It has become common place in my county for agency meetings to include armed fish and game wardens around the walls. Fifth generation ranchers Doug and Gail Jenner can speak to the armed federal agent and state game warden complete with flack jacket who visited their home and read them their rights. Purpose? They were investigating a complaint that their irrigation had resulted in some dead endangered coho salmon.
Or three generations of Carver women ranchers who were visited by two armed fish and game wardens to coerce them into signing up for an “incidental take” permit for salmon which would have signed away their water rights.
Armed citizens are not as easily intimidated as those who have been stripped of their means to defend their families and their homes from a tyrannical bureaucracy.
The Democrats, the Obama Administration and the Brown Administration have gone too far in forcing policies and regulations down our gullets without our consent. Half of the country does not agree with the vision of the other half. That does not give the winning half the license to use force to destroy the lifestyle, values, families, communities and property of the other on a national or statewide scale. Nor does it give them license to introduce vicious predators into their communities on one hand, while taking away their rights and abilities to defend themselves on the other.
Our revolutionary era commissioners in Europe, among them John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, were astounded at the grinding poverty of the masses and the wealth of the nobles. That the princes feared the peasants was evident by their heavily armed security entourages. Government buildings were also stoutly defended by muskets with bayonets fixed.
They were relieved that in our fledgling republics, where the people were sovereign, and government was servant and not master, the specter of standing armies to protect the government was an irrelevant impossibility.
In the 1970s I saw much the same in various Navy liberty ports in Europe; soldiers always posted at various points throughout the cities. I thanked God that would never happen in America.
Now, in my tiny county in north Florida, (population 15,000) I must go through a metal detector manned by an armed deputy to enter the courthouse. To enter the county commissioners meeting room within the courthouse, I must do the same; empty pockets and submit to a search.
I refuse to fly on an airline for the same reason I will not again enter my county courthouse; I am not a criminal, I am not dangerous and refuse to conduct myself as if I were.
I don't think the ruling class understands they are fast losing all legitimacy. When that happens, order can only be maintained by pure force, and not reason.
They will never take my guns.