So brother Jeff has trod upon the toes of some would-be militia bloggers with his latest Knox Report posting. Good for him. He's right.
Some have gone so far as to insinuate that Jeff has betrayed his heritage. That's nonsense. Jeff's characterization of the militia — the armed populace — as being a deterrent, much like the nuclear deterrrent, comes straight from Dad. And his view comes from Thomas Jefferson. Chapter and verse, which also happens to be a book excerpt, follow.
There's no question, America is headed for a rough patch. The Republicans have for the past eight years presided over an expansion of government that would make LBJ blush, and now they're nationalizing the banks. This while accusing the Democrats of being socialists. Both sides like to "spread the wealth around."
But that doesn't mean that everything has gone down the tubes and the only thing left to do is to start killing people and breaking things.
Here's a piece that Neal Knox wrote in May of 1995. Historical context: NRA had lost on the Clinton gun ban, the 1994 so-called "assault weapons" ban. But they lost honorably. The ILA leadership, backed by a strong pro-Second Amendment Board, fought the ban tooth and nail, resisting tremendous pressure to "accept a compromise in order to head off worse." Consequently, the 103rd Congress and especially the Democrats paid dearly at the polls. A sitting Speaker of the House was turned out of office, something that had not happened since before the Civil War, and the House majority switched to the Republicans for the first time in forty years. The leading political analyst of the day, William Jefferson Clinton, declared that the NRA had made the difference (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Then, the unthinkable happened. On April 19, 1995, two years to the day after the Waco horror, a pair of psychopathic misfits blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. We are still dealing with the fallout of that bit of political theater a decade and a half later. Militia is now a dirty word in the media. So much for hastening the revolution.
A revolution is by definition a mass movement. Our militia blogging friends claim three percent of gun owners are with them. Well if you count loosely, maybe so. Can they get that three percent to the polls? Can they bring a fraction of that three percent, maybe a couple thousand of them of them, out on the streets on a hot day? It's been done. Can they do it? Show some mass action — peaceful mass action — and the militia movement will start gaining some credibility. In other words, let's see some real political action. Until then the three-percenters owe more to Walter Mitty than to Thomas Jefferson.
