The right to bear one less arm.

Sam Gregor was loved by everyone and known by no one.

The year started on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. It was 1989. Two years before the fall of the Berlin wall and two years after The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed for the first time above 2,000, gaining 8.30 to close at 2,002.25. It had been a long year in a busier decade. It was the year U.S. President George H. W. Bush banned the importation of certain guns in the United States. The guns banned were classified as assault weapons. Semi-automatic rifles. George H W Bush had given the people the right to bear one less arm.

On September 2nd 1989 Sam Gregor turned 18. In many countries, 18 was a big year. A year where boys become men and men become idiots. Ascending into animals as they waved their wallets in the air to prove that this time, this time the beers were on them. It was their face on the ID’s. Empty cans at their feet and the world in their hands because to them, the world began at the steering wheel of a four cylinder machine with an engine. In many countries you see, eighteen was the year you could drive a car. However, in his country, Sam’s country, he had his first set of Keys on September 2nd 1987, age 16. Two days after Michael Jackson had released his seventh studio album Bad. Bad he was. At driving. It didn’t stop him. He drove everywhere and back again and no one could stop him because he drove with the letter of the law in his pocket. 18 for Sam was different. There were no tap beers, no liquor shop stops. No crashing the parent’s second car. In his country, the land of military spending and two car garages, driving was 16, drinking was 21. There had been one thing and one thing only that made Sam Gregor jump up on the morning of September 2nd, his 18th birthday. One thing that made him wake up in a way he had not woken up the day before or for that matter, any day of his life.

You see, what Sam had not realised is that while he was dreaming his last subconscious whiffs of seventeen. Kissing girls and robbing banks - his president was tightening screws and signing documents. While Sam was imagining how it would feel to run his hands over the handguard of his first semi-automatic rifle, his president, a man whom he, Sam, had only spared two independent thoughts on, was sitting, speaking and thinking about him. Not him specifically, but him in the broadest sense of his place in the universe. George H W bush was thinking about eighteen year old boys like Sam and their aura. Their essence. Their vulnerability. Their lust for shiny things. Machines with buttons and leavers and banging noises where one pull of a trigger was a push to the other side. The side America had fought so hard to keep out, the Comms, the Japs, the Foreign armies with tighter uniforms. Men like George W Bush were afraid of the young battalion, the forgotten eighteen year olds moving into organized factions. He was also afraid of the disorganized ones. The loose cannons in school hallways. So Bush raised the age of possession from 18 - 21.

What Bush didn’t know about Sam Gregor was that Sam had neither a head for insurgency, or a heart for school shootings. Sam Gregor was a man of the people. Vice school captain, head of the tennis club, he had even represented his school in the state chess championship. He had a wide circle of friends and he walked the halls with a back straight enough to seem confident, but relaxed enough to be approachable. Stiffness was a bad sell. Arrogance, a worse one. Sam thought in long term strategy, not short term gimmicks.

Sam’s interest in guns was pragmatic. You see, Sam was a businessman. He was born for it. It was in his blood. When Sam woke up on the morning of September 2nd, he didn’t read the news. Instead he picked up the little black book he had tucked in his drawer. The book had plans, drawings, schemes, poems, philosophies. It was his resting place, his bible, his business plan. He was Da vinci and it was his scroll. Most importantly the book had names. 50 to be exact. Listed horizontally. Just how he liked them. Depth. Depth meant growth and growth meant progress. By the names there were numbers, phone numbers and by them there were whole dollar amounts.

What Sam had realised exactly one year and one day before this was that being part of an uprising was messy. Emotionally, physically, spiritually. Sam wasn’t messy. He kept his room like he kept his books - balanced and consistent. Revolutions and religions had never spoken to him in any sort of directness. What he had realized on September 1st 1988, in the middle of a history class about the 1973 Chilean coup d’état was that these sorts of things were busy. They had arms and legs and under the limbs - the factions and phases, there was a current. A demand. A need for tools. Machines - and where there was demand there was someone, somewhere, supplying. After that he was done. Convinced. He read every article, story, book on the arms trade and what he came to was this: if he was smart about it, his eighteenth birthday would be the beginning of something. The start of his journey to growth - self growth, love over fear, free markets in a freer country.

So over the year he had begun to strategize and during this phase he had reached out to people. He was careful. He covered his tracks and wiped down his prints. Partnerships - that's what a good business was all about. Strategic partnerships. So he built them, and over the months he began to accrue names. Most of these names were connected to a small group near the border of Arizona and Mexico, on the Mexican side. The town was Agua Prieta. As Sam Gregor saw it, the group needed rifles for all the right reasons - safety, revolt, and safe crossing of the border into southern Arizona. He saw no reason why the land of the free should be captive to its own conception of borders. As far he was concerned borders were like business plans; adaptable and fluid.

He had never known what to expect. Initially he thought maybe a few thousand dollars. It was more about the scheme, the plan, the learning. But as it grew so did the number and one day he had woken up to $20,000 wired into his offshore account and forty more orders from the small town near the border. It was unexpected. It was thrilling. It was business baby and business was booming. $20,000 was just enough to put a down payment on the life he envisioned for himself - and after that he would invest the rest back into the stock exchange. It had reached its lowest point, which gave it nowhere to go put up. He knew that day he couldn’t let down his customers. His followers. The men and women that had believed in him. They had paid too much, too early, and god dammit he would deliver on time.

So he made the connections and took the orders. He had a plan. He would buy 50 of the cheapest semi - automatic rifles from different stores on September 2nd. It would take him all day. Then he was to gather them up and take three trips to the border where he would meet a man, Gustov, ex-military gone rogue. He would sell the rifles to Gustov to cover his tracks. This was legal. Gustov had a gun license. Then Gustov would take the rifles one by one and channel them through a small tunnel that had been dug over the months he had been planning. It would be risky, but the first rule of entrepreneurship was risk. The second, reward - which he planned on reaping without being caught.

Most importantly, he had obtained a federal firearms license. Allowing him, Sam Gregor to purchase as many guns as he needed, and in a country who prided itself on this need, he felt confident in his spiel. His insatiable appetite for protecting himself against some other loony with fifty firearms. It was his right. His liberty and above all his conviction in his constitution. It would be ungrateful to think otherwise.

So without reading the news he set foot on the day, pushing his foot on the pedal of the car that had always taken him places, real and imagined. As he was pulling up to the first stop, a bargain barn for all things guns, he saw a boy his age looking disgruntled - walking out of the shop. The boy swung open the car door and slammed it shut.

Sam knew something wasn’t right. He could feel it in legs. He could feel it in his second amendment. So he walked into the store and looked at the rifle section - the one he had already looked at in the catalogues and he pretended to consider what he wanted. Then he picked up the cheapest one that he had already calculated into his plan and he went to the counter where he showed the man with a ruler length beard his license, ID, and freshly minted firearms license. The man looked up at him. Then looked down at his license, then said nothing and instead proceeded to grab a remote and press on to the TV above the counter.

There it was. The president, the commander in chief saying that boys like Sam had to wait. That there was no legal route. Business, Gat business was for the early twenties, not the late teens.

For a moment he panicked. He twisted and turned and then he realised something. Something men with beards who work at gun shops don’t. The Fine print. The details. The specific letters of the general law.

‘When is this law being enacted?’

The man looked stumped. Like he had been asked to recite the quantum theory of gravity.

‘I don’t know - man - I - uh good question.’

Then Sam Gregor did something he had never done so directly - so out there in the light of day. He bullshitted. He used the power the man who was stumped had given him without even realizing it.

‘Every law relating to the acquisition of any consumer good, has an incubation period of twenty four hours between announcement and enforcement - so technically I have one more day .’

‘You a lawya or somethin?’

‘Second year, first semester. Graduated highschool two years early.’

That was all it took. The man was as convinced as he was in the power of the arms trade and then he had it. The trick. The magic potion. He used it in every store. First he would suss out the customer service. Their posture, their attention span, their proximity to reading a book when the store was quiet. Then he would pounce. Somehow he did it, he rounded up fifty semi-automatic rifles from around the Phoenix area and there he was, sweating, panting, breathing, living.

Instead of three trips he’d take one. One big risk for one big reward. One big risk for one big punishment. So Sam drove. He drove for two blocks of eight hours straight. Slept in the car. Woke in the dessert. He drove, and he drove and he didn’t stop driving. In his head was Gustov and in Gustov’s hand was a shovel. It was destiny, and he, Sam Gregor was fate; driving two kilometres below a hundred for the whole nineteen hours. Bopping his head to the sixth track on Michael Jackson’s seventh studio album -

Bad.