MEMORIAL DAY MEMORIES...

My Grandfather fought for our Freedom on an Aircraft Carrier in the Pacific in WW2. My Great Uncles fought for our Freedom in the Bloody Battle of the Bulge. My Father even Served Over Seas during The Berlin Crisis. They all survived. I'm young enough to still remember them all.

They NEVER spoke of what they endured, but I know for what they did, I enjoy life as I do BECAUSE of it! Too many now have forgotten what was done, and why. This Holiday is marked by more as a weekend to grill and hang-out with freinds. The Freedoms our Forefathers fought for are slowly slipping away, and not enough people realize it. Enjoy what you have and do while you can, a new memorial day is soon to be upon us.....

(Via WRSA)

HISTORY

History
by Mike Vanderboegh
25 May 2008

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” -- William Faulkner
A Trooper of the 1st Alabama Union Cavalry Regiment, United States Volunteers.

"A PERSONAL KIND OF WAR"

"It was a personal kind of war, up in the mountains. It produced its share of heroes and more than its share of bloody-handed villains. The fighting took place in a different dimension than the organized battles on the main fronts, where huge formations of uniformed men fired massed volleys at other huge formations distant, faceless, uniformed men. In the mountains there was little of that long-range, impersonal killing. In the mountains the target in your gun sight was not a nameless figure a thousand yards away, positioned at the other end of a smoke-obscured battlefield crowded with regiments. Instead he was an individual human being with a clear and unique face, and he was, all to many times, a man whose identity and home you had known since childhood. When you pulled the trigger on such a man, you did not leave a heap of distant bones-- one more swollen, powder-blackened piece of carrion among hundreds, heaped on the same acreage. You left a dead MAN whose wife and children you probably knew by name....The war in the mountains may not have been large, but it was vicious and took place on an all-too-human scale. There were vast regions of the mountain country that were more dangerous for any outsider who did not know the score than the areas near the front lines in Northern Virginia...Many men took the wrong fork in the road, went a mile too far down an unfamiliar cove, and were never heard from again..... It was this kind of war in the Mountains: The killers had names, their victims had kin, and everybody owned a gun." -- Bushwhackers: The Civil War in North Carolina, The Mountains by William E. Trotter.



Natural Bridge, Alabama is one of the most beautiful spots in the state. It is the largest natural rock bridge east of the Mississippi River and the tourist destination of visitors from all over the world. But if you look past the natural beauty and start digging into the history of the place, you will find the terrible story of Henry Tucker, a trooper in the 1st Alabama Union Cavalry Regiment. As Joel Mize reports in "The Agonizing Death of Henry Tucker":

Henry Tucker is believed to be the son of William and Delilah Rue; a nephew of Simeon Tucker, Sergeant, Companies E&K, 1st Alabama Cavalry; a grandson of Daniel Tucker, soldier War 1812 of Marion/Fayette County Alabama and great-grandson of George Tucker, Revolutionary War soldier, buried at Hopewell cemetery, south of Glen Allen, Alabama. Henry Tucker had enlisted in the 1st Alabama Cavalry on March 11, 1863 in Glendale Mississippi. For reasons unknown, official "mustering-in" did not occur until October, 5, 1863. He had enlisted for a year but was released a little early - mustered out on February 5, 1864. His military duty completed, he returned home to his rugged hill country . . . to wait out the war, although he was also considering re-enlistment in the Union army. Little did he know, there would be no peace for him, for the dog-cavalry rangers and "homeguard" of the CSA were out to get any "traitor" they could find. Led by Stoke Roberts, the vigilante homeguard began scouring the country committing atrocities in the name of enforcing the Confederate's best interests - in forcing men into the CSA army and punishing those who did not join them. They finally reached the home of Henry Tucker on a March or April day during the spring of 1864. As the vigilantes rode into his yard, Henry shouted to his wife, "Lord God, there's a bunch of them homeguards coming up the road now. What can I do ?" "Here, hide quick in this meat box!" Callie, his wife ordered, pointing to a big box of rough planks in the cook room. Henry leaped into the box as the men rode up to the house and Callie threw an old worn quilt over the top of it.



It didn't work. Stoke Roberts and his men found Henry Tucker, bound him, placed him on a horse and took him south a few miles to a place called Ball Rock. There the fiends, and there is no other word for what followed but fiendish, staked Henry Tucker to a tree, built a slow fire under him and began to cut pieces off of him. They made it last as long as they could. Finally, toward the end, Stoke Roberts cut out Henry Tucker's liver and ate it. When Henry's death was just moments away, Roberts bashed in the Union trooper's head with a chopping axe. Says Mize: "William Rowell heard the prisoner's screams for a mile and a half. Tom Johnson and Andy Ingle found the body four days later, still hanging as the torturers had left him and buried Henry Tucker north of O'Mary cemetery."

Like every other atrocity in the war in the mountains, this wasn't the end of it. Henry Tucker's Unionist friends tracked down Stoke Roberts about four months later and did him, in the words of one of their descendants as told to me in 1988, "lick for lick just like he did poor Henry." He paused, "They didn't eat him though," he said, "because they was Christians." It was that kind of war in the mountains -- personal.


We tend to think today, those of us who reflect back on it at all, that the War Between the States was simply a war of big battlefields and stirring changes, banners held on high, et cetera, ad nauseum. This reading of the war tends to convince us that it could never come again. But a closer reading of history reveals that this was not simply a war between the states but a war within the states, a true civil war of former friends and neighbors, made all the more ghastly by the nature of the personal associations of the combatants. Understand that, and then the spectre of its recurrence seems much more possible. Read, and learn.


THE TRUE LEGEND OF AUNT JENNY'S SOAP DISH
"AUNT JENNY" BROOKS


When the War Between the States came to her door in late 1863, Louisa Elizabeth Jane Bates Brooks was 37 years old. A beautiful, blue-eyed half-Cherokee from Walker County, Alabama, she had married Willis Brooks, a saddler and boot maker from Kentucky when she was 14 and he was 35. Willis called her “Jenny.” Together they raised a large family – eight kids—and ran a roadhouse – sort of a combination tavern and inn – on the Byler Road in southwest Lawrence County.

The mountain folk of Alabama had never been keen on secession, looking on it as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” and most tried at first to just stay out of the way and remain neutral. But the Confederacy enacted a draft law and a “tax-in-kind” law. The first made it mandatory for young white southerners to serve in the Confederate army and the second demanded that any poor folks who could not afford to pay their taxes in hard cash had to give up part of their crops or their farm animals to support the war. To enforce these laws, the Confederate “Home Guard” was mobilized to seek out draft dodgers (called “outliers” or “mossbacks”) and to seize the war levy from the poor farmers who lived in the hills. The farmers viewed this as theft of food from their children's mouths. They hardly had enough to eat in the best of times to get through the winter and now the “Secesh” wanted them to starve their children to feed Jeff Davis’ army. These laws ensured that the war would come to the mountains of Alabama.

Now John Brooks was about 17 when the Home Guard road up to the Byler Road inn. The Home Guard was made up of men who were too old, too young, or had medical conditions that prevented them from joining the army. There also were men who were exempted by virtue of the fact that they had 20 or more slaves. This loophole was for rich planters and was deeply resented by the poor white farmers who made up the bulk of the Confederate army and led to many desertions. The hills around the Brooks’ tavern were in fact full of deserters and draft dodgers by late 1863. Even more men had run off to join the 1st Alabama Union Cavalry Regiment, or to become scouts and spies for the Union Army.

So many stories have grown up around the legend of Aunt Jenny that we don't know for sure what the Home Guard patrol of 8 men had in mind when they stopped at the Brooks' place. Even the date is a bit hazy. It was probably late 1863 but could have been early 1864. They might have been looking to draft young John Brooks or they might have wanted to punish Willis Brooks for aiding Union men and Confederate deserters who were hiding all through the hills of north Alabama. What is certain is that, at gunpoint, 57 year old Willis Brooks was seized, bound and tortured. The Home Guard put a noose around Willis' neck and started to hang him from the limb of a tree in his own front yard. Jenny and the children, including Angeline (15), Mack (13), Amanda (11), Willis Jr. (9), Donner, a 7-year-old girl and Gainum (3) could only watch in horror lest they too be killed. Her youngest son Henry was an infant, still nursing at her breast. When John burst from the house to save his father, he was shot dead by the Home Guard. Then they shot Willis Brooks, Sr. as he hung there and rode away.

Now of all the versions of the legend of Aunt Jenny Brooks that are told, this much is certain. Jenny Brooks lowered her husband’s body out of the tree, laid him next to their oldest son and gathered all the children around. Placing the boys’ hands in the sticky blood on their father’s chest --even tiny Henry’s, Jenny made them swear a “blood oath” that they would never rest until all eight of those killers were dead.

Later, Jenny would proudly say that she “wasted many a keg of powder teachin’ my boys how to shoot!” The feud that started with the killing of Jenny’s husband and oldest son in 1863 lasted forty years. Jenny and her second son Mack got the first Home Guard, the leader, in early 1864 when they shot him from his horse shortly after he left his house. Jenny made Mack help her drag the body into the woods, where she cut off his head, but it in a burlap sack and carried it home. There, she threw it in a large boiling pot used to make lye soap and scooped and scrubbed the viscera away until she had a nice clean skull, minus the jawbone. This she used as a soap dish for the rest of her life.

Her boys, brought up with the sole purpose in life of being their father and brother’s avenging angels became deadly expert shooters and fairly competent killers. The war, like all wars, eventually ended. The feud did not. While Jenny kept track by making notches on a hickory stick, her boys sought out and killed seven of the eight Confederate Home Guards and another twelve or thirteen friends or relatives of the “Secesh” who got in the way of the Brooks’ bullets. The eighth literally disappeared off the face of the earth when he realized he was being stalked by the Brooks and their brother-in-law Sam Baker (who soon was well known as a stone-cold killer). Rumor said that he too was actually killed, but in her old age (by then known by the honorific title of “Aunt’) Jenny never claimed him, saying as she waved the hickory stick, “Seven ov’um have been got!”

Of her sons and sons-in-law who joined the feud, only Henry survived the bloodletting and he was himself shot dead in early 1920 by a large posse from nearby Winston County while pursuing an age-old mountain tradition of making moonshine. Heavily outnumbered, he managed to get off six or seven shots before he was hit twelve times. It still took Henry Brooks fifteen minutes to die. The “revenooers” also managed to kill his horse.

Aunt Jenny was always proud of her sons, saying to whoever came visiting (and many people did come visiting in her last years -- they say no one was elected on the Republican ticket in Winston County unless Aunt Jenny approved of him): “They all died like men, with their boots on!” She outlived them all, passing away in her bed at the age of 98 on March 29, 1924. She was known as a “good Christian woman” who did many good deeds for her fellow mountain folk, often handing out much needed cash to the poor. A shopkeeper once asked her why she kept so much money on her, and she replied rather pointedly, “I pay myself $20 a week just to tend to my own business.”

As she lay dying, surrounded by her many friends and kinfolk, her pastor asked if there was anything else they could do for her before she crossed over. Aunt Jenny paused, and then said weakly, “I’d like to wash my hands.” And so they brought a pan of water and Aunt Jenny’s soap dish that she had made back in 1864. One last time, she washed her hands in that murderer’s skull. When her hands were dry, she closed her eyes, and went to meet her Maker.

HISTORY, THEN AND NOW

The story of Aunt Jenny's soap dish is true, as is that of the horrible death of Henry Tucker. This is the way the war was in the mountains. It was, as William Trotter wrote, "a personal kind of war." And I told you all of that to tell you this:

If another civil war gets started in this country by the arrogant actions of the ignorant thugs of the imperial federal constabulary, blundering about like the Confederate Home Guard (Homeland Security?) of old, there will be some new soap dishes crafted up in Winston County, Alabama. You can count on it. For Winston County folks remember their history. For them, as Faulkner observed, the past is never dead, its not even past. "Home Guards," even ones with night vision goggles and MP-5s, will forget that at their own peril.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

(Sources for the tale of Aunt Jenny's soap dish include: “Mountain Feuds of Aunt Jenny Johnson and the Brooks Boys” by Edward Herring; “1902 Gunfight at Spokogee,” Wild West on www.historynet.com; “Librarian Uncovers, Brings to Life the Real Aunt Jenny,” by Michael Palmer, Tuscaloosa News, March 29, 2008; “Fire Destroys Aunt Jenny’s Abandoned Historic Home,” by Deangelo McDaniel, Decatur Daily, November 1, 2005; History of Winston County by Donald and Wynelle Dodd and original research by Mike Vanderboegh in Winston and Lawrence counties, 1987-1990. Sources for the death of Henry Tucker include: Tories of the Hills by Walter S. Thompson; Bushwhackers by William E. Trotter; "The Agonizing Death of Henry Tucker" by Joel Mize, http://www.1stalabamacavalryusv.com/roster/stories.asp?trooperid=2335)

TRUST......NO ONE...SEE?

The Agitator has a great piece on Our Leaders fondness for Secrecy. Go on over to Radley's and check out what we've all been living under for the past 8 years. Then be prepared for much worse once the Dems. win the "White House." Remember, all this current "Monarchy Crap" was explicitly and repeatedly denounced by the founders.

alea iacta est

TRUST......NO ONE?!

CLICK

QUOTE OF THE DECADE: "CELEBRATION" of American Values? The NRA?....

"WHEN IT GETS TOUGH, GROUPS 1 AND 2 WILL TURN ON GROUP 3."

Western Rifle Shooters Association has some good thoughts (probably truths) on the NRA and the 2ND AMENDMENT. Click the title to read about it. Then click here for more truth...

"LOOPHOLE"

"Loophole"
By Mike Vanderboegh
18 May 2008

"THERE'S A REASON THEY CALL 'EM 'CHEESEHEADS.'"

"We all remember the oaths we took, and they didn't have an expiration clause. There is no debating that the Constitution is under assault from enemies both foreign and domestic. Our elected public servants should quake in fear each time they hear the phone ring, the fax hum, the click of a mouse button, or better yet the sound of their office door opening. And if we don't provide the reason for them to be afraid we will be derelict in our duties as free citizens. I have always gotten better results when the other person I am dealing with has to worry about me pulling them across the desk to emphasize the depth of my convictions." -- Comment on KeepandBearArms.com by "OK fellow vets." (5/16/2008)

"I've got to tell you, I think the guy (the judge in the Olofson case) is out of his cotton-picking mind. I mean there's no semblance of proportion here, 30 months in prison? This is outrageous. . . Does anybody in that town care -- in that state (Wisconsin)care -- what's happening to one of their fellow citizens? I mean they're just sitting there like sponges watching it go by. And those -- by the way -- what's going by are the Second Amendment rights of every American." -- Lou Dobbs, CNN, 14 May 2008.

Last night, I read the Lou Dobbs' transcript regarding the Olofson case to a buddy of mine who has lived in Wisconsin. "Mike," he replied, "there's a reason they call 'em 'Cheeseheads.'" It would be hard to overestimate the frustration and anger which has swept the community of Second Amendment activists over the Olofson case and the continued sell-out of our rights by those who claim to be our friends, those indeed who claim to be our leaders: the Republican party and the National Rifle Association. Those who ignore this anger do so at their own peril, and that includes most especially the arrogant ninja-wannabes of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. One day soon, they're going to tackle the wrong guy, an angry guy, a guy who knows what Olofson really represents -- the complete breakdown of the rule of law in our country. And that guy is going to deliver them justice, if not law.

This dangerous anger comes from our frustration that we have been gradually stripped of any possibility of the redress of our grievances by peaceful means. What do the courts mean when the BATF and their handmaiden US attorney enablers are able to violate with impunity the laws which are supposed to regulate them? Of what significance is a positive ruling in the Heller case when measured against the government villainy represented by Olofson? And how long as it been since a traditional view of the Constitution has been delivered in the wrongly named "main stream media?" In truth, we have become a despised minority in our own country, shoved back from the free exercise of our God given rights, and its about to get worse.

"MURDER HOLES"

Loophole: noun
1 a: a small opening through which small arms may be fired
b: a similar opening to admit light and air or to permit observation
2: a means of escape; especially : an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded -- Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Regardless of who wins the next election, we will have a president who has pledged to "close the gun show loophole." Funny word, "loophole," especially when used in a firearms context. I'm sure the liberal lawyers like Josh Sugarman who came up with the canard "assault weapons" invented this one as well. Products of their law school upbringing, I'm sure they meant the second definition rather than the first. Indeed, being completely ignorant of the history of firearms, I doubt they knew of the first meaning of the word at all.
Fort Barrancas, Entrance to Pensacola Bay, Florida


One of the wonderful things about living in north central Alabama is its proximity to the Gulf coast of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Pensacola is one my favorite places along those white sandy beaches. What with Fort Pickens and her sister Fort Barrancas both available for exploration, a history buff like me can't resist their ghostly charms.

Completed in 1844 as a small sea coast defense fortification capable of resisting a land assault (if not a regular attack) Fort Barrancas is one of most interesting and creepiest little masonry castles on the Gulf Coast. Fort Barrancas was sited on a slight bluff above a pre-existing battery built by the Spanish opposite the entrance to Pensacola Bay where it could cross the fire of its water bearing heavy guns with those of Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island and Fort McRee on Foster's Bank. The fort itself consists of a main work traced as an irregular quadrilateral redoubt with two fronts positioned for land defense and two fronts for defense of the bay. A counterscarp wall covers the two land fronts and is itself covered by a massive earthen glacis that seems to slope a bit too sharply for the foot to be well seen from the interior crest of the parapet of the main work, a fact of some importance since the work does not feature a covered way for defense against a land attack. The main ditch, which was about 34 feet wide, was defended by crenallated scarp and counterscarp galleries; embrasured and loopholed casemates were built into both extremities of the counterscarp gallery (to flank the water fronts of the main work) and within the salient angle of the two land fronts. -- Source: http://civilwarfortifications.com/
Colonel H.L. Scott, in his 1864 Military Dictionary, defined loopholes as "apertures formed in a wall or stockade, that through them a fire of musketry may be directed on the exterior ground. . . Loopholed Galleries . . .are vaulted passages or casemates, usually placed behind the counterscarp revetment, and behind the gorges of detached works, having holes pierced through the walls, to enable the defenders to bring a musketry fire from unseen positions, upon the assailants in the ditch. Loopholes, however, are not confined to galleries. In modern fortifications, the revetments, both scarp and counterscarp, are very generally pierced for a musketry fire." Here is an example of a loophole in the scarp gallery of the northeast land front of Fort Barrancas:




Loopholes as a feature of military fortifications predate both gunpowder and masonry castles, being originally built as angled slits in wooden palisades to give bowmen good fields of fire while affording them excellent protection from enemy bowmen. Loopholes are murder holes, designed to allow one marksman to kill the maximum number of attackers from cover. Loopholes are still used today, especially in city fighting. Witness this quote from a recent Marine manual on Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT):

"Machine guns play an important role in urban military operations. . .Upon entering a building, all windows and doors should be secured. If boards are used, leave small gaps between the boards to allow for alternate firing positions. . .Loopholes should be used extensively when defended a building. Loophole construction should not follow any logical pattern or be constructed at floor or tabletop level. By varying the height and location of loopholes, you will make it difficult for the enemy to pinpoint and target the loophole firing position. Dummy loopholes should also be used to deceive the enemy in his efforts to locate actual firing positions. Loophole openings should be small in front and wide in back" Machine Guns in Urban Terrain, http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6453/moutpoi43.html
Thus, from bows and arrows to machine guns in the 21st Century, loopholes have served their purpose. Just where and when the terminology used for killing became a "an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded" is lost in time. I don't know, ask a lawyer.

"DROWNING IN AN OCEAN OF LIES."

"Americans today are drowning in an ocean of lies. Virtually everything they think they know -- about history, about economics, about the Constitution and the law, about a hundred other things -- is wrong. The shameful truth about the National Rifle Association, for example, is that there seems to be some kind of mutually beneficial -- symbiotic -- relationship between that group, which would like you to believe it was created to protect the Second Amendment right of the people to keep and bear arms, and the agency that enforces federal gun laws, the notorious Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Neither could exist without the other to prop it up." -- L. Neil Smith, "With Friends Like the NRA . . ", http://www.jpfo.org/smith/smith-friends-like-nra.htm

"Over the years, I haven't agreed with the NRA on every issue. I have supported efforts to have NICS background checks apply to gun sales at gun shows. I recognize that gun shows are enjoyed by millions of law-abiding Americans. I do not support efforts by those who seek to regulate them out of existence. But I believe an accurate, fair and instant background check at guns shows is a reasonable requirement." -- John McCain, Speech to the NRA Annual Convention, 16 May 2008.

"Reasonable requirement" and "gunshow loophole" are just two drops in this ocean of lies. And John McCain has been prominent in pimping the "gunshow loophole" line. Others have written convincingly and passionately about the nature of these lies. Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, for one. (See Larry's series of articles on the GOA website. GOA rates John McCain as an "F Minus" on the Second Amendment) In 2002, McCain and his Democrat sidekick Joe Lieberman produced television ads on this subject for "Americans for Gun Safety" (AGS), seeking public support for their own bill to "close the loophole." Dave Kopel fired back in an article in National Review Online called "Gun Games":

"(McCain's and Lieberman's statements) create the entirely false impression that gun shows are some sort of Brigadoon, where the normal gun laws do not apply . . .(T)o the contrary, federal gun laws (for firearms dealers) apply at gun shows preecisely as they apply anywhere else. . . (But) if you are not engaged in the business, then the federal paperwork laws do not apply to you -- nor should they, since federal power to regulate gun sales is based on the interstate commerce power, and a collector who sells three guns a year to people in his home state is not engaged in interstate commerce. . . In other words, there is no 'gun show loophole.' The phrase is an audacious lie, invented by people who want to abolish privacy for firearms owners . . . AGS is simply using Fabian tactics. Its own internal strategy documents state that its long-range goal is the licensing and registration of every gun owner in the United States. . . And, in fact, McCain-Lieberman does far more than impose federal registration and background checks on small-time, non-business vendors at gun shows. As I detail in the Issue Paper 'Should Gun Shows Be Outlawed?' McCain-Lieberman is a cornucopia of poison pills which would allow a future anti-gun executive branch to shut down gun shows entirely. In particular, the bill makes it illegal for a person to operate a gun show without a federal license, and structures the license application process so that licenses need never be issued. The bill indirectly requires that people who ATTEND gun shows must be registered. The bill even requires that people who cdon't sell guns (e.g., the numerous book, food and clothing vendors at gun shows) be registered; and it would allow the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to demand a list of every book being sold by a book vendor. Finally, McCain-Lieberman authorizes BATF to create additional, limitless gun-show regulations, which could be used to make it nearly impossible for gun shows to be held." -- National Review Online, 21 May 2002.

Sound like a "reasonable requirement" to you?

When McCain first started this nonsense, the NRA bitterly denounced him. Wayne LaPierre asked, "Is it possible that John McCain thinks you have too much freedom?"

That was then. Now, they have him speak at their convention AND NO ONE DENOUNCES HIM. He is not booed into shamed silence. Has McCain recanted? Has he changed his mind? NO, he stands there in front of them and tells them how he still intends to take away our rights. The NRA not only won't fight for your rights, they won't even risk being impolite for them. He feeds them excrement and they eat it with gusto.

McCain wants government control of all private firearms sales! That's what his "loophole" is all about. Not even King George III was THAT grasping. It's like an urbane and sophisticated Hitler addressing a crowd of German Jews, telling them "I'm not going to persecute you as much as the OTHER guy, so vote for me." Jeez leweez, can't these NRA idiots SEE THAT?!?!?

And many no doubt applauded anyway. Just to be polite.

"A WAKE UP CALL"

"This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after (the GOP loss in) Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day. -- "Pity Party," Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, 16 May 2008

The time for politeness is long past. Like the poster on KeepandBearArms.com, it is time for us to start pulling these pukes across the desk to emphasize the depth of our convictions. Realize this: we have no friends. Not in the media, not in the courts, not in either major party. We have only ourselves, alone. The next President, whoever he is, WILL sign a "gun show loophole" bill. How shall we respond? One way might be to enagage in civil disobedience. They can ban "unauthorized" gunshows, and we can conduct them anyway, daring the BATF to do anything about it. Why not hold the first one at Fort Barrancas? It has loopholes, ready-made. Just in case they want to see what a REAL loophole is for.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

RESISTANCE

RESISTANCE
by Mike Vanderboegh
13 May 2008

“It is only the dead who have seen the end of war” -- Plato, 428 BC - 348 BC

"I hate war." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940, when he was running for a third term.

"MAYBE SOMEBODY JUST FORGOT WHAT IT WAS LIKE."

Last week, on 7 May, was the anniversary of V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) -- the date in 1945 when the World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany and ended Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Hitler had committed suicide on 30 April. The war in Europe was over. The act of military surrender was signed on May 7 in Reims, France. (The Russians signed a day later in Berlin). Between 60 and 70 million people who had been living at the beginning of the world war were dead by the time the Japanese surrendered a few months later, most of them innocent civilians who had no idea why the war was necessary -- ignorant of why, in fact, they were being killed. Death had found many of them at home, blasted apart by aerial bombs, incinerated in firestorms conventional and atomic. Others were rousted from their houses, transported somewhere convenient for the killers, and machine-gunned, bayoneted or gassed -- entire families, old and young -- because of who they were, or in retribution for someone else's act of defiance. A few, a statistical minority, got to fight their enemies -- either as soldiers in armies or as resistance fighters in the dark.

I grew up listening to the stories of the men who left their homes to cross the vast oceans and defeat the enemies of western civilization. The stories of the survivors, that is. In every tale was the mention of other men -- the valiant, the feckless, the unlucky, who remained "over there" in neat cemeteries of white markers or beneath the waves, or worse, were simply missing -- never to return to their loved ones, never to love, to build or grow old watching their children and grandchildren. Somewhere in those stories of triumph and loss, I became an amateur historian, in order to understand. And yet, after all these years, I still don't. Oh, I know now what motivates men to fight for their country, their liberty or just for their friends. But I still don't get why the evil greedy bastards throughout history have always managed to start vicious wars for power, or territory that isn't theirs, or plunder, or sometimes just because they can.

Many times I think, like Powers Boothe's Colonel Tanner in Red Dawn (1984), wars break out because of simple historical amnesia:

Darryl Bates: What started it?
Col. Andy Tanner: I don't know. Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they're gonna fight. Jed Eckert: That simple, is it?
Col. Andy Tanner: Maybe somebody just forgot what it was like.
-- Red Dawn, 1984
In Why Nations Go to War, Darian Domer, observes that both sides in a conflict will claim that morality justifies their fight. Heck, the Wehrmacht in World War II carried out operations in support of the Final Solution wearing belt buckles that said "Gott mit uns." (God is with us.) Domer also states that the rationale for beginning a war depends on an overly optimistic assessment of the outcome of hostilities -- both the casualties and the costs and on misperceptions of the enemy's intentions.

I have a bumper sticker on the back of my Chevy Blazer, two of them actually. The one on the left says, "If you think 'war is not the answer . . .'" The one on the right finishes, "Then you don't understand the question." I never got around to putting the "Remember 9/11" sticker under the one on the right. As anyone who has read much of my writing before knows, I have a son in Iraq, currently on his second tour as a Sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division. He still believes in the mission, so I do too. I support him unconditionally and totally, and all of his comrades in arms. I started out putting the above sentiment on my vehicle to poke a rhetorical stick in the eyes of the peace-love-dopes who sport those "War is NOT the answer" bumper stickers.

But to me the twin stickers are not about Iraq, but rather a restatement of George Washington's dictum that only those who are prepared for war will have peace. What liberals fail to grasp is that you don't have to be a war lover to believe this. Indeed, those who have studied the history of human conflict (and especially those who have had to fight them) know that war is the sum of all human evil. This is even more true of civil wars. Only sociopaths and lunatics would disagree with F.D.R.'s quote above. There are, however, a few things worse than war: oppression, slavery, and the unanswered murder of innocents, including your own family. Faced with this alternative, those of us who wish to be free have but one choice -- resistance

"YOU SIMPLY CANNOT RESPOND WITH NICETIES...."

"When you face violence -- political violence such as in Germany -- you simply cannot respond with niceties; you cannot deal honestly with dishonesty." -- Belgian "Pere" Bodson to his pacifist son Herman, 1935, in Agent for the Resistance: A Belgian Saboteur in World War II, Herman Bodson, Texas A&M Press, 1994, p. 9.

Like many Europeans horrified by the slaughter of the Great War (1914-1918), Herman Bodson was raised to be a pacifist by his father. But with Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Belgians like the Bodsons began to reconsider.

"As my thesis was being printed in August (1937), I reported for my induction physical. My country was calling, the enemy was known, his views were known, and I looked forward to serving. The only possibility of not being enslaved was to fight. I was ready, as was every loyal Belgian. We had had the experience of German occupation in World War I and by now we knew the Nazis would be worse." -- Ibid., p. 19.

When the Germans once again invaded their little country on the 10th of May 1940, it didn't take them long to defeat the Belgian army, whose general staff -- in the interest of preserving the sham protection of "neutrality" -- had refused to even carry out cooperative planning with the French and the British. After his release from POW status, Herman Bodson the former pacifist began to explore the paths of resistance.

"Having been raised a pacifist, never having had any toys resembling a gun, hating the use of force, I was certainly not prepared to become a belligerent person. I had already realized I could not live with the German philosophy, and now that they had imported it into my country, it was just intolerable. Something had to be done. From there came the thoughts of rebellion, or resistance. But I also realized that thoughts alone would not achieve anything, action was needed. Individual acts, even if possible, would have very little effect against this fantastic war machine well oiled by propaganda. The only logical way to organize would be to form small groups of trusted friends to discuss, train for, and embark on some serious and very dangerous ventures." Ibid., p. 50.

The Germans, for their part, considered the Belgians fellow Aryans and even were able to recruit some quislings into the Waffen SS. The Nazis figured that after their racial "bruders" got over pining for the old order, they would embrace Hitler's "New Order." Belgians like Herman Bodson soon gave the Germans and their allies plenty of reasons to regret their failure to anticipate effective resistance.

JACK BOOTED THUGS WITHOUT A CLUE.

I suppose this is always the way it is with those who start the wars. They simply can't or won't see what the unintended consequences of their actions are going to be, even when others are completely unsurprised and even predict it publicly. Which brings me, as many of you familiar with my work have probably already guessed where I was heading, to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Look, there are roughly three different classes of folks who read my stuff these days. The first is made up of my beloved gunnies, the awake and aware members of the armed citizenry of the United States. The second, far less numerous, are the objects of my gun control ridicule -- the Op-Ed page-writing venal morons and collectivist "useful idiots" to whom I often address my essay responses. And the third, and really the most important of all, is what has become the armed opposition to the constitutional republic as represented by the forces of the imperial federal leviathan: the BATFags and their bigger, meaner, more deadly brethren, the Fibbies.

These tax-paid mokes read my stuff for evidence that I have strayed across the shifting line of post-PATRIOT Act law into sedition or worse, for they would like to shut me up. Some of them would like to shut me up with nails in my coffin, or so I've been told. I have tried mightily to stay on the right side of the law while trying to educate these historical ignoramuses about the dangers to everyone of their violating the Law of Unintended Consequences. It has been an uphill climb, I'm here to tell you.

As I learned only too well in the 90s, these agencies have an institutional memory with all the longevity of a fruit fly's honeymoon. If they learned anything from Waco or Ruby Ridge (and I doubt they did very much) they have long ago forgot it. Today, they are totally unaware of how such outrages as the Olofson case are viewed by people -- armed people I might add -- who internalized those lessons and who will never forget them. They are truly jack booted thugs without a clue.

They sit in their steel and concrete headquarters, look out their windows and believe they are masters of all they survey. They are in their own minds, as I have pointed out in earlier essays, The Untouchables. Having escaped the consequences of their bloody errors in the 90s and lacking even the most superficial oversight from their bureaucratic and elected masters, they do anything we can't or won't stop them from doing. And as Olofson demonstrates, that includes rigging evidence, suborning perjury and manipulating judges to get the outcome they want. They are the Men in Black -- above the law, outside it -- and it ain't no Hollywood action comedy, it's all too real.

Now, if these jerks were well-read in history, they wouldn't be quite so smug in their arrogant ignorance. If they understood that folks who DO read history could, come some future "nut cuttin' time," inflict a few of those lessons on THEM, well, they might be a little more polite and law-abiding. For example, if somebody in one of those shiny corner offices actually read Bodson's memoir on the Belgian resistance from cover to cover, they might get a little nervous -- deservedly so, in my opinion, after their recent unlawful depredations.

Remember that His Majesty's General Gage did not want to start a war in April 1775. Indeed, the trip to Concord was anticipated to be a simple gun raid -- to be executed there and back before anyone was the wiser. Oops. That miscalculation cost the Brits the best half of a continent. Wars CAN start by accident.

Thus, I think it would be a public service to draw the attention of the present-day gun-seizing, Redcoat-equivalents to a few of the more awful lessons of modern resistance war so that we all may thereby more easily avoid its horrors. Wars are started, remember, by "overly optimistic assessment of the outcome of hostilities -- both the casualties and the costs and on misperceptions of the enemy's intentions" to requote Domer. Presumably then, we may better avoid war if everybody understands the horrors attendant to it. This is surely a public good, and so I offer this anecdote from Bodson's book in the interest of continued peace and tranquility.

NUMBER 453 AVENUE LOUISE

The Belgians like Bodson who stayed on their home ground and fought the Nazis in the merciless, unequal shadow war of night and fog had help from across the North Sea in Britain. A number of Belgians fled to Britain to continue the war against the common Nazi enemy, especially pilots like Jean Michel De Selys Longchamps -- a man who was both fighter pilot and resistance fighter.

Baron Jean Michel P.M.G. De Selys Longchamps
Distinguished Flying Cross, Chevalier de l'ordre de Leopold, Croix de Guerre

In 1939 in Brussells, the capitol of Belgium, two old manor houses on the Avenue Louise were torn down to make way for a tall new building of concrete, steel and glass which towered over the surrounding structures. When the Germans seized Belgium the following year, the Gestapo made Number 453 Avenue Louise their new home-away-from-home. For almost three years, the Nazis dragged Belgian Jews, "politicals" and resistants to their shiny headquarters for interrogation and execution. Among these Belgian martyrs were friends and relatives of the Baron Jean Michel P.M.G. De Sels Longchamps (Bodson says the victims included de Selys' father). It would have been better for the Nazis if they had not attracted the attention of this amazing pilot.

Born in Brussels on 31 May 1912, de Selys was a Belgian cavalry officer at the time of the German attack on Belgium. After the surrender in May 1940 he came to England with the Dunkirk evacuation. Immediately returning to France to continue the fight, when France fell he managed to escape via Marseilles to Gibraltar. In his eagerness to reach England to continue the war, de Selys traveled to Morocco to join up with Belgian aviators. He was arrested by the Vichy authorities in Morocco and returned to France and imprisoned in Marseilles. Transferred to an internment camp near Montpelier, de Selys escaped and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain and finally reached England. Despite being rather old for pilot training, he was accepted as a pilot in the RAF in 609 Squadron based at Manston in Kent.

The 609 Squadron flew Hawker Typhoon Bs, nicknamed "Tiffies" -- big fast single-seat attack aircraft mounting 4 Hispano Suiza 20mm cannons. Tiffies made great bomber killers, but after the Battle of Britain German bombers were a bit scarce so they were employed in another role: ground attack.
Hawker Typhoon showing the big 20mm cannons.

Jean de Selys leans against the prop of a Hawker Typhoon B, at Duxford, England, 1942, when the Belgian minister Camille Gutt visited the Belgian 609'ers.

By January 1943, the Tiffies of 609 Squadron were being employed on "Rhubarb" flights -- ground attack missions in France and Belgium aimed at destroying the transportation and communication infrastructure of "Festung Europa". For months, de Selys had been begging his superiors to let 609 Squadron attack Number 453 Avenue Louise. Each time he was turned down. On 20 January 1943, Flight Lieutenant Jean de Selys Longchamps was flying a routine "Rhubarb" with a fellow Belgian Andre Blanco. They were looking for locomotives and they split up. De Selys destroyed his and radioed Blanco to return to base. Blanco complied. De Selys had another idea.

The Belgian flight lieutenant violated his RAF orders, and turned the nose of his Typhoon toward Brussels. He was there in minutes, coming into the capitol he knew so well, buzzing the local horse track as he made a bee-line for Gestapo headquarters. Flying just above the deck, an incredibly dangerous feat in Belgium's largest city, he zoomed down the two-miles of the Avenue de Louise with his prop blast blowing the hats off pedestrians and bicyclists below and his wingtips just clearing the buildings on either side.

In Number 453, Gestapomen sat at their desks, confident in their modern, high-class surroundings. Let Bodson take up the story:

"Coming from the west, the pilot was able to see the building from quite a distance as it faced the wide Avenue de Mot and the adjacent Parc de la Cambre. Approaching over the suburban community of Ixelles and flying at rooftop level to avoid early detection, the pilot could easily aim at the building and direct the fire of his wing guns at its base. Continuing his fire while pulling up on the joystick, he sprayed the complex from basement to roof with a murderous hail of (20mm) explosive bullets. . . The attack had taken place around ten in the morning while the building was fully lit by the rising spring sun. . . The morale boost for us was immense, for the pilot had demonstrated that the Germans were vulnerable and unable to exercise complete control of they air space. They could also be victims." Ibid, p. 78-79

De Selys' marksmanship was impeccable. As he walked his fire up from bottom to top, every single 20mm projectile hit the building, leaving those on either side and beyond untouched. As the Tiffie roared up in an almost vertical climb, de Selys tossed out of his open canopy a memento for the Gestapo. Bodson recalls it was a wreath with de Selys' father's name on it. Other accounts say he dropped two flags, one the Belgian Tricolor, the other the Union Jack of Britain. Bodson was able to get inside the building the next day posing as a repair contractor. Recalled the ex-pacifist with satisfaction approaching glee,

"It was unbelievable the damage those little explosives had done. I particularly remember a third-floor office, a major's office. One bullet had entered his mahogany desk and exploded, temporarily adding the major to the plastering job. By the time we arrived he had already been scraped away. How many German agents died that day I was not able to tell, but from the evidence of the damage, quite a few. All the big shots had offices in the front of the building looking out on the Avenue De Mot and the park beyond." Ibid, p. 79. (Note: The butcher's bill was later estimated to be 30 dead Gestapo officers.)



On his return to base, de Selys was demoted to Pilot Officer and transferred to another squadron in punishment for disobeying orders to fly off and play resistance fighter. At the same time, he was awarded the RAF Distinguished Flying Cross. On 16 August 1943, after returning from a mission over Ostend in his beloved Belgium, he crashed on landing at Manston and was killed . You can find his grave, number 3002A, in Minster Cemetery nearby. Number 453 Avenue Louise still stands today, and the Belgian people have erected a statue to their heroic, if disobedient, flying resistance fighter. Recalled Bodson,

"Belgian morale was low . . . (but) the day of the attack was a day of joy. That week, while the news was told around the country, was a week of joy. We were not alone. We were the oppressed, we were the victims, but across the North Sea we had friends, friends who cared and were ready to help." Ibid., p. 79

So there you have it, G-Men -- a snippet of ancient history poorly told. It has absolutely nothing to do with you as you go about framing people like poor young Olofson. Nothing whatsoever. There is no reason why you should lose any sleep over it. Indeed, I present it here as an informational tale only, from another place long ago and far away. You may go to your tall shiny 21st Century offices and look out the windows down the broad streets below secure in the notion that nothing of the sort could happen to you. Not here, not in America. First of all, I'm sure you'll never be so stupid as to become as oppressive to your own people as a Gestapo man was to the Belgians in 1943. And secondly, I don't think the Confederate Air Force has any Hawker Typhoon B's flying. Yeah, I'm pretty sure of that. Just don't screw up and fatally victimize the wrong guy who has a son who happens to be an A-10 or Apache pilot. Naw. That couldn't happen. Could it?

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

MONOPOLY

Monopoly
(or, Slouching toward "nut cuttin' time.")

by Mike Vanderboegh
10 May 2008

“The government must have a monopoly on force,” Ladd Everitt, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence


"You will die like dogs." -- El Guapo

THE "EL GUAPO" AND "JEFE" OF GUN CONTROL

Monopoly, noun
1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2 : exclusive possession or control
3 : a commodity controlled by one party
4 : one that has a monopoly
Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Meet Josh Horwitz, the El Guapo ("the Handsome One") of the victim disarmament crowd.

(Tiny head reputed to be actual size.)

Horwitz should not be confused with Alfonso Arau, the original El Guapo: the muy malo bad guy Mexican bandit in the 1986 comedy movie, The Three Amigos:





Horwitz, unlike Alfonso Arau's comedic role, is real, and not funny in the least. Indeed, he's far more dangerous than any Mexican bandit, real or imagined. Joshua Horwitz is (of course) a lawyer and is Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). A graduate of the University of Michigan, he has a law degree from the George Washington University and he is currently a visiting scholar at the notoriously anti-firearm Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (an institution that’s been known to “tweak” gun statistics now and again). He says he's “working on a book, Freedom Under Fire, examining the relationship between guns and democracy.” We can only hope that his book is more intellectually honest and scrupulously footnoted than Bellesiles' now discredited “history” which Horwitz pimped at the time of its publishing with great enthusiasm. Somehow though, I doubt it. The CSGV and its sister organization, the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (EFSGV),

"emerged from the civil rights movement in the early 1970s to campaign for measures aimed at reducing firearm death and injury. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence or CSGV is a non-partisan group of 45 organizations representing 100,000 individual members that was founded in 1974 to ban handguns, but now seeks to ban assault weapons and strengthen other gun control laws in the United States. The coalition works at the state and federal level to prevent gun violence through both litigation and legislative lobbying. The organization was originally known as the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. In the early 1980's the organization's name was changed to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence."

Now every "El Guapo" needs a right-hand man named "Jefe" (Chief"). In The Three Amigos it was Tony Plana (below):


Personally, I was more impressed with Plana's acting in The Wild Bunch, but that's another story. But if Horwitz is the "El Guapo of Gun Control," here is his "Jefe." Meet Casey Anderson.
"Jefe" of CSGV

Another lawyer, Anderson is the "Litigation Consulting Manager" of a company called CapAnalysis. Anderson graduated from Georgetown in 1989 with a BSFS in International Affairs, went to journalism school in 1990 and earned a law degree from Georgetown in 1997. According to his company bio:

Casey Anderson has almost two decades of legal and communications experience, including several years developing and executing legislative and media relations strategies as a senior staffer on Capitol Hill and for large corporations and non-profit organizations. Earlier in his career, Casey practiced law with the firm of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo, and he worked as a newspaper reporter and judicial clerk before entering private legal practice. He has represented clients in matters involving intellectual property, product liability, competition policy, invasion of privacy, telecommunications and media regulation, and other issues. . . Pro Bono Experience: Represented prison reform group before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in regulatory proceedings on prison pay phone rates; Won judgment for tenant in D.C. Superior Court bench trial, including counterclaim against landlord for charging illegal rent under HUD Section 8 housing subsidy program.


Now CapAnalysis is no storefront operation. According to its website:


CapAnalysis provides economic, financial, regulatory, environmental, and litigation consulting services. Our work has played a central role in achieving positive outcomes for our clients in some of the most high-profile and significant antitrust, intellectual property, regulatory and business litigation matters in recent years. Our 50+ professionals include Ph.D. economists, CPAs, CFAs, CVAs and other certified specialists. Our experts are widely published, and our public reports have received widespread attention in the media. With offices in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Brussels, and affiliate offices in Amsterdam, Chicago, Houston, Irvine, London, Menlo Park, Paris, and Salt Lake City, CapAnalysis offers clients transatlantic services with seamless delivery. CapAnalysis is led by Chairman Donald L. Martin, and Vice Chairman Mark Glueck. Our litigation consulting practice is led by Senior Vice President Charles Kauffman.


Ironically, Donald Martin, the Chairman of CapAnalysis is an economist whose "expertise includes antitrust merger and litigation work, intellectual property, and commercial and antitrust damage analysis, with extensive experience in price fixing matters." Perhaps ironic, perhaps not. For you see his employee, "Jefe" Anderson, has just coauthored with "El Guapo" Horwitz a gun control tour de farce entitled, "The Game of Monopoly."
Liberal Trial Lawyers Demonstrate Majority Rule at Work

DEMOCRACY, SWEET DEMOCRACY

El Guapo: Jefe, you do not understand women. You cannot force open the petals of a flower. When the flower is ready, it opens itself up to you.
Jefe: So when do you think Carmen will open up her flower to you?
El Guapo: Tonight, or I will kill her!


Published at The Huffington Post on 6 May 2008, the article El Guapo and Jefe co-authored advanced the same theory, although not as baldly stated, as that stated earlier by their fellow bandido of gun control, CSGV's Ladd Everitt:

“The government must have a monopoly on force.”

El Guapo and Jefe are concerned, you see, that the upcoming Heller decision may overturn their gun control cart for good and all. Scratch a liberal, get a fascist:

In its decision, the Court of Appeals asserted a broad range of purposes for the Second Amendment, including hunting, self-defense and, most notably, to defend against the "depredations of a tyrannical government." After the ruling was successfully appealed to the Supreme Court by the District of Columbia, the National Rifle Association made a similar argument in their brief to the Court, affirming that the "very existence of an armed citizenry will tend to discourage would-be tyrants from attempting to use paid troops to 'pacify' the populace." Such "insurrectionist" philosophy is common among a small but vocal group of gun rights supporters. Insurrectionists assert that unrestricted access to guns of every kind is an essential element of freedom. Government is seen as a likely enemy, and gun regulation is viewed as a plot to monitor gun ownership and, ultimately, to confiscate all private firearms. If this insurrectionist logic were to be embraced by the Supreme Court, however, our democracy would be severely degraded.

Ah, democracy, sweet democracy. El Guapo and Jefe are right you know. Democracy IS "severely degraded" by constitutional restrictions. AND THAT'S JUST THE WAY THE FOUNDERS WANTED IT.
Democracy, pure majority rule, as I have observed in previous writings, is three wolves and a sheep sitting down to vote on what (or who) to have for dinner. The rights of the sheep are by no means protected in such a scheme. The Founders, who were nothing if not avid students of history, understood this. James Madison observed:

'Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.' -- Federalist #10, James Madison

In a letter to John Taylor, 15 April 1814, John Adams wrote:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. -- John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850), Vol. VI, p. 484.
This was an attitude Adams held his entire life:

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy; such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. -- The Papers of John Adams, Robert J. Taylor, editor (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977), Vol. I, p. 83, from "An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, with the Author's Comment in 1807," written on August 29, 1763, but first published by John Adams in 1807.

"The execrable cruelty of one or a very few." This is what a government monopoly on force inevitably leads to. This why the Founders did not give us the "democracy" that El Guapo and Jefe wish for, but a constitutional republic of enumerated powers, checks and balances, and most importantly a Bill of Rights, which contain a guarantee of the people's God-given right to arms. Horwitz and Anderson despise this arrangement, calling it an "insurrectionist" theory. Indeed, they understand the constitutional republic about as well as the cinematic El Guapo understands women.

An insurrection, in case your English is a little rusty, is an act or instance of rebelling or revolting against civil authority or an established government. An insurrectionist is a person who promotes or takes part in an insurrection. You know, like the monarchy of King George III was an established government and the Founders were the principal insurrectionists against its tyranny. King George wished for a "monopoly of force" against the colonists. The colonists, being free men, declined to give it to him, and they in turn, gave us a Constitution that ensured their descendants would have the same opportunity.

SLOUCHING TOWARD "NUT CUTTIN' TIME"

So, shall we embrace this label that El Guapo and Jefe have thrown at us in an attempt to discredit us among the weak minded historical amnesiacs among our fellow countrymen? Jefferson did. This is precisely what he was talking about when he observed that the tree of liberty had to be periodically watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots. Remember, the weapons of military utility that these evil clowns wish to deny us are merely sitting in our closets and gun safes. We have not brandished them. We have not sought to deprive anyone of their rights with them. AND YET THEY ARE SO SCARED OF THEM THAT THEY SEEK TO TAKE THEM NOW, BEFORE WE HAVE A CHANCE TO RESIST ANY FUTURE TYRANNY. Indeed, we have been shoved back from the free exercise of arms that the Founders had in mind for 70 years now without ever going to guns to shove them back. What is it that they are afraid of? They are afraid, my friends, that one day we MAY wake up and use them. This is why they sing the tyrant's siren lullaby of citizen disarmament, claiming.

(A) democratic state must be able to prevent the accumulation of military arms for insurrectionary purposes, and it must have enough strength to enforce its own laws. Without this monopoly of force, rights are only abstractions, because they cannot be enforced. This is not to say that government is the source of all rights, but rather that the only hope of vindicating individual rights over the long term is through democratic government that has both the will and the means to protect them. . . (O)ur Constitution . . .can be amended and modified, but it does not sanction its own violent demise. As the eminent jurist Roscoe Pound concluded, a "legal right of the citizen to wage war on the government is something that cannot be admitted [because it] would defeat the whole Bill of Rights." If we value our democracy, we should hope the Supreme Court agrees and explicitly quashes the D.C. Circuit's assertion that there is an insurrectionary purpose to the Second Amendment.
They claim the legitimacy of the Constitution in order to destroy it! And despite their cute title, this is not a "game" they are playing at and they understand it only too well. They are, after all, well-educated lawyers of considerable means. I suppose we ought to be grateful for their naked ambitions to be so clearly self-delineated. Used to be, the gun grabbers cloaked their desires for our disarmament in dulcet tones of "reasonable" regulation and "sporting purposes." But now, when they fear their gun control applecart is about to be overturned (and I for one do not think the Supreme Court will do that, but they apparently do), they show their hand plainly for what they are, the handmaidens of tyranny -- intellectual gangsters of the first water, worse than any Mexican bandit because the "monopoly of power" they seek would enslave the greatest country of free men and women ever seen on this planet, rather than a single dusty village.

Whenever my Michigan farmer grandfather was ready to make a big decision, he would say, "Well, it looks to me like it's 'nut cuttin' time.'" I was so young when I first heard it that I had no idea what he was talking about. Later, I understood. Ladies and gentlemen of the armed citizenry of the United States of America, you'd better get ready, for El Guapo and Jefe have heralded its coming -- It's fixin' to be "nut cuttin' time." Just who is to be gelded is entirely up to us pesky "insurrectionists."

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

Old Gold.....