A Diabolic Gun Control Strategy

A Diabolic Gun Control Strategy

Copyright ©2023 • Revisionist History Website

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

These thoughts didn’t spring from erewhon. They were inspired in part by another civil war, in Britain itself some 130 years earlier, when the people took up arms against the government of King Charles I. Those Puritans had argued that the legislature, i.e. the House of “Commons didn't just represent the people, it answered to them: ‘We are your principals, and you are our agents.”

Their petition, “Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens and other Freeborn People of England to their own House of Commons (July 1646), did not only denounce (King) Charles, but monarchy itself. It was possible, the petitioners said, for a nation to be happy without a king. It argued for thorough reform. It asked of the victorious Puritan ‘New Model Army,’ “Have you shook this nation like an earthquake to produce no more than this for us?’

“Ultimately, they were claiming authority from the large numbers of people that put their names to it: a democratic mandate…This was reflected most obviously in the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens’ suggestions for parliamentary elections: they were to be annual, upon one certain day in November, and the people would simply turn up, rather than being summoned. Symbolically, they were not serving a higher power, who called them by writs, they were expressing their sovereign rights as citizens.

“A central element to the radicals’ thought was the idea of English birthrights: not just the idea that the English were ‘free-born,’ something widely accepted, but that this conferred political rights. These were partly expressed in the common law, and (John) Lilburne himself saw his rights as being protected by Magna Carta.” (It was the medieval Catholic militia led by the barons that compelled King John to enact Magna Carta).

“But the new radicals said something different and more profound, too. They argued that the law, as it stood, was created by the successors of William the Conqueror. But now the defeat of King Charles, who was the Conqueror’s most recent heir, meant the so-called Norman yoke had been thrown off.” (Cf. Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England 1603-1689 [2023], pp. 214-215).

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.”