A Giant Has Awoken:
Resistance in the Blue Zone
By Claire Wolfe, April 13th 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
They're burning registration forms! They're rallying by the thousands. They're pledging civil disobedience. They're swearing to resist, to disobey, even if it makes them felons. They're angry, they're defiant, they've had it and they aren't going to take it any more.
Who are they? No, they're not 1960s draft resisters. They're not anti-nuke activists or scruffy Occupy Wall Street protestors. Heck, chances are some of them actually work on Wall Street.
They are the gun owners of the bluest blue states. They're the respectable men and women of the mid-Atlantic region. They're people who have, in the past, submitted to the rules even when they didn't like them -- or at least kept their mouths shut about their non-compliance.
But not any more.
The spate of pointless blue-state legislation against "assault weapons" and standard-capacity magazines that followed the Newtown school shooting sought -- as usual -- to punish millions of people who didn't commit the crime by registering or outright banning firearms that just happen to look scary to hoplophobes.
This time it didn't work.
- In New York, where owners of "assault weapons" have until April 15 to register them, thousands burned registration paperwork instead.
- In Connecticut, the December 31, 2013 register-or-surrender deadline passed -- and was resoundingly ignored by an estimated 85 percent of its intended targets. (And that's despite the fact that, unlike New York, where it's a misdemeanor, failure to register is a felony in Connecticut.) TheBlaze.com reported, "...officials and some lawmakers are stunned."
- In New Jersey, as a particularly ridiculous bill loaded with unintended consequences moved through the legislature, lawmakers had to face a nine-year-old competitive shooter who threatened to move out of state. (Not to mention a tongue-in-cheek campaign by the New Jersey Second Amendment Society to send gun magazines to some bigoted politicians.)
- Meanwhile, 19 states and 34 congresspeople, and the NRA sued New Jersey over one of its existing bad gun laws.
- Rhode Island gun-rights activists have so far managed to keep a host of ugly bills bottled up on committee while frustrating one state senator so badly he spewed an obsenity at a Second Amendment supporter. They also elected themselves some hopefully more rights-friendly politicians, too.
- While individual Maryland gun owners have been quieter about the "merely bad" law inflicted upon them, Maryland-based Beretta objected enough to announce it would be expanding -- in Tennessee
In some cases, anti-gun legislators ended up shooting themselves in the foot. In the months after Newtown, some Delaware politicians hoped to pass "reasonable" victim-disarmament legislation. But when a staffer mistakenly introduced a bill that revealed their real intention, they had to withdraw the bill and slink away. Their intended victims were onto them -- and could prove it.
Rage and resistance continue to build. A rally in Connecticut on April 5 drew as many as 5,000 gun owners, some lawfully bearing arms. (David Codrea was its keynote speaker.
As New York's registration deadline looms, "hardly anyone is signing up."
It seems people have not only had it with absurd, pointless gun laws. They may have finally grasped that registration leads to confiscation.
Taken one-by-one, these developments don't seem to mean much. Taken together, they're an absolutely remarkable record of resistance -- with more to come.
In old Hollywood movies and before that, in even older novels there was a phrase: "The natives are restless." This phrase usually turned up just before said natives went on a rampage against clueless "civilized" people. At that moment in the movies, you'd hear the sound of beating drums and angry hubub in a language that none of the "civilized" people could comprehend.
Well ... the natives (of formerly complacent blue states) are getting restless indeed. And too many clueless anti-gun politicians are still failing to comprehend the language of gun rights.
Just as in those old movies, this is not likely to end well for those who seek to dominate "the natives."
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