Torpedo Los! Another Toys for Totalitarians shipment delivered, this time to Andrew Cuomo.

USPS reports that the following letter and package was signed for by A Hasson at Albany, NY, at 9:24 this morning.

23 December 2013

Andrew M. Cuomo

NYS State Capitol Building

Albany, NY 12224

Dear Governor Cuomo,

Merry Christmas! Although it will no doubt get to you late, enclosed you will find my Christmas gift to you, one thirty-round standard capacity AK-74 magazine in 5.45x39 caliber, manufactured by TAPCO, USA, located in the great little town of Kennesaw, Georgia, where every head of household residing within the city limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition. You have been awarded this gift as part of what my friend David Codrea calls my “Toys for Totalitarians Campaign.”

I selected this magazine in honor of Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died today. Given your collectivist politics, I thought it was an appropriate choice, since Kalashnikov was an unrepentant Soviet to the end of his days. To other tyranneau governors such as yourself -- Hickenlooper of Colorado and Malloy of Connecticut -- I sent magazines manufactured in their states to remind them of the companies (and jobs) departing their jurisdictions because of their own unconstitutional laws banning such devices to otherwise honest, law-abiding citizens. But you don’t need any reminders about what the wildly misnamed SAFE Act is costing your state, so the Kalashnikov magazine seemed the appropriate choice. From one collectivist to another, I thought.

My New York friends have hopes that your efforts to disarm your fellow citizens will play an important role in your reelection next year. They think they can mobilize enough folks to cost you at the polls, although the latest Quinnipiac poll has you looking pretty good. But then there’s a long time between now and the election and there’s no telling what sort of verbal and policy gaffes might jump out at you -- or out of you. The SAFE Act has the real potential to damage your campaign, and to be considered for president in 2016 you absolutely have to be reelected governor, don‘t you agree? Why that might even motivate Hillary Clinton to funnel money through the NRA’s political action arm to your GOP opponent in 2014. As I asked Maryland’s Governor O’Malley:

What is it about you anti-firearm governors? You, Cuomo of New York, Malloy of Connecticut -- all of you all have the out-sized egos and even larger appetites for power that make you believe that you deserve to rightfully sit in George Washington’s chair. Even Hicklenlooper of Colorado, as disingenuously coy as he is, believes he belongs there and would drop his faux modesty in a New York minute if he thought he had the poll numbers. And all of you apparently think that citizen disarmament is a winning national issue that will get you to the Oval Office. One must ask, what are you all smoking?

Bill Clinton is said to be a friend of yours. Ask him about the political consequences of gun control. After all, the first Assault Weapons Ban gave him Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. And now that all the provisions of your new tyrannical law have gone into effect, you can count on more headlines of the “honest-gun-owner-caught-in-Cuomo’s-ill-considered-law“ variety. The issue of citizen disarmament which you have embraced whole-hog will not be going away.

To ensure that, my friends and I will continue to smuggle such thirty-round magazines as you now own in defiance of that law. Indeed, my friends and I have imported into your state more than forty such magazines and transferred them to New York citizens in defiance of your ill-considered diktat.

It is a modest number, to be sure, but then we work with modest means. All of the magazines we have smuggled to date were donated by folks -- some from New York -- who wished to slap you in the face with their defiance. My friends and I, Three Percenters all, are merely the conduit of their contempt for your petty tyranny. They believe the long-standing principle of American jurisprudence that an unconstitutional law is null and void. Of course the trick is to make that point when the levers of power are in the hands of domestic enemies of the Constitution such as yourself.

In any case, you are now welcome to have your state police open a case file on me. They will play hob trying to make a case on my friends, but I’d say that your Christmas gift may be proof that I, at least, am guilty of defying your unconstitutional tyranny. But then you still want to president, don’t you? To do that you not only have to get past Hillary and the Democrat primaries in 2016, but win a general election -- and gun control, in case you hadn’t noticed, doesn’t play well in the country at large. And the more tyrannical your enforcement of the SAFE Act becomes, the more it discredits you and your political party. The Law of Unintended Consequences is iron-clad, and it can neither be repealed nor its verdicts appealed.

Of course if you don’t come after me, my friends and I will have, as they say in South, slapped your jaws and forced you to resent it. Can you stand our unanswered defiance? My bet is that you can’t -- your monumental ego won’t let you -- but even if I were to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, my friends, including some of your fellow citizens, will continue to defy your unconstitutional law by smuggling in what you have banned. How well do you know your own state’s history? What would William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis and Lewis Morris -- all men who risked everything as signatories of the Declaration of Independence -- do in response to your petty tyranny? What would the men of New York’s revolutionary generation do? Which way would they be pointing their muskets? Do you think your fellow citizens today are any less committed to opposing your depredations of their traditional liberties? Do you think they do not understand your growing appetite, like all tyrants, for their liberty, their property, and -- at the hands of the state police raiders enforcing your diktat -- their lives?

If you do, you misunderstand their character. They may be a minority, but they are a determined minority and history, for good or ill, is made by such determined minorities. So, too, are critical one-issue voters in state and national elections.

Oh, and one more thing. Since you now own an illegal device smuggled into your state in defiance of your diktat, I have this suggestion: Go arrest yourself.

Sincerely, and hoping you have a merry Christmas,

Mike Vanderboegh, Smuggler