I love the image, despite its inaccuracy. I’ve met people, civilian farmers, who were facing an invading force that was armed with full-auto AK-47s, and all they had to defend themselves with were old British Enfield bolt-action rifles, roughly the equivalent of a hunting rifle. The army did not come to help them. What did their government expect them to do, you might ask? It expected them to die. These were people the government didn’t care much about, and if they kept the rebels busy for a little while, they were an acceptable loss.

If you think such a dystopian situation can’t happen in a “civilized” country like the U.S., it already has. Many Korean-American shop owners in Los Angeles in 1992 would have lost their property were it not for so-called assault weapons. For days there was no police presence, and chaos and burning in the streets – with Korean-American businesses a major target. The National Guard finally came in to put down the riots, but not before huge sections of the city had burned. I lived in LA then, and the image of shopkeepers on their roofs with assault rifles and flack jackets is one I will never forget.

In the real world, governments fail, and the responsibility for defending family and property falls to the individual. Our government has been looted and hollowed out by the 1%. “It can’t happen here” is no longer credible.