Here’s a bulletin, one that readers may realize is loaded. Militiamen and gun enthusiasts of Montezuma County have been stocking their arsenals, purchasing every available gun in the Four Corners since Barack Obama won the presidential election.
Actually, it’s not just going on here in Montezuma County. All across the nation, gun-sale records are being set. Dealers say they can’t get their hands on enough guns to meet the demand, and they aren’t discouraging anybody either.
Stores across the nation — even in Obama’s home territory of Illinois — have depleted their supplies of ARs, AKs, Glocks, and they are running low on ammo. Fear, they say, has triggered this frenzy. If Paul Revere were still alive, he’d be encouraged to ride his ATV along our county roads shouting, “To arms, to arms, a Democrat is coming!”
With this hysteria packed in like gunpowder around us, I doubt gun owners have noticed that many writers, too, are quietly wondering what will happen once Presidentelect Barack Obama takes the next logical step and bans the ownership of writing utensils in America.
It’s all too possible. Any schoolchild knows that the pen is allegedly mightier than the sword. As soon as the President-elect realizes that pens have the potential to be more dangerous than conventional weapons, we’re going to see a police state where liberals remove the ink cartridges from perfectly good ballpoints in order to destroy them.
It may be too late for America to wake up and read the calligraphy on the wall.
I don’t know what the rest of literate America is going to do, but I’m planning to visit every stationery store across the Four Corners and purchase all the ordinary ink pens in stock. If I can afford it, I’ll buy the fancy fountain pens, gel-tip gliders, graffiti markers, high-lighters, mechanical pencils, regular wooden pencils (in all varieties of hardness), and laundry pens. Especially laundry pens.
It doesn’t take an educated person to realize a bullet can leave an impression, but I’m encouraged by the notion that a good ink pen can make a point.
David Feela writes from rural Montezuma County, Colo.
