Despite definitive Supreme Court rulings, historical evidence and simple common sense, gun control advocates continue to maintain that the Second Amendment’s prefatory or militia clause means there’s no such thing as an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right is reserved for citizen militias. At the same time, gun control advocates vilify citizen militias, painting them as intellectually challenged paranoid proto-insurrectionists. See what individual firearms freedom leads to? Trigger-happy right-wing gun nuts! Organized trigger-happy right-wing gun nuts!
JACKSON, Ga. — “Put the guns down!”
The order crackled over a loudspeaker from two sheriff’s deputies crouched behind the doors of police cruisers, semiautomatic rifles at their sides.
Several middle-aged militiamen were toting loaded AR-15 rifles and 9-millimeter pistols at a makeshift checkpoint — two lawn chairs and a narrow board — on a dirt driveway in central Georgia. The men, members of the Georgia Security Force III% militia, grumbled but laid their weapons down on the red clay earth.
The brief standoff ended with an amicable chat, and the men retrieved their weapons the moment the lawmen drove away. But the episode further stoked the militiamen’s abiding fears that their cherished Second Amendment rights were under assault.
That’s the lead of A Militia Gets Battle Ready for a ‘Gun-Grabbing’ Clinton Presidency published yesterday at nytimes.com. A curious reader might like to know what precipitated this potentially deadly confrontation between a citizen militia and local law enforcement. Scribe David Zucchino’s hit piece on Peach State militia men and women only solves the mystery in passing; the answer’s buried deep within the text of his voluminous hit piece.
One of the militia members suffered a break-in. The cops were responding to the burglary (presumably invited to do so). Why were weapons drawn? Who cares! Weapons were drawn! It’s foreshadowing!
Mr. Zucchino’s desultory interest in the incident reflects the author’s desire to live up to his employer’s reputation as The New York Slimes. A news organization that never met a Trump supporter they didn’t despise. Hence his visit to the Georgia woods to talk to armed Americans who support The Donald’s presidential ambitions. Like this:
When Mr. Trump says he wants to make America great again, a message that has appealed to a broad segment of the electorate, Mr. Hill and his roughly 50 local militiamen are particularly enthralled. They long for an America they believe has been stolen from them by liberals, immigrants and “the P.C. crowd.” Their America is one where Christianity is taught in schools, abortion is illegal and immigrants hail from Europe, not faraway Muslim lands . . .
They are machinists and retirees, roofers and factory line workers, all steeped in the culture of the rural South. They say Mr. Trump, a Manhattan billionaire and real estate tycoon, speaks for them.
“Within the extreme right, many of Trump’s most passionate backers come from the militia movement,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. “The militia movement is overwhelmingly behind Trump’s candidacy.”
For militias, Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment views “play right into their paranoid style of politics,” said Ryan Lenz, editor of the Hatewatch blog at the Southern Poverty Law Center . . .
Mr. Trump has retweeted posts from white nationalists and Nazi sympathizers, but Mr. Hill and his followers insist they are not racists, only staunch citizens and patriots with an admittedly apocalyptic outlook. They consider Mr. Trump a bulwark against the candidate they call “Shillary” Clinton . . .
“Donald Trump would fit right in with our little group,” she said. “He wants America the way we want it, back like it used to be.”
What follows, of course, is a full-on attempt to show how armed militias are a bad thing, not a good thing. The implication of the headline, photos, and carefully selected quotes is crystal clear: anyone who supports Donald Trump is a dangerous deplorable. A threat to the country.
It’s not too big a leap to suggest that Mr. Zucchino’s article is based on one of The Times’ favorite memes: all armed Americans are a threat to “civilized” society. In case you think I’m just another paranoid gun owner, the article’s conclusion drives the point home with all the subtlety of a head-on collision.
Mr. Hill, who calls his group a “defensive militia,” predicted unrest and violence from extremists on both sides no matter who wins the presidential election. If Mrs. Clinton wins, he said, millions of gun owners will march on Washington at the first attempt to restrict gun ownership.
“If the people decide they can no longer suffer the inequities,” he said, “I’d be with the people and I’d take my guns up to Washington, D.C.”
For The New York Times and other hoplophobic harridans, the mere idea of an armed rebellion against tyranny (a.k.a., full implementation of the Progressive agenda) must be strangled at birth. Hence the left-leaning media’s constant campaign to degrade and destroy Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. A fact that the “paranoid” militias know all too well.