Only yesterday, my son asked me, “Why do they want to take our guillotines away?”

We sat at the dinner table, just me and my son, eating sauerkraut and yolks. He was crying while he ate. I took a sip of milk but it fell out of my mouth because I was sighing. I never thought that in this country, where I was born and raised, where my dad first showed me how to use a guillotine, where my high school yearbook photo is of me posing with my guillotines, that they would ever try to take our guillotines away from us.

I told my son that guillotine control punishes everyone for the not so great choices of a few, who have used their guillotines for evil and not for good. But people don’t understand that most guillotine owners are like me: harmless purebred folks who just want to feel safe at the Red Lobster factory outlet. They want to take ALL of our guillotines away. Then they’ll probably take them to a plant where they’ll recycle them and make them into gay benches. They don’t understand that ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-ninety-nine-nine percent of guillotine owners only use their guillotines for self defense. We keep the pieces separated and packed away in locked cabinets that are buried in the yard. The keys we keep in the dog. So when illegal men, armed to the teeth with guillotines, attack us I can defend myself. By cutting their heads off with my guillotine.

They won’t be able to take them away anyway. I’ve built a Rube Goldbergian contraption of overwhelming cleverness. When a force is applied to the door, the kicked-in or knocked-on door tugs on a rope overhead, which tips a hanging bucket, dropping a marble into a chute that travels around a bend before it taps the ‘play’ button on our tape recorder, which plays a recording of old mom’s voice saying ‘come in!’ all sweet like. The marble also hits another marble, which drops into a small metal box, depressing a lighter that lights a nearby wick. As the candle burns down, the hot wax drips onto a simple piece of blue string, which, when burned through, snaps, releasing a switch attached to a hammer, which hits the lever attached to a guillotine, which is above the door. Then the guillotine takes the swift plunge of freedom, severing the head of the intruder, who is sticking his neck out into a way of life where it doesn’t belong. Then I pick up his head and put it on a pike in the yard where the mailbox used to be.

Removing the mailbox is important because if they can’t send us mail, they can’t find us and take away my new guillotine, “Chops,” a ten-blade, six-speed dome-slayer with sonar and it takes pictures during the moment of descent just like they do on roller coasters, and which I only acquired because it will save our lives someday, son. That’s why the mailbox is also buried in the yard.

Liberals say that a responsible guillotine owner is an oxymoron. To that I say, “Look at me. Come see how I live. Bring your cameras. Make a reality show of me. I want to be on television.”

“Will they take away my baseball bat or old mom’s car?” asked my son, his little porkchop face interrupting my reveries. “You can kill people with those things.”

“They won’t,” I said, “because those things aren’t ‘killing machines,’ which is a word that the liberal mean-dia invented to hate on things that they say have no other use besides making people permanently dead. To that I say, ‘Puh-scuse me? This guillotine can cut an acorn squash.'”

“Couldn’t the laws be changed so that no one can own a guillotine?” asked my son.

“No,” I said. “How would we defend ourselves during the next massacre? Unless all people, especially kindergartners like yourself, get outfitted ASAP with a cornucopia of sharp, shiny guillotines, we’re all going to die in a large pile. But they won’t listen. They’re going to take away the second amendment.”

“The right to vote?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “The right to bear arms. Haven’t you been listening? We can’t vote anyway, we don’t have a mailbox. The right to bear arms — a right that our forefathers gave us.”

“You mean metaphorically?”

“No, I mean literally. This guillotine belonged to Andrew Jackson, who used it to defend himself against tons of bad Indians who attacked him in his home or in what he wanted to be his home.”

My son smiled wearily and fell asleep. But don’t you worry son, I know just what to do. When you wake up, you’ll find that I’ve buried both of us up to our necks in the yard. We’re going underground, where our guillotine rights cannot be violated. Best of all, we’ll be really close to our guillotines. We’ll be safe and happy and free.