ask them how they think the experiment is going.
This Is Not a Thought Experiment With No Past
Minarchy has a record. It is not a pristine record, because nothing human is, but it is a record, and it beats the record of the administrative state.
The Icelandic Commonwealth, from roughly 930 to 1262, ran a functioning legal order with an assembly, courts, and private enforcement. No king. No standing army. No police department with a public-information officer. Chieftains competed for followers. Disputes were cases, not crusades. David Friedman has spent decades pointing out that the system lasted longer than the United States has so far managed without a civil war, and that it did so without an executive branch as we understand one. Read the Mises Institute overview and Friedman's own case study on private creation and enforcement of law before you tell yourself that order requires a camera on every pole.
Switzerland is a close modern analog in some regards. Not a pure minarchy — no serious person should pretend otherwise — but a country that built independence on the citizen in uniform, the rifle at home, and power pushed down into cantons and communes. Stephen Halbrook's account of the Swiss armed citizenry is the short version: military rifles in the pantry, a homicide rate that made American gun-controllers change the subject, and a culture that treated the militiaman as the default adult male. Machiavelli noticed it five centuries ago. The Swiss were well armed and enjoyed great freedom. Not a coincidence then. Not a coincidence now. Grant it, there's aspects of the Swiss state that could be revised (they don't have a robust concealed carry culture, for example), but the mindset is still there.
The early American republic was the closest thing this continent has produced to the same arrangement. The militia was the people. Standing armies were regarded with suspicion. The right to keep and bear arms was the hardware layer under every other right. They spoke freely because they could use force against those who would deny them that right. We spent two centuries building the administrative state on top of that foundation and then acted shocked when the results would have made the monarchs of old jealous.
None of these examples is a plug-and-play template for 2026 America. Iceland had sagas and sheep. Switzerland is largely homogenous for the sake of brevity. Early America still remembered what a king felt like. The useful point is narrower. Societies have kept the peace without a panopticon by making the citizen the first responder and the government the last resort. The people who insist that is impossible are usually benefitting from the current arrangement. Bureaucrats, welfare cases, urbanite dilettantes.
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
— Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc in Silveira v. Lockyer, 2003
Kozinski wrote that in 2003, in a country that already had the modern police department, the modern welfare state, and the habit of treating the Second Amendment like an embarrassing relative. He was a federal judge telling his colleagues that unpreparedness is a one-time error. The warning was not about a paperback coup. It was about the slow version: cameras, databases, and a population that forgot it was the militia.
How to Say This Without Sending the Normies Into Orbit
You cannot walk into a backyard cookout and open the dialog with machine-guns-for-all and the abolition of proportionality doctrine. You will get "the look". The look is how normal people tell you they have decided you are a problem to be managed rather than a neighbor to be heard.
So you do not open there.
You open with the thing they already know and do not want to say out loud. The camera did not stop the catalytic converter theft. The police just asked for you to come by with pictures if you had them. The 911 call was performative at best. The person who actually changed the outcome, when an outcome changed, was a human being on the scene who was willing and able to defend themselves. That human being is supposed to be you.
Then you make it ordinary. Not "Second Amendment Radical with a go-bag, plates in the trunk, and BLVCKHELICOPTERS on the stereo." Promote "ordinary". The way owning a fire extinguisher is ordinary. The way knowing CPR is ordinary. The way locking your door is ordinary. An armed citizen is a prepared neighbor. Prepared neighbors are how streets stay quiet. Again, predators don't go where they know they will become prey. Predatory nations avoid nations that can grind their armies into dust. People defending their homes and property have no ROE.
Be a little funny about the rest, because the alternative is a sermon, and sermons make people wander off and flip through TikTok. They might have to put the beer down. They might have to turn off football — the NFL has spent twenty years lecturing them like substitute teachers with better lighting, so the loyalty was always one-way When 20+ teams put out press releases condemning so-called "ghost guns", you know how they stand. Football has zero to do with 3D printers.
They might have to go to a range on a Saturday and discover that hitting a target is a skill, not a vibe. The first instinct in an emergency should not be to call 911 and narrate. The first instinct should be to deal with the threat in front of you and summon law enforcement after the dust has settled, so the report has an ending instead of a question mark.
That last sentence is the whole argument in civilian clothes. You are not asking anyone to become a commando. You are asking them to stop being a spectator in their own life.
Do not sell it like a civil-war poster. Sell it like adulthood. Train. Carry. Keep your mouth shut when talking would make it worse. Keep the gun holstered when walking away is still on the menu. Be the neighbor people are glad lives on the street, not the one generating anonymous notes to the HOA.
You Are Not a Lone Wolf, and You Should Not Try to Be
Self-sufficiency is not a cabin, a generator, bad hygiene and a typewriter.
The armed citizen coordinates with his community. He barters. He uses the old machinery that predates the Department of Whatever: churches, synagogues, families, the neighbor who will watch the house because you watched his. Armed neighborhood watches that are actually watches, not Facebook groups with a logo. Community gardens that produce food instead of worms. A culture of keeping an eye out that does not require a glorified game camera bolted to a pole.
This is the part the movie version always gets wrong. The lone wolf dies of something boring. Infection. Isolation. A wall collapsing because one man doesn't have the strength to correctly build it alone. The functioning version looks like a congregation that already knows who owns a truck, who can set a bone, who can shoot, and who can cook for forty people if the power is out until Thursday. That is not a militia fantasy. That is how humans lived for most of the time humans have been living.
The watchman state can afford to be small because this layer exists. Remove the voluntary layer in favor of State services, and you do not get compassion. You get a waiting room and a case number. Rebuild the layer and a lot of the "need" for government turns out to have been a make-work project to make number on TV go up.
The Tough Sell
This will be a tough sell. Say that out loud so you do not waste energy being shocked.
Decades of conditioning produced a particular American: busy, tired, slightly ashamed of his own competence, convinced that defense is what your extorted taxes are for. Just let the government handle it. The game is on. I am too busy earning dollars that are worth less and less every day. That last one is a real complaint, and it is also a trap. A debased currency is one of the ways a large government keeps you on the treadmill long enough that you never have time to notice the size of the government. Bitcoin fixes that, ha ha. More precisely: sound money gives you back the hours that inflation stole, and those hours are the raw material of citizenship.
The deeper problem is theological. A lot of people who vote like conservatives do not want the responsibility that comes with the rhetoric. They want the flag, the anthem, the gun as a totem, and a state large enough to brutalize their opponents, but somehow never brutalizes them. That is a consumer product with patriotic packaging. The real article is smaller, harder, and more adult. It assumes you will be armed, literate, neighborly, and difficult to govern in the ways that need to be difficult.
Push the people who already use the word. If they flinch at night-watchman policing, at warrants that mean warrants, at lethal force in defense of property, at the expectation that a free man owns a rifle and knows when not to use it and when to do so, they were never conservative in the old sense. They were progressives who slapped Gadsden stickers on their truck and maybe purchased 1 AR. Say it with a smile and a range invitation.
The surveillance state sells itself as safety. It is not safety. It is a receipt printer for a crime that already happened, plus a database of everyone who drove past the hardware store. An armed citizenry takes up the real burden of safety. It is a burden, one that the State pretends to shoulder but really does not. It is also the only arrangement that has ever produced a country worth inheriting.
The cameras can come down. The welfare office can go dark. The police can go back to being watchmen. The rest is on us, which is exactly where it was supposed to be.
Trust GLOCK. Not Flock.
note: I wrote this with the aid of Grok. Let me know what you think. With Grok I can output faster, but it may not seem like "me" as much. Without Grok, you get "me" but slower.
Get Yourself A Gun And Learn It
This is a firearms blog, so we're going to recommend guns. Of course don't forget other things like medical, comms, doing your Area Study, and so on. There's better sources than RGG on those topics, but for firepower, we have you covered.
Ideally you'll at least want either a basic rifle, i.e. an AR-15, or a pistol, i.e. a GLOCK 19, to start. Both are exceedingly common firearms with plenty of accessories, spare parts, training, and support. However, in some restricted areas, both an AR and a GLOCK are hard to get easily, and you may have to settle for a shotgun for quickly arming yourself. It beats a sharp stick. Note, the in-house counsel wants to remind you that we're talking the legal acquisition of guns here. We're still working on abolishing gun control, and we don't want you in jail. Unfortunately you'll have to play ball in this regard. But anyways, here are some basic suggestions for getting armed.
| Firearm | Cost | Buy Now |
|---|---|---|
| Radical Firearms RF00028 AR-15 | $469 | Buy Now! |
| GLOCK 19 Gen6 9mm Pistol | $620 | Buy Now! |
| Mossberg 590 Shotgun | $621 | Buy Now! |
Learn how to make guns, as well.
| 3D Printer | Cost | Buy Now |
|---|---|---|
| Ender Creality 3 V3 SE | $186 | Buy Now! |
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