- Bracken, Matthew.
Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, [2003] 2008.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-1-7.
-
This is one of those books, like John Ross's
Unintended Consequences
and Vince Flynn's
Term Limits in which a
long
train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute Despotism committed by the Federal Government
of the United States finally pushes liberty-loving citizens
to exercise
“their right, … their duty, to throw off such
Government” even if doing so requires
the tree
of liberty to be refreshed “with the blood of
patriots and tyrants”.
In this novel a massacre at a football stadium which occurs
under highly dubious circumstances serves as the pretext
for a draconian ban on semiautomatic weapons, with immediate
confiscation and harsh penalties for non-compliance. This
is a step too far for a diverse collection of individuals
who believe the Second Amendment to be the ultimate bastion
against tyranny, and a government which abridges it to be
illegitimate by that very act. Individually, they begin
to take action, and what amounts to a low grade civil war
begins to break out in the Tidewater region of Virgina,
with government provocateurs from a rogue federal agency
of jackbooted thugs (as opposed to the jackbooted
thugs of other agencies which are “just following
orders”) perpetrating their own atrocities, which
are then used to justify even more restrictions on the
individual right to bear arms, including a ban on telescopic
sights (dubbed “sniper rifles”), transportation
of weapons in automobiles, and random vehicle stop checkpoints
searching for and confiscating firearms.
As the situation spirals increasingly out of control,
entrepreneurial jackbooted thugs exploit it to gain
power and funding for themselves, and the individuals
resisting them come into contact with one another and
begin to put the pieces together and understand who is
responsible and why a federal law enforcement agency is
committing domestic terrorism. Then it's payback time.
This novel is just superbly written. It contains a wealth of
detail, all of it carefully researched and accurate. I only
noted a couple of typos and factual goofs. The characters are
complex, realistically flawed, and develop as the story unfolds.
This is a thriller, not a political tract, and it will keep you
turning the pages until the very end, while thinking about
what you would do when liberty is on the line.
Excerpts
from the book are available online at the
author's Web site.
December 2009 