By Jeff Hulbert
Alongside the swirl of headlines about the Second Amendment sanctuary movement in Virginia, there are the echoes of other courageous American patriots who have battled lawless tyrants in their time.
The wailing, gun-confiscating leftists of 2019 need to know this: declarations of “We will not comply!” in America are as old as the fruited plain.
In 1775, British General Thomas Gage led a regiment of Boston-based Redcoats out into the countryside to confiscate caches of ammunition and firearms from American colonists who had refused to comply with his demands to surrender them.
The farmers and tradesman fired on the Redcoats, forcing the historic British retreat from Lexington and Concord. The cost was high. At least seven patriots lost their lives in the battles that day, and many more were gravely wounded.
The colonists in 1775 were not fighting to preserve the Second Amendment. It didn’t yet exist. They were fighting the despotic tyranny of King George. Our Second Amendment would not arrive until sixteen years later with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.
This is all just “ancient history” according to the Bloomberg-financed politicians who are now zealously planning firearm confiscation sweeps in modern-day Virginia. Tyranny? That is so 18th century declare the leftists.
What they fail to acknowledge is that in our lifetime there has actually been a shooting war on American soil, with Constitution-loving patriots facing off against corrupt, tyrannical Democrats and their minions. And the patriots won.
It’s called “The Battle of Athens, Tennessee” and it happened in 1946. Citizens there, long brutalized by rogue police and dirty politicians, learned that a ballot-stuffing effort was underway after a county election. Waves of armed patriots — most of whom were World War II veterans — converged on the town center.
Some news accounts from 1946 put the number of armed Tennesseans in the hundreds, but other publications reported that as many as 2,000 patriots arrived with their rifles and sidearms.
After refusing to comply with demands from corrupt officials to disperse, shots rang out and the battle was on. In addition to the volleys of gunfire, armed citizens threw flaming bottle-bombs and even dynamited the building where the corrupt officials had barricaded themselves.
The armed patriots of the Volunteer State prevailed, driving out the cheating politicians and rogue cops who had terrorized them for years. A shooting war in America against unconstitutional tyranny is not off the table.
To get a sense of what a crowd of hundreds—or perhaps thousands— of patriots would look like converging on a county courthouse, one need look no further than last week in Fauquier County, Virginia.
In just the last month, a majority of Virginia’s counties and incorporated towns have passed Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions in response to incessant threats from gun-hating radicals that semi-automatic firearms will be stripped from the citizens of the Old Dominion.
Across Virginia, declarations of “We will not comply!” have been heard regularly on the courthouse commons and in Board of Supervisor meetings.
For many across America, the battle cry seems to have emerged only recently. Yet the stance has had real traction elsewhere— it just hasn’t been reported by the mainstream media.
Almost a year ago in Maryland, Democrat legislators gleefully stuffed almost two-dozen gun control bills into the hopper, then were shocked to find their hearing rooms and hallways filled to capacity with hundreds of my fellow “free state” patriots wearing WWNC shirts.
To make sure the gun grabbers didn’t miss the message on our shirts, our folks regularly staged a gauntlet right outside the House and Senate chambers as legislators filed in.
And to drive the message home, we shouted “We will not comply!” from the visitors gallery when the infringement-minded Democrats rose to blather about their bills. Of course, it was followed with ejection from the chambers.
Were our demonstrations worth it? Our stance seemed to drive a wedge into the debate, and the result was this: not one bill passed. Not one.
Next door in Delaware, “We will not comply!” was brought to their statehouse, but in-state Second Amendment organizers were without a budget to get t-shirts printed. Wearing WWNC messages pinned to their shirts, the “First State” patriots overshadowed a Moms Demand Action rally big-time with a much larger turnout. Democrat efforts to pile on gun rights infringements failed there, too.
Fast forward to September to the Congressional Democrats’ hearing on Capitol Hill to reinstate an “assault weapons” ban. Once again, we stood up in the gallery, and on live television declared: “We will not comply!” with a new AWB. That was followed, as expected, by ejection from the building.
>Democrats’ hopes at that hearing that their Infringement train would stay on track were dashed just moments later with the courageous testimony of Dianna Muller of the DC Project.
A former police officer, Ms. Muller appeared as a scheduled witness. She stunned the panel by saying she would not comply with any new “assault weapons” ban.
Within hours of Dianna Muller’s gutsy remarks, the Congressional Democrats’ zeal for major infringement schemes evaporated.
Now the fight for our Second Amendment rights comes back, full circle, to Virginia, where patriots fly a state flag with the sword-and-spear-carrying Goddess Virtus grinding her foot into the chest of a prone tyrant.
The Latin motto, Sic Semper Tyrannis, means thus always to tyrants. The flag was adopted in 1776, the year Virginia native George Mason’s Declaration Of Rights was used as the model for our Bill of Rights.
With Michael Bloomberg’s dollars having flooded into Virginia, the threats to Second Amendment rights there constitute a threat to the Second Amendment rights everywhere. This is not just Virginia’s fight.
For that reason, I am leading a contingent of my fellow Marylanders across state lines to stand with Virginia patriots in just a few days.
On Wednesday, December 18th, the Accomack County’s Board of Supervisors will vote on a proposed Second Amendment sanctuary resolution. The meeting begins at 5:00 pm.
Accomack County is on Virginia’s Eastern Shore and holds the distinction of being the ancestral home of Michael Bloomberg’s puppet governor, Ralph Northam.
Starting mid-afternoon, my group will be staging a “We will not comply!” demonstration there and we look forward to seeing a flood of other gun rights supporters into the township of Accomac. Here’s the address:
Accomack County Administration Building
23296 Courthouse Avenue
Accomac, Virginia 23301
Suffice it to say that with the county’s ties to the ardently anti-gun governor, the energy in Accomac this Wednesday should be something to see. I hope to see you there.
Jeff Hulbert is founder of The Patriot Picket.