Book Review: Enemies Foreign and Domestic by Matthew Bracken, a
novel about the cost of freedom in the age of terror, 568 pages,
copyright 2003.

History has shown that governments will often react to a crisis with
extreme and repressive measures. The September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks prompted passage of the Patriot Act. The Gun Control Act
of 1968 was a reaction to the assassinations (JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr.)
of the 1960s. Great Britian's draconian gun control laws were
enacted after a school shooting. The December 7, 1941 attack
on Pearl Harbor led to the internment of Japanese-Americans, whose
only "crime" was their ethnicity. The Reichstag fire in Germany
prompted passage of repressive measures that paved the way for
Hitler to take power.

What if someone staged a horrific act of "gun violence" for the
express purpose of prompting the passage of draconian anti-gun laws?
Who would do that and why? How would America's gun owners react to
an extreme War on Guns?

This is the scenario set forth in Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
The book opens with a stadium massacre, in which shots are fired
into an NFL stadium on the opening day of the pro football season.
The crowd panics and hundreds of people are trampled to death or
fall to their deaths. The alleged shooter is a disabled Desert Storm
veteran who is loosely connected to a rod and gun club in Virginia.
The gun used is a semi-automatic SKS, so the government's knee-jerk
reaction is to ban all semi-automatic rifles.

This edict sets off a civil war in America. While seamlessly describing some
of the nationwide resistance, the book more intensely centers on a small
group of Virginians who have been targeted by the government
rogue agency responsible for the stadium shooting. The rod and gun
club is demonized by the rogue agency as a right-wing racist militia
terrorist group. The club members and their associates are murdered,
kidnapped, tortured and/or framed for crimes. How the rogues operate,
and how the citizens react and fight back, both for personal survival
and to defend freedom for all, makes for compelling reading.

This is a well-written book that I could not put down. It will make
you think about the issues, the Constitution, the tactics and
technology available now and in the future to the government, and
what you would do in situations like those postulated. The two
lead characters, whom you come to care about, become romantically involved,
so there is a love story here as well.

This book will appeal to readers who are conservative or libertarian,
and especially, pro Second Amendment. It is also a clean book, in that
the love scenes are handled tastefully without resorting to explicit
sexual details which is so common in literature these days. There is,
however, some graphic violence and profanity in the book.

Enemies Foreign and Domestic is the first book in a trilogy by the
author. The second book, Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista, is in
print now, and the final book, Foreign Enemies and Traitors, will
be available in 2009. You can read 20 chapters of Enemies Foreign
and Domestic, as well as excerpts of the other two books, online at

http://www.enemiesforeignanddomestic.com