We’ve reported several times in the past on the “We Will Not Comply” movement, a response to new gun restrictions imposed last year in Washington State as a result of ballot initiative I-594. The issue has moved out of the headlines, but it has not gone away. It is simply dormant, awaiting the actions of any state or federal authorities who attempt to enforce it.
The following essay by Kit Lange was posted yesterday at the Patrick Henry Society. It is worth reproducing in its entirety:
Anti-Gunners Fail to Understand That We Will Not Comply
by Kit Lange
As PHS reported a few months ago, the Second Amendment Foundation — run by pro-background check power fundraiser Alan Gottlieb — filed a lawsuit against I-594 in federal court. Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility and Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, two hardcore anti-gun organizations, filed a motion to enter into the lawsuit as defendants, claiming that they had the legal standing to defend I-594 against those who claimed it was unconstitutional. Even though Everytown is an out of state organization funded and administered by Michael Bloomberg, Shannon Watts, and others who desperately want Americans unarmed, a federal judge today granted their motion to defend I-594 in court.
Their goal, of course, is to see I-594 stand as law, in all its unconstitutional, unenforceable and unconscionable glory. They seem to think that if the lawsuit fails and I-594 stands, that those affected by it will simply sigh and start complying. Surely, they think, these ‘gun nuts and ammosexuals’ will start doing as they’re told… and if they don’t, we’ll just arrest them and imprison them.
They are wrong.
The sentence “we will not comply” is not temporary. It does not have an “if, then” clause. It does not mean “We will not comply until you make us understand that it’s The Law.” Initiative 594 is not constitutional, it is not just, and therefore it is not law. As such, We the People are not bound to follow it; in fact, it is our duty to resist it.
And resist it we will.
Make no mistake: We will no longer tolerate these abuses and thefts of liberty. We will no longer sit by and shrug while elected officials attempt to impose ever-tightening control over us as though we are subjects in their kingdom. We will not disarm. We will not follow unconstitutional laws and rules. We will not register our guns. We will not purchase them at dealers, where our information is collected and stored by the federal government. We will not adhere to ammunition limits, or type restrictions. We will not comply.
The real question is not “will we comply eventually?” It is not even “How far are patriots willing to go to defend their right to refuse slavery and tyranny?” The answers to those questions have been answered many times over, both on this blog and in the hearts and minds of those patriots who are standing on the line. The real question, as Mike Vanderboegh has asked, is “What are your appetites for our liberties?” In essence, what is the government prepared to do? What are the lackeys of tyranny and the enemies of liberty prepared to give up in order to take our unalienable rights from us?
We’ve answered what we’re willing to lose. Perhaps those who seek to take our liberty should answer it as well, because we will not comply. Not if you arrest us. Not even if you shoot at us, and remember, we will shoot back. In order to take our liberty, you will have to kill us.
Even then, if your bullets riddle our bodies and our blood stains the ground, know this:
We will die standing, and we will die free.
Hat tip: Sipsey Street Irregulars.
And it couldn’t be stated any more plainer than that!
This is the ancient agrarian America rising up again. Pre-Civil War, pre-Whiskey Rebellion, pre-Revolution. It is hard for Europeans to grasp because all they see in the media is illegal guns used by ghetto youth to kill one another – and any poor innocent who gets in the way.
[Those people are the victims of socialism in force since 1964, though rolled back some as states run into problems of solvency. Socialist payments, decrepit socialist schools that turn out functional illiterates, socialist food programs – they killed family structure so they could gain the vote of those who remained. The vote de Tocqueville warned us about.]
Guns are the warp and woof of the fabric of country life among both black and white communities. They celebrate hunting season (starting off every year with bow hunting first), join gun clubs, and small businesses close on the first day of hunting season – your broken car can wait one more day, your haircut ain’t going anywhere – except for small restaurants opening at 5:00 a.m. for hungry hunters before the hunt, and staying open as late as 4:00 p.m. if they have a state license as a weigh-in station.
We don’t have a TV but during some gun controversy or other I got to see plenty of the stubborn incomprehension of that Brit TV personality, Piers Morgan, as he nattered on and on about killer Americans. Surely no human being with even a room temperature IQ could have failed so miserably to understand cultural differences. He was one of those fanatics that Churchill described – someone who couldn’t change the subject and couldn’t shut up…Or summat like.
CNN must have decided he wasn’t a good fit because after a while I didn’t see him anymore. I presume he’s back in England somewhere explaining to all who will listen about his less-than-excellent adventures in the U.S. Seriously, the man’s character could have been delineated perfectly by Mark Twain. The latter loved to take apart foreigners who detested America and refused to shut up about our deficiencies.
Once you get away from the thin scrim of coastline on both sides of this continent you come across the provincial Americans. The ones who are born, live and die in the same place. They might visit other places – especially if their children move away – but the homeplace is central to the lives of provincials. And again, I stress, these are black and white provincials. They live amongst each other but lead separate social lives. By choice. The urban areas should be so fortunate to experience the acceptance that takes you in and lets you alone.
Even the food choices are the same and they include the birds and deer they’ve hunted. Some bigoted whites won’t eat collard greens because that’s colored food. Some bigoted blacks won’t eat broccoli because those things are honky food. But the rest of it is pretty much open to both: they grow green beans and tomatoes and okra and anything this red clay earth will sustain. Onions pulled from red clay are hot; sweet potatoes are deeply yellow.
In some places, like here, black families remember the names of the white families who owned their ancestors. The white descendants don’t talk about it now, but they’re aware. And 500 years from now, they’ll still be aware and still not talking much about it. Some things don’t change. Ever.
With freedom came the right to own guns, but it didn’t come immediately. Gun control originated in this country as “no guns for negroes”. Black people remember and they’re not giving up their guns, not even for Obama’s promises. Not ever.
Guns mean liberty. It’s a lesson Europe has to re-learn.
This is a good description though it kind of leaves out the fact that there are middle ground type areas where the environment may seem small town urban or suburban, and most of the population doesn’t hunt religiously, but there’s still no way in hell that most people living there are going to relinquish their arms.
The political issue of firearms ownership goes beyond just the practical aspects of hunting and self-defense though. Accepting disarmament would, as analysts like to say, “send signals” to the government that the population is willing to accept the primacy of government policy even when opposed to underlying cultural assumptions about individual rights.
You’re right: my focus wasn’t the suburban or ex-urban parts of the country. They are much more numerous than the provincials. But they are tied in some way to the nearest urbanity. Their focus is not where they live but where they go to for work, entertainment, education, etc.
Those places are populated by transients who move for job-related reasons. They don’t count their days there in generations but in years of productivity. When they retire from their work life, they move somewhere else – usually to the south where it’s warmer and cheaper to live.
These folks probably make up the majority (a slim majority) of our populace. Restless, transient, ambitious. They aren’t bad people – many of them subscribe to the same ideas as the provincials, but they don’t necessarily live those ideas at the same unstated visceral way as the provincials. These are the folks who would indeed give up their guns and hunting without much of a fight. Venison and wild turkey or duck can always be replaced by some kind of meat from the local grocery chain.For them hunting is a somewhat expensive hobby.
Many suburban folk live where they do because the city is too expensive. But their hearts belong to the bustling city, or at least to the safer parts of it. In that hive where all sorts of behaviors are tolerated, commerce rules; deviance doesn’t interfere with commercial transactions. But the presence of guns and the threat of the unexpected crosses commerce in a way that deviant behaviors and strange street folk don’t.
This foreigner has always marveled at the sheer energy of the USA. The Constitution and Bill f Rights are enviable, and provided the slow evolution into the powerhouse of all things desirable in the world.
Then came the corruption of th SCOTUS. The moment their interpretations of the Constitution became ‘flexible’, things started to drift. slowly at first but accelerating.
Hope can be malignant, and change can be for the worst, this is called betrayal, and that middle America, black and white, has been betrayed.
I think of the old movie South Pacific, and its cameos of Americans, and their different class foibles, thrust together on a Pacific Island, a nation aware of its imperfections and able to debate them without killing each other.
Gone! because socialists don’t debate, they dictate.
Again, to understand how long America has been unravelling, I recommend Fred Siegel’s book:
The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class
America’s strength has always been the breadth and depth of her middle class. It is the middle class which crony capitalism wants to destroy, and our current president is one of their demonic avengers. His “you didn’t make that” mantra resonated deeply as the threat it was intended to be.
Obama has floated atop the non-makers, drawing sustenance from those who do NOT produce anything, those destroyers who long to see America broken and paralyzed. The ideas of Communism are seen as 20th century-gone, even though we live daily with the results of its inroads into our being.
Fred Siegel has rightly pointed to the roots of the people who made Obama. Those roots go back to the late 19th century as the American intellectual class turned to European ideas – e.g., the Fabian socialists, those precursors of Marx, et al.
H. L. Mencken was a primary voice in this choir. His hatred of Main Street inspired many decades of America’s intellectuals who saw Europe as the source of all things superior.
Siegel has done a fine dissection. Read him as a briefer prequel to Diana West’s investigation of our home-grown Communist party betrayers. Once you’ve grasped Siegel’s revelations, West’s investigations fall into place. In a way, Dr. Siegel helps one see why the pushback against Diana West’s book was so visceral and cowardly.
As is often the case, reading the reviews of Siegel’s book is an education in itself.
I would *love* to read Mr. Siegel’s book. My policy for the last several years (due to strained $ situation) is to check the book out from the county library system or its extended InterLibrary Loan partners (statewide!) before I make a decision to purchase.
After reading the book, IF I think I’ll want to refer to it later, I return the library’s copy and buy my own. Otherwise, I simply return the library book.
However, I cannot find Mr. Siegel’s book *or* Ms. West’s book in the County system or on InterLibrary Loan. I may be moving too fast today (gotta leave the house SOON to run errands!), but I *also* do not purchase anything from Amazon, if there is any alternative at all.
Suggestions for alternate sources of these books? Used books, as long as they haven’t been heavily written in (pencil notes or the random pen note here and there are OK), are also fine. 🙂
The best thing to do would be to apply thru your state interlibrary loan system. The reference librarian should be able to help you.
The second possibility is a used version at Abe Books. Both books are newish but have been out long enough that used copies should be appearing. I like AB: http://www.abebooks.com/
Like you, I can’t afford much in the way of books anymore. A friend of Dr. Siegel’s sent me his book as a present. Diana West is Ned’s good friend so she sent him a copy pf both her books (“Death of the Grown-Up” is mighty fine too). Since he can no longer read print, I saved up my Amazon credits and got him a Kindle version of “Betrayal”.
The thing I miss most is a book budget! There must be many people in the same circumstances…book publishers must be hurting. I saw an anniversary edition of Flannery O’Connor’s work (probably the short stories) but I can get that at the library.
Funny thing is, our little county library can get most anything. The next county over is very wealthy horse country and they never EVER stock anything conservative. Never. Even the local Barnes & Noble underplays books and authors from the right. Some years ago they had a display of Global Warming books – a rather large table with a myriad of titles. ALL of them were from the Warmist point of view. It was ironic since the University several blocks away had a tenured professor who’d written a dissenting book. So I went to the manager and asked that his book be displayed. They did so, but not for long.
Barnes & Noble used to be my treat when I was in town. Errands done, I’d stop for a latte and a browse. That was pre-fibromyalgia. Now it would be more like a drowse. I had to trade in my drivers’ license for a handicapped parking thingie we hang on the rearview mirror when I began falling asleep at the wheel. I’d rather have the license but the roads are safer now that the B is “driving Miz Dymphna”. He puts on Bach for me when I have to be in the car…getting lost in a fugue really makes the pain take a back seat.
I’m with you on this I always like to read a book before I buy it. The reason your library doesn’t have something is that most librarians are liberals – it is a very liberal profession. BUT if you and many like you request a book they may get it.
I use to buy a lot of books via the thrift shops – not always easy to find something, and you just walk in and see what they have, you cannot go in expecting to find a certain thing. However I did find a Koran and a few other things I wanted but didn’t want to pay good money for to liberals. It did take a while to find them though. Also you pay cash and that cannot be traced. Good luck.
Thrift shops are great. Some of my favorite authors turn up there – but it’s always several years after publication. I read a few years ago (in a blog authored by a neurophysiologist, of all things) that the Liberal::Conservative ratio among librarians is 17::1 – that is certainly my experience…except in our tiny county library where it’s probably half-and-half. But you have to differentiate between social issues and economic philosophies to really sort them out. For example P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious send-up of economic liberals, “Eat the Rich” really lays out the limits of the welfare state.That’s one I found in a thrift shop and paid a dollar for it so I could use it for a gift.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics
It was written in 1999 and people are still showing up to praise the book. Last time the future Baron was home, he rattled off some hilarious quotes from memory – about Bangladesh, I think…O’Rourke is one of those people who can make you smile just thinking about them.
I noticed the Amazon page has used hard copies starting at a penny. Of course you still have to pay 4.00 for shipping, but it’s a bargain. I always enjoy reading the reviews in O’Rourke’s pages; brings the books back to life once more.
Certainly a painless way to learn economics.
The problem is, more and more books are in ebook form, and the publishers do not give you permission to resell them. The technical term is, you license the right to read them, rather than buying them, so you don’t have the right or ability to resell them.
I buy all my books through kindle now, when possible . They gather much less dust on my bookshelves, and I like taking my books around with me. But, the big disadvantage is, the market for used books is going to take a nosedive, sooner or later. Hopefully, enough people still like hard copies to keep them available for people on low budgets.
Wonderful post Dymphna – couldn’t agree more with it.
Well said. I live in Vermont, the least restrictive state in the union in regards to gun control. I can carry any way I like, anywhere I like, any time I like. But the Dems have been in super-majority control for years here, and they are finally overcoming their fear of the rural Vermonter. VT is now 56% non-native, and the libs are moving here by the thousands (as well as 3rd world refugees that vote dem), mainly from NY, CT, MA, PA, and other lib states. So now Bloomberg and GunSenseVT (everytown affiliated) are lobbying for “common sense” gun control. Why? VT is always the safest, or next safest, state in the union. We have about 4 murders per year in the whole state, and rarely from guns. But yet the libs are gunning for universal background checks, safe storage laws, increased reporting to NCIC, mandatory confiscation during police interventions, etc…etc…etc… Unfortunately, most people are dumb to the rhetoric – it’s for the safety of the children…it’s just simple common sense… – BS! The agenda is eventual confiscation of all arms. Nothing the government ever does that infringes on your rights ends with the first law; it continues, unabated until they get what they want. It is just a matter of time. They don’t care about losing law suits, or having some bills rallied against, eventually they will wear us Constitutionalists down, because they are elected over and over, and getting paid to be in a job that allows them the time to overcome us, one small law at a time. They are learning from the muslims – it will take time, years, maybe dozens of years, but they will eventually overrun us and get what they want. So, the question is, where is your line in the sand? Where will your Lexington and Concord be?
Poor Vermont; it’s enough to make you weep.
Liberals are swarming to Vermont because they’re fleeing the messes they’ve made in the places they used to live. They fundamentally fail to understand what they’ve done back home and how what they want to do will turn the refuge they seek into the same kind of hellhole they left in the first place.
They’re fleeing California too. Colorado, Oregon, Texas, New Mexico are seeing the same kinds of transplants who want to move in and make the new place like the old place. This “geographic cure” is described well by Alcoholics Anonymous, i.e., you can’t run away from yourself.
Colorado used to be a ‘red’ state. It’s purple now. Oregon has many poor areas that are ever more neglected by the new “haves” who lean on the legislature.Texas is resistant:it is large, rambling, and full of Texas brio – I think there in something in Texan DNA that is fundamentally unchanging and appealing.
The Bush clan has decamped to Texas from Massachusetts and Maine. They still maintain their ‘summer places’ but Texas is home, and they’ve become enthusiastic Texans. But then they had a conservative spirit to begin with. Vermont has not been so fortunate: unlike the sprawl of Texas, it’s small and vulnerable to the assaults from outsiders who out-number the natives.
Vermont has no natural resources or mineral wealth to attract the Texas-type individualist risk-takers. The naturally conservative character of the native Vermonter is being crushed under the feet of the wealthy movers and shakers who see the state as their Great Escape.
Amen!
You Americans better fight for this “right” to carry weapons. I don’t think it is a right given to you by anyone. It’s every free citizens right to defend him or herself with any weapon of their choice.
In the Netherlands i know people who are supposed to be “protected” by the police. In most cases the police tells them: we cannot protect you from those criminals with guns, you better move to another part of the country. We are so sorry.
That’s what you get when people give up their “rights” to carry the weapons they want.
Furthermore. It is well known that the Netherlands never have been invaded by any foreign power ever. Thanks to these wonderful gun control laws the Dutch government has imposed on their not so free citizens.
“It is well known that the Netherlands never have been invaded by any foreign power ever.”
Are you being sarcastic or is this seriously the official revisionist history people are taught in school?
Also, I’ve been wondering how much of what goes on in the Netherlands is about the states of Holland dominating the rest of the country? (It’s kind of funny how many people think that Holland and Netherlands is the same thing, even though Holland is really just the two most densely populated provinces.)
At this point I wonder if Holland, Michigan is more Dutch than actual Holland is….
Sarcastic! 🙂
I am born and still living in the southern part of Holland. Together with the Provence of North Holland that’s what you call: Holland!
The rest of Holland calls itself: The Netherlands. Holland still dominates the rest of the country. In population and we got the main airport Schiphol, the biggest harbor Rotterdam and the government in the Hague.
Most of the cultural enrichers settled in this area. The Hague now has an immigrant population that outnumbers the natives. But lately we see very old villages in the rural areas of the Netherlands with 150 natives being invaded by 1000 plus conquerors from the religion i have seen all i wanted to see and learn from on 9-11.
my wife does not like guns and I am a lousy shot. However, I have some fairly sharp knives if it ever comes (prayerfully not) to that. I mourn for what our country and society have become.
Never bring a knife to a gun fight.
Very good! Not many people will realize that’s an allusion to an Obama quote about political fighting: “if they bring a knife, you bring a gun…”
Good self-defense courses – e.g., Krav Maga – are a growth industry. The Communist mayor of NYC is watching it dissolve into chaos as he goes after LEO, firefighters, etc. The quality of life in the city is reverting to the level of the 1980s, when so many people fled. At a Q and A session after one of his book tour things, Dr. Fred Siegel – a true New Yorker – said he hoped NYC would survive this current guy. Or words to that effect.
Here’s his take on the new(ish) mayor right after the election:
http://www.publicsectorinc.org/interviews/fred-siegel-on-the-future-of-new-york-under-mayor-de-blasio-a-publicsectorinc-org-qa/
[Yes, that’s a strange URL but I checked; it works]
What I didnt know till I read that is the three elective offices across NYC are now held by The Working Families party, a far left wing progressive mish-mash funded by the usual suspects. That’s too bad. It’s not an alliance that could work outside a very corrupt urban scene.
My guess is that half of the guys out there who don’t have guns don’t have them because their wife is afraid of guns….
If a wife is afraid of guns, good reason to not have a wife.
Here, here. “From my cold dead fingers”
“Initiative 594 is not constitutional, it is not just, and therefore it is not law.” I’d like a citation for this because if this is the case then ObamaCare is not the either because it too is not in the Constitution (see 10th Amendment, if it ain’t in the Constitution then it is the responsibility of the state or the individual).
Incidentally, my elevator pitch is to tell people that slavery was once the law of the land too – this the can usually understand.
I love the idea of an “elevator pitch” – you have a captive audience! Hilarious.
How they got around the unconstitutional ObamaCare law. The chief justice said it didn’t pass the sniff test for the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which the OCare lawyers were pushing. However, he claimed it did get by under our tax laws – despite Obama’s swearing it wasn’t a tax, it was:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/28/explaining-the-supreme-court-ruling-on-obamacare.html
The whole essay is brief and worth your time if OCare applies to you. I feel sorry for those who are paying huge premiums now when all they wanted was universal care.
The Affordable Care Act (he hates it being called ObamaCare) is as deeply immoral and incomprehensible as, say, the European Union’s Constitution. They are both written in the dense impenetrable language of malign bureaucracy. When things fall apart, both of those stinkeroos will fall, too. But what a high price to have to pay for two excrescences that never should have seen the light of day.
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Thus any law that infringes on that right could be considered unconstitutional, particularly if the real intent of the law is not to regulate but to prohibit. (See DC v. Heller for example)
Without an actual court challenge and ruling, the “constitutionality” of a law is a matter of individual opinion that isn’t legally binding. If prosecutors think it’s constitutional and want to charge people then they can try. If even they don’t think so, or just think enforcement is a bad use of resources, they may not bother.
If this is not a battle-cry, I don’t know what it is.
Godspeed!
As a Brit and European I really do understand the importance of a free people being able to bear arms in order to be able to defend themselves – my direction in this would be tyrannical governments – as your founding fathers intended. Those people had experience of the British government and were probably of the opinion that then (as now) we do not live in a democracy but the fiction of one, intended only to gain subtle control of the masses and that those in the establishment only serve their own purpose.
An armed people are the ONLY free people. Free from establishment cliques with nefarious influence over the masses. Not just the freedom to hunt.
“An armed people are the ONLY free people. ”
I take a slightly different perspective of the right to carry.
I don’t think gun owners would have a chance in an open conflict against the government. You might be able to get guerrilla groups like the Taliban, but the results would not be anything that anyone would want to live under.
The fact is, gun owners have a sense of independence. They are not completely dependent on the police. This sense of independence extends to taking care of themselves financially and in other ways. In other words, they focus on self-reliance, rather than ways of extracting resources from the government. They do not immediately jump towards schemes to give the government ever more control.
It is this sense of independence that left-wingers hate more than anything. The Black Panthers party was heavily armed. The Muslims in America are heavily armed and organized. There are no protests against these groups because their fortunes are linked to more government benefits and assistance, not to mention the dissolution of a distinct American culture.
I’ll say it again: leftists hate gun ownership because it fosters a sense of independence from government support. There are other reasons, but for leftists, the sense of independence is like waving a red cape in front of a bull.
“Wouldn’t have a chance” is a bit of a dichotomous way of looking at things. As the gun control nuts like to point out, the militias during the American Revolution didn’t win any huge battles and they were sometimes the target of disparaging remarks by continental army commanders, but they were quite helpful in an area that gun control nuts routinely fail to understand: economics.
Militias didn’t win major spectacular battles but they did impose an economically significant cost on British military operations. If the population had been disarmed, taking over a village would cost next to nothing. But with armed individuals being willing to defend settlements or even just harassing troops with gunfire, the cost of enemy operations increases significantly.
Britain technically could have kept fighting but they didn’t want to keep spending the resources necessary to do so. If their costs had been lower, they may have kept fighting and eventually won, or more likely they would have just won earlier due to their forces being less degraded.
Things that increase the cost of military action tend to discourage that military action. But if people surrender weapons or otherwise signal an unwillingness to impose that cost, military action gets cheaper and starts to look more inviting. So it’s important to keep the cost of military action against the populace as high as possible.
My eyes and attention span got tired, so I did not read the last 3-4 items, but it sure was enjoyable while it lasted.
I live in Kansas and this subject seldom comes up (except for concealed carry, which some people really want) — otherwise the gun issue is kind of a non-issue (unless I missed something — I have 5 unread newspapers, so I am missing something on the local leve no doubt).
Dymphna, I have enjoyed reading your writing on this subject. Please give my regards to the Baron.
I went back. A sense of independence is a good thing, IMO. If everyone felt that, this would be a better, stronger country.
However, I have come to the conclusion that “they” do not want a better stronger country and I still wonder why? Is it that silly place called Davos, where the rich and powerful gather to plan the next level of destruction?
But then you wonder why they think that way. A country where there are enough jobs, enough able taxpayers, enough intact families — that is a good country and the government can expect to get tax money, assuming that’s what they are in it for (yes, I’m laughing, too!)
Oh, well. ave, John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.
Maybe that tree of liberty needs to be watered already?
It’s pretty simple. Some people would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. History has demonstrated that for the past hundred years or so those people are usually Marxists.
The big trouble with the gun banner [redacted]->fellows is they can’t read past the first few lines WELL REGULATED MALITIA so they assume it means the Military and Well Regulated means gun control and confiscation is allowable
OT, but I like your nic very much. I’m not sure this is the one you have in mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spur-winged_lapwing
Evidently, the “spur” is quite distinct when the bird is in flight.