Hard as gun haters try, freedom won’t die

Guns Save A Life.com ^ | Oct 28. 2012

[KeyLargo]

Hard as gun haters try, freedom won’t die

October 28, 2012

There are some anti-self-defense activists who feel so strongly about depriving Americans of their Second Amendment rights that they work to deprive these same Americans of their First Amendment rights as well.

We’ve seen this in vandalism of our Guns Save Life highway signs along the Interstates.

We put the kibosh on a rash of nearly a dozen incidences of vandalism in the space of a couple of months during the early 2000s by erecting a “double decker” set of signs which featured vandalized signs with the following message underneath.

AS YOU CAN SEE THUGS SPRAY LIES HARD AS THEY TRY FREEDOM WON’T DIE

Amazingly, our vandalism spree came to a abrupt end and incidents since then have been almost unheard of.

A couple of years later, the Illinois Department of Transportation sent letters to some of our sign project landowners, claiming our signs were in violation of some highway beautification act or another and threatening to remove the signs and charge the landowners for the costs of removing the signs.

Our corporate counsel, the late Paul Vallandigham sent them a pithy one-page letter citing LaDue v. Gilleo, a 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision which basically established that religious or political messages are more or less exempt from government regulation.

Vallandigham tied his citation of LaDue with language that he would hold any State of Illinois Department of Transportation workers, their supervisors and the entire Department liable for damages should state workers trespass on private property to remove the political signage.

[KeyLargo]