Your morning Orwell

  This Winchester Model 86 45-70 rifle is a family heirloom of my family's.  It is pictured below above the mantel of my father's house in Wyoming.  The rifle is in working order as it should be.

  This rifle has spilled blood in the infamous Johnson County Range War and that's all I know.  I asked for more details and was told "you don't want to know."

  Anyway, here's your fix of that visionary Orwell.  It's hard to read Orwell and to not think of Snowden, Feinstein, and the NSA.  It's a bit depressing to think of the land of the Magna Carta (George Orwell's land!), the land where certain inalienable rights many Americans take for granted originated, having been disarmed like it is now.

That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.