The Weekly Screed (#614)

A few good children
By David Benjamin

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning.”

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MADISON, Wis. — When I read in the Times that there’s a gun industry magazine aimed at children called Junior Shooters, I mentally segued to a classic episode of The Twilight Zone, “To Serve Man,” about the benevolent and charming crew of an alien spaceship that lands on Earth. The big-brained martians convince mankind that they’re friendly, they present Earth’s leaders with a copy of their intergalactic diplomacy manual, To Serve Man, and they invite a goodwill delegation of earthlings to their planet. But as the flying saucer is about to leave, the book’s Earth translator runs toward the launchpad, desperate to prevent its departure. “Don’t get on that ship,” she cries. “It’s a cookbook!”

Similarly, the paired nouns in the title, Junior Shooters might mean it’s a magazine for children who shoot, or a “cookbook” for shooting juniors.

As I chuckled at this double(-barreled) entendre, my close friend Wilhelm “Wild Bill” Bienfang — America’s foremost idea man, and a staunch defender of Second Amendment prerogatives for minor children, frowned at my levity.

“You have no idea,” he scolded me, “of the desperate global need for seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds capable of emptying a 30-round clip of .223-caliber hollow-point ammo accurately into a live, moving target at a range of 80 meters and re-loading in less than 1.5 seconds — do you?”

I admitted my ignorance of an actual “market” for “junior shooters” possessed of such highly developed marksmanship and ruthlessness.

“Look around, kid,” said Bienfang, whose virtually untaxable ten-figure fortune was built on innovations to which no moral strings were ever attached. “Do you think outfits like the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, or the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, or even the good old IRA could even exist without whole platoons of compliant, well-drilled junior shooters?”

It dawned on me. “Oh,” I said, “you’re talking about child soldiers.”

“That’s an ugly term. But call them whatever you want,” said Bienfang. “The fact is that half the wars going on right now in opportunity zones like the Philippines, Mali, Rwanda and Burundi, Somalia — heck, at least half of Africa, plus Mexico, the Pakistani tribal regions, certain portions of Indonesia, and, for that matter, the South and West Sides of Chicago, most of Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, and several counties in Montana and Idaho… Kid, we wouldn’t even have these minor but lucrative conflicts if we couldn’t count on a steady supply of little kids with big-ass guns. Do you have any idea of the devastation to the small arms industry if we took the AR-15’s, the Uzis, the Mac-10’s, the Tec-9’s, the T-16’s, the Sturmgewehr-44’s, the Kalashnikovs and the bullpups away from our little junior shooters spread all over the Third World and the militia compounds of red-state America? Dozens of corporations would crash, mutual funds would dry up, Wall Street would go into full-scale, suicidal, pistol-to-the-temple panic.”

“So,” I said, it’s a good idea for the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation to promote the munitions industry’s youth-marketing program, even in the wake of the hideous tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut?”

“Kid,” said Bienfang, “it’s a dog-shoot-dog world. When 20 tots get wasted in a New England kindergarten, the media go ape and call it a massacre. When 20 eight-year-olds are lined up by a West African irrigation ditch and executed by kids their own age, Reuters issues a two-graph blurb a month later about ‘insurgents’ killed by ‘guerrilla forces’ in a ‘failed state’ somewhere in Ubangi-land.”

Bienfang let this reality sink in. “You got kids killing kids everywhere,” he said. “Ironically, this is a positive thing. It nourishes the global economy while reducing the number of mouths you gotta feed. But to keep peace from breaking out and starting a recession, you need two things. First: a steady supply of guns, which is a business I missed out on — because it started up before I was born.”

“What’s the other thing?” I asked.

“Kids!” said Bienfang. “Kill a kid, you gotta replace him with a kid! In places like Kandahar and Niger, little boys are starting to dodge recruiters for the local resistance. They’ve figured out it’s only fun to shoot guns if nobody’s shooting back. But now, we’re training junior shooters in Virginia, California, Georgia, who aren’t just skillful, thanks to the NRA. They’re gung-ho, and touchingly naive.”

As usual, I objected to Bienfang’s coldblooded scheme. “This isn’t just unspeakable. It’s impossible. You’ll never convince American parents to send their little kids off to Africa or the Middle East to be child soldiers.”

“No, not child soldiers. We avoid terms like that. My program for placing junior shooters in more realistic settings is called Young Patriot Simulated Combat Internships. It’s fully certified by every major U.S. shooting sport organization. And, I’m expecting Chuck Norris’ personal endorsement any minute.”

“Well, if Chuck says it’s OK,” I said. “But is there money for this travesty?”

“Money?” Bienfang laughed. “Son, the parents are paying tuition. But even if they didn’t, as long as there’s a gun industry, as long as there are rich governments like the U.S., France and Germany handing out bribes — er, foreign aid — to Third World gangsters, there will be millions available, and swiftly spent, to arm a few good children for the timeless purposes of slaughter, plunder, mayhem and rape.”

“Well, that’s certainly a load off my mind,” I said, a little sarcastically.

Bienfang, without sarcasm, smiled and replied. “Ah, yes, my boy. The guns are hungry and the fodder is green.”