A Tale of Two Kingdoms

The King of style...

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

This is a story about a boy named Justin. 

Justin was the Ruler of a Small Kingdom surrounded by three oceans. It was a magical kingdom powered by rainbows and unicorn farts. King Justin had many servants who helped him rule the Small Kingdom. Chief among these were the Queen of the Environment and Changing Climates, Princess YamYam (who was in charge of making sure no one got offended), and the two Billys - Money Billy and Safety Billy, but they didn’t really do very many useful things.  The servants that worked the hardest were the Leaders of the Kingdom’s Law Enforcers, those who helped King Justin enforce his many commandments.  

As beautiful as the Small Kingdom was, it had a big problem: many of its citizens were being killed by people with guns and King Justin just didn’t know what to do about it.  He went to Safety Billy and the Leaders of the Law Enforcers and said, “I think we should ban all assault-style weapons.  This way, those weapons would cease to exist in the Small Kingdom and none of my fine citizens would ever have to worry about being assaulted again.”  

Safety Billy and the Leaders of the Law Enforcers went away thinking very hard about what the King had said, although the Leaders of the Law Enforcers were pretty sure it was a dumb idea.

Then one day, several months afterwards when all the King’s advisors were on holidays and relaxing in their basements, King Justin decided to ban all assault-style weapons.  Not actual assault weapons, mind you - assault “style” weapons,  because actual assault weapons had already been banned long before Justin was even able to form a coherent sentence (well ok, let’s just say it was a long time ago). Being a fair King, Justin decided not to ban the small handguns because, well, they’re small and probably not very dangerous anyway.  

The citizens in the Small Kingdom already knew it was all about style with Justin - socks, costumes, makeup - Justin was truly the King of Style.  And so in order to make his list look really grand, he also banned rocket launchers, grenade launchers, and a few anti-tank guns.  Of course, these had also been banned for longer than most could remember, but now they were DOUBLE-BANNED, so the citizens could rest easy, knowing they would never see any motorized vehicles going down the main street with those puppies on the roof any time soon.

But King Justin had a problem: since all these newly banned assault-style weapons also happened to belong to good, regular, law-abiding citizens, and it was now up to him to remove these dangerous weapons for the good of the Small Kingdom, he decided to ease the blow a bit by putting aside 600 million dollars to buy the assault-style weapons back from said law-abiding citizens, even though these guns had never been used in a crime and these citizens had never committed a crime.  “Surely this will make them very happy”, Justin thought to himself.  

But Justin had another problem: the Small Kingdom shared a very long, undefended border with another, much larger kingdom that was filled with real assault weapons (not just styled ones), and so to show his citizens that he was in fact a good sport, King Justin decided to dip into the royal treasury and came up with something to help secure the Small Kingdom’s border on the off chance that somebody, somewhere might possibly attempt to smuggle a handgun or two over the extremely long, undefended border. 

86 million dollars.  

Spread over five years, because you don’t want to get too crazy with tax-payers’ money, you know.  Okay, so it wasn’t quite as flashy as the 600 mil to take guns away from his loyal subjects, but at least it was something, right?

Now, we need to back up a little bit to a day, several months before all this happened…

King Justin happened to be on vacation when the Leaders of the Law Enforcers met to discuss what could be done about all the killing and all the small handguns that were showing up on the streets of the Small Kingdom, and to discuss the King’s wish of banning assault-style weapons.  These people dealt with crime on a daily basis and were a valuable source of information for Justin.  It was good that Justin had a ready ear for people like this so the citizens could be confident that he wasn’t just doing random stuff or forging blindly ahead with an ideological agenda.  

After much discussion, the Leaders of the Law Enforcers came to an astounding conclusion: almost all of the guns being used to kill the citizens of the Small Kingdom were not from the Small Kingdom at all, but in fact were small handguns being smuggled over the very long, undefended border from the Large Kingdom next door.  They realized that banning these weapons would do nothing to stop the senseless slaughter of the Small Kingdom’s citizens because the Large Kingdom had an unending supply.

The Leaders of the Law Enforcers tried to get their message to King Justin but alas, they could not contact him in time, as he was at a costume party and couldn’t be disturbed.  They left a message with Safety Billy, but he misplaced it just before Justin returned from his vacation and so poor Justin never got that valuable information that could have changed the fate of the Small Kingdom…

       ****to be continued****

If you want find out what happens next, read A Tale of Two Kingdoms - Part Two