Guns, Gold, and Secession

Occasionally I run across a post that nicely ties together what is going on in our country, and is funny and pointed and has a lot of great lines. Over at Big Hollywood, I read such a post, and am now passing it on to you- I suggest you read the whole Guns, Gold, and Secession post, but here are the best parts:

Not too surprisingly to my Republican friends, guns sales have skyrocketed across the country since Obama was elected. A week after the election, I read that gun sales near where I grew up in north Texas had gone up 185%.

Similar sales figures have popped up all over the U.S. By mid-February 2009, an article in the Sarasota Herald Tribune reported an 82% increase over the previous year’s gun sales, due to “customers fearing for their safety in desperate economic times and worrying that President Barack Obama might resurrect some 1990s gun bans.” The same article cited FBI background checks as surging 27% over the previous year in the last three months of 2008.

And it’s not just guns being bought and hoarded. Gold sales are skyrocketing. In January 2009, the U.S. Mint sold more American Eagle coins than it shipped in the entire year of 2007, and gold prices just topped $1,000 an ounce. You’d think people didn’t trust the markets or the dollar any more.

You’ve probably heard of Igor Panarin, the Russian professor and former KGB analyst who predicted the breakup of the United States in 2010, giving it “a 55-45% chance.” In his opinion, Russia will regain control of Alaska, which sounds like a lot of wishful thinking, given that the Russian stock market and banking system is currently in worse shape than in the United States. As quoted in the Wall Street Journal, however, his prediction that “wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union” makes a bit of sense, when one considers the fact that the U.S. will actually need to pay back the trillions it owes.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Second Vermont Republic movement? And in June of 2008, long before the election, the State of Oklahoma declared its sovereignty under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.