In Washington and Elsewhere, Defiance
is Proper Response to "Gun Control"
By Kurt Hofmann, November 19th, 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
Picture, Oleg Volk
We have discussed recently the Washington State ballot initiative, successful in the recent election, that will outlaw all private sales of firearms (because a sale in which the prospective buyer's criminal history--and increasingly even medical history--is first combed through by the FBI, is anything but "private"). That discussion was about the threat posed by this new approach by the gun ban zealots--using a lavishly funded media blitz to dupe low information voters into passing oppressive "gun control" ballot initiatives. A very useful breakdown of the future of that threat in other states can be found here, by the way.
For Washington gun owners, though, it's too late to worry about how to stop such measures from succeeding--the billionaire backers of I-594 have already won, and the law they bought goes into effect in about two weeks. The question now is what to do about it.
As it happens, thousands of gun owners in Washington have just the answer--massive noncompliance. From Enter Stage Right:
Now, Washington state gun owners intend to take things to a new level in response to Washington's new gun control law. At least 5,500 are planning to openly violate the heavy-handed law, I-594, during a rally at the state capitol in Olympia on December 13th. The law goes into effect on December 4th, after the Secretary of State certifies the election results. Not a single so-called mainstream media source has mentioned the unprecedented event, even though RSVPs continue to increase every day.
This is practically unheard of in the modern era; not only will 5,500 people deliberately violate the law through civil disobedience, but will violate felony gun laws.
Mike Vanderboegh
Actually, according to the Facebook page associated with the event, the RSVP list of planned attendees is now over 6,200, with nearly 2,000 more "maybes." Among those planning to attend is tireless liberty advocate and perennial thorn in the collectivists' sides Mike Vanderboegh, who despite some serious health issues, intends to travel from Alabama to Washington for the party--about as far as one can go in a straight line within the continental U.S.
So what will they actually do at the event? The plan is to publicly exchange guns without a background check--a felony under the new law. As the event's Facebook page says, they plan to "violate I-594 in every possible way."
And they aren't alone in announcing their intentions. The Seattle Times reports that the Washington State Patrol has made an announcement of its own:
Now, a Washington State Patrol spokesman says people won't be arrested for exchanging guns.
"We don't think that we could prove that that's a transfer," said Bob Calkins, spokesman for the patrol.
It's not easy to believe Calkins' contention that they "don't think that [they] could prove that that's a transfer." The text of I-594 explicitly defines the word "transfer" for purposes of the law: "Transfer means the intended delivery of a firearm to another person without consideration of payment or promise of payment including, but not limited to, gifts and loans." With these "transfers" being made in public and in plain sight, the police could record them on video if they wished--sounds like a pretty easy proof.
The vastly more plausible reason that the state police have no intention of trying to arrest a gathering of thousands of angry, armed citizens is that they are smart enough to be terrified of starting a shooting war against an armed citizenry with both right and numbers on their side.
In short, several weeks before the rally, its planners have already won a key victory. The state's enforcers have already tacitly acknowledged their inability to do anything more than stand on the sidelines and watch as the law is violated thousands of times in front of their eyes. Nothing breeds contempt for a law as quickly as the knowledge that it can be openly violated with utter impunity.
We have seen this before. Tens of thousands (or scores of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of owners of banned (but "grandfathered") "assault weapons" in Connecticut are defying that state's mandate that they register them, and the state has been at an utter loss as to what to do about it.
In New York, compliance with the obscenely misnamed "SAFE Act's" similar requirement to register "pre-ban" "assault weapons" is unknown. Why? Because the state refuses to say, dubiously claiming that to release this aggregate data would be to violate gun owners' privacy (as if that would bother New York politicians). The far more reasonable explanation is that compliance is embarrassingly low there, too.
The movie "Defiance," about the Bielski brothers' desperate struggle to save themselves and hundreds of other Jews from the Nazis in Belorussia, is, despite its unfortunate choice of Daniel Craig for the leading role, an inspiring movie, with a tagline very applicable to this situation: "Freedom begins with an act of defiance." In Washington and everywhere else under the thumb of onerous "gun control" laws, it's time to get freedom started.
A former paratrooper, Kurt Hofmann was paralyzed in a car accident in 2002. The helplessness inherent to confinement to a wheelchair prompted him to explore armed self-defense, only to discover that Illinois denies that right, inspiring him to become active in gun rights advocacy. He also writes the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner column. Kurt Hofmann Archive.
