So, there's this blog I often visit by a retired US Army Special Forces Colonel, mainly for the insight he brings to the Greater Middle East, having been an attache' to several Arab militaries. He's sort of in the paleo-conservative camp, meaning there are some things -- the virtues of rural living, the monstrousness of the corporate-military industrial complex, the delight of trout -- he and I can agree on. But there are other things we can't and that make me mad, like the Civil War (he is an old Virginian). More topical is gun control. He posted a rather silly piece of satire from one of his right-wing commenters, premised on the idea that the Battle of Lexington and Concord was Big Government (Gen. Gage) trying to "take the assault weapons away from anti-tax, right-wing, paramilitary extremists."
There are a lot of things wrong with the piece, but as an historian of 18th century Massachusetts, let me note just a few:
1. The Patriot/Whigs were left-wing, not right-wing, if we're going to impose this ahistorical framework. The right-wingers are the Tories locked up in Boston.
2. These were not "paramilitary extremist" nutters in the sense of Ruby Ridge or Waco; they were the established militias of the several towns of the provisional Gov't in Exile of Massachusetts Bay. They were undergirded and sanctioned by the Civil Authority in the several Town Meetings, and the General Court in exile that met in Salem. This is crucial and key: the modern far Right's view that any cadre of bandits with firearms constitute "defenders of liberty" would have been roundly rejected by the intensely communitarian New Englanders of the 18th century countryside.
3. The idea that gun fetishists and various madmen (they mostly are men, aren't they?) owning stockpiles of weapons designed for industrial warfare, in the midst of a free and democratic society, during peacetime, can in any way be likened to the storage of 18th century war materiel, AT THE BEHEST OF THE LEGITIMATE CIVIL AUTHORITY, during a time of foreign military occupation, is fallacious.
Thus, the ultimate problem the Far Right has in this analogy of themselves with the Minutemen, is the lack of the crucial element which legitimized the 18th century minutemen: the endorsement of legitimate civil authority representing the popular will (now, you can say that Gen. Gage is the legitimate civil authority, but I'm assuming we all accept the Patriot/Whig argument here; sorry, Tories, John Yoo, et al.). If they want to start Committees of Correspondence and other legitimate civil authorities that will endorse their nuttery, they are free to do so: but only if such civil authorities are democratically formed can they be considered legitimate in today's America. Indeed, they would have to be more democratic than the currently ordained civil authorities, the Towns, States, and Federal Governments. But if one thing is clear about the Gun Extremists, is that they really DON'T want to accept democratic strictures; the idea of a free and open debate on their right to own weapons of mass destruction makes them quite literally frothing mad, as it did Mr. LaPierre on "Meet the Press" in December. Or, more recently, the fascist mutant who decided to carry an assault rifle into a Charlottesville, Va., supermarket, in order to impress on all the mothers and babies there how devoted he was to his strange, trigger-bound political theology. This is not how people in a democracy discuss an issue of public import: this is how maladjusted punk weirdoes do so, with the overt threat of violence.
But, as old Abe famously said, in a democracy, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.
Then again, I don't think they're big fans of Abe in the first place.
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