Secret Shocker

Copyright © 2006 - 2008 by Mitchell Allen

Originally appeared on FanStory.com, November, 2006.

butcherknife.jpg
Photo by emdot

It looked like a simple butcher knife. When I grabbed it to stab the intruder, we were both shocked. I was surprised to see no penetration and no blood, while the intruder was shocked with 20,000 volts of electricity.

As I sat in my jail cell, I marveled at how well the Non-Lethal Weapons Act of 2024 had integrated itself into our society. Actually, I wondered how come he was dead, while I had to suffer. In a twisted sort of way, I felt that I should be dead and he should be incarcerated. It just wasn’t fair. But that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. The irony of it all is that I had become a victim of the very law that was supposed to protect helpless people like me …

When the “Nilly Willy Act” was proposed, it was bitterly opposed by the National Rifle Association and Major League Baseball. Both groups rightly predicted that its enactment would pretty much put them out of business. What neither group could have foreseen was that Nilly Willy would impact everything from shaving our beards to frying our chickens. Originally intended to rid the country of illegal firearms, Nilly Willy was liberally interpreted by the courts and expanded over the years to include knives, razors, fish hooks, hot oil, staple guns, bricks, sharp sticks, baseball bats, golf clubs, poker irons and piano wire.

Because of the potential for every item sturdier than a soggy cornflake to be classified as a lethal weapon, the government authorized studies into the implementation of mind-control, social engineering and criminal justice reform. The government hoped to supplant Nilly Willy with more viable legislation.

Mind-control proponents, which included the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies, showed that reduction in violent tendencies could be achieved simply by adding chemicals to the water supply. Opponents of mind-control, which included every organized religious institution, felt that such measures were redundant.

Social engineering took advantage of the fact that the Whistle-blower program had been expanded into a nationwide network of busybodies squealing on their neighbors. The new breed of informers had established local, statewide and regional clearinghouses for vicious gossip, half-truths and petty grievances. The former Better Business Bureaus controlled these clearinghouses.

Criminal justice reform was based on the outlawing of capital punishment, in favor of prefrontal lobotomies for persons convicted of violent crimes. Of the initiatives, reform was the weakest. Not only did it rely on a barbaric principle, it also presented a contradiction to the very law it was supposed to uphold, for quite a few inmates expired as a result of hasty “ice-picking” by unskilled physicians.

In the face of these utter failures, the Non-Lethal Weapons Act of 2024 entrenched itself more deeply into our legal system.

Rather than ridding ourselves of dangerous weapons, we ushered in an era of pure, uninhibited casual violence. Once all of the firearms were confiscated and sold overseas in exchange for oil, the only way to quell unruly citizens was to zap them with stun-guns, spray them with immobilizing chemicals or club them with nightsticks. Where the mere threat of being shot was enough to control most people, there was no fear in being incapacitated. It became mere sport for roving gangs to taunt law enforcement - the sheer number of miscreants guaranteed that they would overwhelm any police force. That is not to say that they walked all over the cops. Far from it. What happened, usually on a nightly basis, was that a couple hundred gangsters would have the stuffing beat out of them, while three hundred more ran rampant through the streets, beating the stuffing out of anyone who crossed their madding path. It was a lot like high school football.

As the government dragged its feet with its silly social experiments, the outlaws became more outrageous; finally, the nation’s police departments became so desperate that they sought the help of the private sector.
With the promise of profits to spur them, corporations began to study ways to combat the problem of wanton violence. In the manner typical of capitalistic endeavors, the proposals were nearly as outlandish as those of the government. Unfortunately, where the elected officials’ dreams of program implementation were tempered by fiscal responsibility or - at the very least - voter sentiment, corporations merely suspended dividends, delayed pension contributions and forced their employees to work overtime in order to realize the launch of their massive consumer products campaigns.

The most successful of these projects was the so-called “secret shockers” line of consumer products that appeared to be innocuous but, in fact, concealed immobilizing mechanisms such as pepper sprays, stun-guns and knock-out gases. Everything from fake bibles to hollow candles had been manufactured and sold.

… Apparently, my wife bought the deceptive butcher knife, or should I say, defective butcher knife. Turns out, the manufacturer had a recall on this model because, although the voltage was correct, the amperage was 100 times what it was supposed to be.

It looked like a simple butcher knife. But it was a lethal weapon, and I am going to be convicted of murder.