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My good friend Michael Hoffman recently wrote an outstanding thesis on the subject of the growing efforts of Democrats (and some Republicans) to push the anti-Second Amendment envelope as far as possible. I borrowed the title of Michael’s thesis for the title of this column.
For instance, right now Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee is calling a special session of the legislature—probably convening in July—to take up a Red Flag gun confiscation bill. But Lee’s proposal goes further than any previous Red Flag law: It actually includes many prescription drugs that a person is taking as a cause to confiscate their guns.
The proposed Tennessee Red Flag gun confiscation bill is a MONSTER!
Here is a short list of some of the medical disorders that could disqualify a Tennessee citizen from exercising their right to keep and bear arms, depending on the medication they take:
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (which targets veterans, of course)
- Anorexia
- Premenstrual Syndrome
- Eating Disorders
- Nerve Pain
- Male Sexual Problems
- Insomnia
- Postpartum Depression
- Fibromyalgia
- Hypochondria
- Chronic Headaches
- Attention Deficit Disorder
- Sleep Disorders
- Personality Disorders
- Obesity
Under Governor Lee’s proposed gun confiscation bill, laws protecting medical privacy, such as HIPAA and others, would be suspended, and physicians or pharmacists would be required by law to report the use of medications used to treat the above disorders to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation—which could trigger the confiscation of the person’s firearms.
I hope the people of Tennessee are paying attention, because if they don’t rise up en masse against this communist gun confiscation grab, the Second Amendment will die a methodical death of attrition in The Volunteer State. And that would force every other State in the country to have to deal with this monstrosity.
And, of course, the State of Washington just passed a so-called Assault Weapons ban, as did the State of Illinois. (A federal judge has temporarily blocked the ban in The Prairie State.) And several other Democrat-controlled states are in the process of proposing similar gun bans.
All of these communist gun confiscation proposals are doubtless destined to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court, where hopefully they will crash and burn.
Now, to Hoffman’s awesome article:
April 19 marks the 248th anniversary of the day on which 700 agents of the lawfully constituted government of Massachusetts approached the town of Lexington intent on seizing the guns of the area’s farmers. Eight farmers were gunned down on Lexington Green, after which the uniformed gun confiscators “came under attack by thousands of swarming” farmers organized as “the Minutemen,” a citizen militia armed with the same weapons as the government’s forces. On the day of “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in Massachusetts, these United States were founded.
The battle of Lexington and Concord which marked the start of the civil war known as the American Revolution, is too often presented in books and lectures as between “foreign troops” and “Americans.” In order to disguise what was a police action by the royal governor acting on the order of the Commander in Chief (King George), the event is presented in terms of “foreign troops” invading New England, the equivalent in our day of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army landing in Seattle and disarming the local citizens.
By framing Lexington and Concord as Americans vs. aliens, the role of the loyalist American government is overlooked, as is the fact that this was a police action by troops charged with enforcing the law of the land, who spoke the same language and were in some cases cousins of the English-Americans they killed.
Beginning the previous autumn, the local governors of New England began to enforce the king’s October 19 order for the seizure of the people’s guns and ammunition (Cf. Boston Gazette, December 12, 1774). One patriot remarked, “the Decree” that “prohibited having arms and ammunition” was a violation of “the law of self-preservation” and the right to “defend the liberties which God and nature have given us.” (New Hampshire Gazette, January 13, 1775).
A Short History of our Militia Heritage and Ideology
In the 18th century support for American independence was often viewed as the legacy of the “radical children of the Puritans” who pulled the country “in their preferred democratical direction.’
“…according to (Thomas) Jefferson’s autobiography, in May 1774, after news of the Boston Port Act arrived in Williamsburg, he and the set of fellow insurgent members of the House of Burgesses met in the council chamber ‘for the benefit of the library in that room’ and ‘rummaged over’ John Rushworth’s Historical Collection of English documents from 1618 to 1648 ‘for the revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans of that day.” (Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence [1997], p. 125).
Jefferson’s famous statement that “… the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred to ride them, legitimately by the grace of God,” was taken from a speech by an officer of the New Model Army, Captain Richard Rumbold, prior to his execution by the Stuart King James II.
The English Calvinists who defeated King Charles and founded a commonwealth, argued that “in a republic every man ought to be a soldier.” Those forbidden the possession of firearms were regarded as no better than “slaves.”
“English Puritans and so-called Independents (Congregationalists), Scottish and Ulster Presbyterians and members of the Dutch, German, and French reformed churches—bulked larger in the thirteen colonies of the 1770s, then in any major European nation…No other creed had so many of its 18th century churches burned by British troops, especially in New Jersey, and in the Carolinas, where they were regarded as rebel hornets’ nests. Just as Puritans and Presbyterians had interwoven just war and chosen Nation beliefs into the English Civil War of the 1640s, so they did again in the 1770s…The Anglo Saxon (republic)…has for its lineage the book of a primitive society—the Bible. It is the product of (the) severe theology…of Calvin…necessary for the republican movement.”
“This was not lost on British officials who, as we have seen, sometimes described the revolution as a Presbyterian, and/or Congregationalist war. Edmund Burke’s pointed analysis a month before Lexington and Concord is also worth revisiting: that ‘the (American) people are Protestants, and that kind which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion…religion in our northern colonies is a refinement of the principle of resistance.’ In New England resistance was principally Calvinist. The rage militaire circa 1775 has been described as follows: ‘When the actual fighting began many New England ministers became fighting parsons. Ministers exerted their influence to raise volunteers, and sometimes marched away with them.” (Kevin Phillips, 1775: A Good Year for Revolution [2012] pp. 212-216; 568).
The organization of militias in Massachusetts by Samuel Adams and others in 1775 were reminiscent of the organization of the Puritan militias in 17th century England and New England.
In defiance of King Charles I, the English people passed the Militia Ordinance of March 5, 1642 which became the foundation for the Puritan New Model Army organized by Thomas Fairfax in 1645. That army’s officer corps was made up of soldiers promoted by reason of their skill and zeal, not their birth. Distinctions between ranks were few.
In Massachusetts the Puritans could not have survived native attacks without a militia composed of all able-bodied men without distinction. The record of their exploits reflects a peculiar Calvinist dimension of their militia, which can be summarized in four words, “No heroes but God.” Richard Slotkin observes this theology of self-effacement:
“The lack of human heroes in the King Philip’s War tracts is remarkable. Jehovah is the only hero; of the earthly protagonists, very few individuals and no heroes stand out. Special providence to individuals are mentioned…but the nature of the incidents makes it clear that God, not man, is the heroic agent….Not that heroes were lacking in the war….but references to (their) exploits are scanty. John Mason, hero of the Pequot War, refused to publish his account of his exploits, deeming them too immodest and likely to detract from the glory ascribed to God in those events…The King Philip’s War tracts establish the characteristic genre conventions for narratives of the Indian wars. God, never man, is the hero…”
The Gun Elite of the Ruling Class
In every age humanity witnesses the spectacle of persons volunteering to become slaves; perhaps never more so than in our day, when it is freely conceded by millions of “progressives” that only agents of the state should possess high-powered firearms, on the historically illiterate supposition that you “can trust the government.” The ancient wisdom reflected in the warning posed as a question by Juvenal, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who will guard the guards themselves?”), is ignored.
In the writings of Soviet concentration camp survivors such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Gulag Archipelago), and the testimonies of disarmed Judaic survivors of Hitler’s dictatorship, we learn the fate of a people without modern weapons who, as the rightful foundation of any godly militia, are denied the police power which is Scripturally wielded as per Romans 13:4. (For exposition cf. Chuck Baldwin, Romans 13: The True Meaning of Submission [2011]), and Gordan E. Runyan, Resistance to Tyrants: Romans 13 [2013]).
We have among us a militant party of zealots who ardently work to infringe the right to possess firearms; an infringement specifically proscribed by the Constitution. They appear little conscious of the fact that their system will create a class of disarmed lumpen proletariat, upon whom will squat the gun elite of the ruling class.
In 2023, in discussions of the “urgent need” to ban the people’s weapons, President Biden insisted, “We're living in a country awash in weapons of war. I am determined to ban these weapons and high capacity magazines that hold 30 rounds…Weapons of war have no place in our communities.”
Do Messrs. Biden, Bush, Obama and Clinton reside on the moon, or in “our communities”? The latter is the case, and where they go, so go their guards—personnel possessing weapons of war stationed in the neighborhoods where these de facto aristocrats reside. This is also true of hundreds of thousands of Federal agents and local and state police officers.
At any given time a considerable number of common people in America are under threat of death or serious injury from a would-be assailant. In accordance with the legislative proposals of the Democrat party, these unfortunates would be denied the protection afforded our current president and his entitled predecessors. This would represent a frightening empowerment of one class above other classes of Americans, a grievous inequality that seldom makes its way into the debate over gun control.
Moreover, many thousands of persons designated as VIPs by the government, or by the circumstance of their personal wealth, are assigned government bodyguards supplied with “weapons of war” in the former case, while private security personnel, often former police and military veterans who have a license to possess high-powered guns, are hired at great expense to protect the families and property of the rich, at a cost which is out of the reach of the average American peasant.
These special privileges for the “connected” are a fixture of banana republics and dictatorships which embrace a two-tier law system repugnant to the founding principles of our nation.
At the time of its enactment, Rep. Elbridge Gerry said of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms that it “is intended to secure the people against the mal-administration of the government.’
“Commenting on the proposed First and Second Amendments at the time, Rep. Fisher Ames stated, “The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.’
“A select militia defined as the only privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same way that Americans denounced select spokesmen approved of by the government as the only class entitled to freedom of the press.” (Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right [1997], p. 82).
I encourage you to read Michael’s complete column.
As you read the history of our Second Amendment provided above, note the fact that America’s War for Independence, Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights—including and especially the Second Amendment—would not have existed without the dynamic influence of the Puritan and Protestant ministers before, during and after this great nation came into existence.
Today, however, not only do the vast, vast majority of evangelical pastors say absolutely NOTHING in opposition to the satanic efforts to disarm the American citizenry, the Southern Baptist Convention in the State of Tennessee came out in vehement support of Bill Lee’s communist Red Flag gun confiscation proposal.
The great Puritan and Protestant reformers threw off the yoke of both religious and political bondage and created a free nation “under God.” If today’s ministers had had any man stuff, these totalitarian gun control proposals would have never seen the light of day—and America wouldn’t have collapsed into warfarism, corporatism, welfarism, collectivism and wokeism.
But they didn’t, and we have!
It’s a diabolical gun control strategy, all right—and it started in the Twentieth-Century American pulpit and has grown even more diabolical in the pulpits of the Twenty-First Century.
I will never understand how millions of professed liberty-loving, Second-Amendment Christian adherents can take their families to church every Sunday and listen to a pastor for years and years who never opens his mouth in opposition to the gun-grabbing would-be tyrants who are trying to enslave our country.
If evangelicals would be as concerned about what their pastors are saying—and NOT saying—(especially regarding God’s Biblical Laws of self-defense) as they are what their politicians are saying, America wouldn’t be in this fix.
And any minister who could read Michael’s treatise above and not be both embarrassed at how little we ministers have done to ensure that our posterity inherits the same Blessings of Liberty bequeathed to us by the courageous clergymen referenced in Michael’s masterful report and zealous in our determination to maintain the essential safeguard of Liberty—the right to keep and bear arms—doesn’t deserve the title of minister or American.
© Chuck Baldwin
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