Want to Save Money on Bullets? Buy Books!
— Jacob Tyler —
Long before the internet, books were the first weapons in the arsenal of liberty. They still are. In 1776, a little pamphlet called Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution. In an era of digital censorship, it might just be a well-worn paperback that keeps history from repeating itself.
Jefferson once said, “A well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy,” and anyone who’s spent time at the range knows: no target gets hit without a little aim. That aim begins with knowledge — and knowledge starts with books.
Gun owners have long understood that freedom isn’t free. But in today’s digital age, that truth has taken on a new front. As of February 26, 2025, Amazon eliminated its “Download & Transfer via USB” feature, which once allowed folks without Wi-Fi to copy their purchased Kindle books to a computer and then onto their devices. This shift isn’t just inconvenient — it’s strategic. It makes offline reading harder, conversion to universal formats like EPUB more difficult, and in turn, centralizes control over what you’re allowed to read.
The prospect of a society dependent on digital libraries is like a gun locked behind a fingerprint reader — accessible only on someone else’s terms. If Big Tech doesn’t like your book, it’s gone. Just ask Donald Jeffries, the author of Masking the Truth: How COVID-19 Destroyed Civil Liberties and Shut Down the World, who watched both Amazon and Barnes & Noble erase his title without warning.
Some might assert that Jeffries was “asking for it” by publishing something that was deemed “dangerous” and “divisive” in the midst of what people were led to believe was a massive public health crisis. Yet his case is far from isolated. Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were deleted from Kindles back in 2009. Roald Dahl’s classics got sanitized for political correctness. The idea that you own your books digitally? That’s becoming fiction itself.
Meanwhile, hard copies can’t be “updated.” They can’t be disappeared at 2 a.m. They sit where you place them — on shelves, desks, and nightstands — ready to outlast the fickle tides of political correctness . . . and they will do just that. No woke authoritarian can rewrite Twain, censor Seuss, or retcon the Bill of Rights when the words are in your hand.
Ideas are bulletproof. And the elites and oppressive class are all too keenly aware of this. That’s why they try to erase them — by rewriting history, controlling language, or outright destroying the physical records. In days of yore, those in power burned books by the cartload. The history of the English Bible is soaked in blood — translated by men who risked torture and death so people could read the Word for themselves. Tyrants from every age have tried to round up and burn Bibles and other books they deemed dangerous. At times they succeeded to varying degrees.
While digital books offer undeniable convenience — and many of us own them — nothing beats the permanence of print. A physical library can’t be erased with a software update. But a digital one? That can be burned with the push of a button. Book burning is alive and well, and the shift to digital-only formats makes it easier than ever in human history.
If we would see the fire of liberty continue to burn bright in the bosom of the American republic, we must not empower the enemies of truth and righteousness to burn our books. We should be no more willing to turn in our books than the colonials were willing to turn in their guns at Lexington and Concord.
Good books do more than preserve knowledge — they empower the citizen. In an age when mass media and the public school system increasingly push narratives over facts, books offer a counter-balance to institutional indoctrination. They tell the truth about our history: how bad actors have tried — and often failed — to erode freedom before. They teach us not just what went wrong, but how we can fight back and win today. A good library isn’t just a collection of stories; it’s a tactical manual for the preservation of liberty.
Bullets are expensive. Not that books are cheap necessarily, but buying books (and reading them) is bound to be a lot cheaper than all the bullets gun owners are going to have to use if we ever lose our freedoms as a result of unchecked government corruption or runaway civil unrest resulting from Soros-funded Communist agitators like BLM and Antifa, or soaring crime rates in Democrat-run cities.
For this reason, The National Firearms Coalition Today will always point our readers to good books. Not just about gun-related topics. But about important issues in general. Because there’s little point in owning a freedom stick if you’re not armed with knowledge first and foremost.
In a 2023 speech at a convention sponsored by The Heritage Foundation, commentator Tucker Carlson warned, “Don’t throw away your books because they can’t be disappeared, because they exist physically.”
There is much talk today of fears that if things in America continue at their current trajectory there could be a second Civil War. If such an outcome is to be avoided, we must first win the war that is being waged on our minds. The key to victory is simple: own books. Real books. Print books. Stockpile your shelves the way you stockpile ammunition and provisions for if the lights ever go out.
Want to save a bullet? Buy a book.