The totalitarian urge is strong. Our Founders knew this. Before Hurricane Helene hit, the Chief of the Okeechobee. FL Police Department, Donald Hagan, issued a declaration which, among other things, banned the sale of guns and ammo, and restricted gun possession to the police and military. Thankfully, Americans were outraged, Hagan went into hiding and police and city officials quickly backpedaled. The ban was apparently never enforced. One suspects gun and ammo sales increased just to figuratively spit in Hagan’s eye. Americans are like that.

Graphic: X Screenshot

Why would anyone think to ban guns during a natural disaster? For public safety? Denying the public the means to protect themselves when every public institution has broken down makes them safer? Who thinks that way? Government officials too full of themselves and too impressed with their own power. Let all-knowing, all-powerful, magnanimous government handle it, even when they can’t and won’t, as in Washington County, Tennessee:

Graphic: Washington County Sheriff's Office Screenshot. Public Domain.

Eight migrant men are accused of looting Americans’ homes in flood-ravaged Washington County, Tennessee, following Hurricane Helene, which has left at least 128 people dead and hundreds more missing across Appalachia. [skip]

Some of the unoccupied homes the migrants allegedly looted were “barely still standing,” Washington County officials said, as a result of deadly flooding from Hurricane Helene.

The article notes they’re in America on temporary work visas and “could be eligible for arrest and deportation by federal immigration agents.” Sure, that’ll happen. Our “federal immigration agents” are busy letting unidentified murderers, rapists and pedophiles into the country. They’re going to deport mere looters?

To be fair, our immigration enforcement agents are despondent about being relegated to mere clerks forced to allow virtually anyone into the country. Sworn to enforce the law, they’re forced by the Harris/Biden Administration to break it. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis understands the purpose of the Second Amendment and its application:

You never know what’s behind that door if you go break into somebody’s house and you’re trying to loot, these are people that are going to be able to defend themselves and their families,” the governor added. “We are going to hold you accountable from a law enforcement perspective at a minimum, and it could even be worse than that depending on what’s behind that door.”

Sadly, we live in a Twilight Zone where, particularly in blue states, citizens are more likely to be prosecuted than the predators that force them to shoot. Even when a hurricane instantly reduces Americans to a state of nature, they can’t be certain government won’t arrest them for legitimately protecting their lives and property from bands of feral looters. As appalled Americans know, this state of nature exists in blue states where gangs, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, loot jewelry and other stores in broad daylight.

Security guards, and the police, simply stand by knowing if they use any force against criminals, and worse, should they shoot one, they’ll be in jail and ruined while looters never see the inside of a cell. With each theft, the foundations of civilization are chipped away. 

What are citizens, whose lives have been overturned, who stand, trying to protect what few possessions they have left, to do? There are no communications, no water, little or no food. The roads and bridges are out, and even if they could call the police, the police aren’t coming. The minutes—under ideal circumstances—it would normally take for a police response, are now days, even weeks. In New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, some police became looters, and others seized citizen’s guns.  

But why? What public safety purpose could that possibly serve? One of the true, but virtually never stated, functions of the criminal justice system is protecting criminals from Normal Americans. Left alone, abandoned by the government elected to serve them, Normal Americans will tend to mete out a rather severe and final form of justice.

Normally, deadly force can’t be used to protect property, but when every element of society has broken down and life is reduced to the survival of the most violent and brutal, when the police aren’t coming and have arguably turned against them, what choice do decent Americans have?

In March of 2024 I wrote Devolving to a 3S society, where I noted decline is always a choice. When the rule of law is abandoned for social justice, when merit is abandoned for diversity, entitlement, resentment and lawlessness rule. Left alone against the mob, the law-abiding have no resort but to 3S: shoot, shovel and shut up. Deprived of the Second Amendment by Twilight Zone government, they’ll inevitably find themselves on the wrong end of the shovel.

It's a reality the citizens of Okeechobee have been forced to confront, as should everyone. All must ensure it never happens to America.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.