Some hothead in North Korea starts testing his nuclear missiles every day of the week and twice on Sunday, and suddenly people are demanding a ban on these “weapons of mass destruction,” saying that only the military needs that kind of power, and that civilians can get by with regular old missiles. According to the anti-nukes mob, anyone with the temerity to possess just one short-range ballistic nuclear missile for self-defense must, ipso facto, be a violent evildoer.

Well, I’m a proud nuclear-missile owner, and I’d like to put in my two cents—assuming this is still America, and that they haven’t replaced the dollar with the Chinese yuan, too.

My most treasured childhood memories are of deer hunting with my father using nuclear missiles. Dad and I would pack sandwiches and drinks (Bud for him, Coke for me), head out to the woods, hide in the foliage in our camouflage hazmat suits, load up a Minuteman III in the launch vehicle, calibrate the angle and the initial velocity, set a timer to detonate it, take cover in our steel-encased underground bunker, then come out seventy-two hours later and pick up all the carcasses in the blast area. And I’ll tell you what: those hours in the bunker, just goofing off and waiting for the dispersal of the nuclear fallout, were the best we ever spent.

Now my own six-year-old boy spends hours poring over the ads for mass spectrometers and composite Pu-Oy pits in Missiles and Isotopes Monthly. I’ve started bringing him out to the nuclear test range, and when I see his eyes light up with wonder, and also with irradiated luminosity from the mushroom clouds reflecting off his goggles, I think about my old man, who inexplicably died at thirty-seven, from four dozen neon-green tumors. How are fathers and sons supposed to bond without nuclear missiles? You eliminate them, pal, and you may as well get rid of baseball and mumbling during holidays about how business has been picking up lately.

By the way, nuclear missiles aren’t just for the guys. Whenever my wife goes out alone, I make sure she stashes her nuclear missile—a cute little ten-kiloton surface-to-air number she calls Sammie—in her purse. She’s converted all her friends, and now they have monthly get-togethers where they drink wine and trade missile-cleaning pointers and whatnot. Last time, they all knitted warhead-tip cozies that say “Gone Fission” for their husbands. Great group of gals.

Yes, nuclear missiles do carry a risk of death. You know what also carries a risk of death? Chewing gum. Grow up.

Remember, nuclear missiles are already out there; if they can no longer be purchased legally, they’ll just be sold on the black market. And, if I’m at the park or a football game, or in an open-carry college seminar on nineteenth-century American poetry, I want to make sure I have my ICBM on me, just in case some nut job’s packing thermonuclear heat and takes issue with my stance on Emily Dickinson’s use of slant rhyme.

If they outlaw our nuclear missiles, what’s next—our beakers of hydrochloric acid? Our vials of bubonic plague? Our test tubes of hydrochloric acid laced with bubonic plague? It’s a slippery slope to tyranny, my friends, and the Founding Fathers knew that the best defense against despotism was for every home to have its own well-stockpiled nuclear-missile silo. And—before you start trotting out made-up “statistics” about how nuclear missiles are more likely to be used on a relative than on an intruder—yes, we store our arsenal on a shelf out of the kiddies’ reach, and of course we’re teaching them responsible nuclear-missile protocol, requiring two-person key-turning simultaneity, choosing a launch code with at least six letters and numbers plus a special character, and keeping the safety on when they play Kennedys and Khrushchevs.

Look, I’m in favor of a few commonsense restrictions. Mental-health screening, so that a madman with a military and a tacky branding empire can’t get hold of them, is a sound idea, just so long as it doesn’t prevent law-abiding citizens from buying a vintage SSM-N-8 Regulus at a nuclear-missile show or picking up some uranium-235 and a centrifuge on a milk-and-bread run to Walmart.

I’ve been a member of the National Nuclear Missile Association ever since I was eligible, at eighteen hours old. It’s true that we make occasional donations to certain lawmakers, but it doesn’t affect their policies. As clear-thinking officials who care more about being on the right side of history than about their reëlection prospects, they all recognize that the possibility of dying in a nuclear holocaust is the price we pay for freedom—and they know that the way for us to protect ourselves is not to make nuclear missiles illegal but to minimize the target area by “getting small” through dieting and flexibility exercises.

Remember: nuclear missiles don’t kill people. Nuclear bombs have killed people. Get your facts straight before you launch a reckless attack. ♦