A HISTORY of the AMERICAN MILITIA MOVEMENT: America’S Shooting Edge by Nita M

A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN MILITIA MOVEMENT: America’s Shooting Edge By Nita M. Renfrew©2000 The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. Thomas Jefferson PART I: Broken Seal Chapter 1 SECRET MILITIA I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. Nathan Hale I knew already there was something mean amiss in America when a federal building was bombed in 1995, and soon after, news of Militias training for battle, quoting Thomas Jefferson, became commonplace. Until that time, I had investigated conflicts between peoples and governments far away, mainly in the Middle East and Central America. Now, sensing that the important story was moving to my own homeground, I turned my sights accordingly. What I found out about the Oklahoma bombing did not really surprise me. What I found out about the Militias, however, would change my life forever. It was in the spring of 1996 that I had my first Militia interview, with the bearded commander of an underground citizen Militia, at a remote place in the countryside. I shall call him Tom Church to protect his identity. We rendezvoused early one morning at a place in the state of New York which I cannot disclose. When I arrived, he was waiting for me, standing next to his van on a dirt road a few hundred feet from the highway. Tall and slender, in his late forties, he wore slacks and a t-shirt, not fatigues. His eyes were brown and gentle, his hands sensitive, with long fingers, and there was a fluid, transparent quality to him. Without the slightest affectation, and with a clear sense of purpose, almost as if he were a concerned parent reporting that he was a member of the local PTA, Tom said simply, "U.S. Militia, New York Regiment." In the three years since the federal government's gun-control raid in Waco, Texas, on a church, as many Americans saw it -- gassing then burning eighty-some children, women and men -- outraged citizens had been enrolling spontaneously in Militia of their own creation in most every corner of the American Union. Aside from the horror of it all, rural America saw the raid and ensuing massacre as a Second Amendment matter. The feds had had no business being at the church commune at Waco, since there had been no unlawful firearms activity. The feds had had no business being there anyway, since the Constitution made no provision for federal police powers. Indeed, it was the second time in the short history of the United States that citizen Militias had sprung up en masse spontaneously. The first had been two centuries earlier, after Lexington and Concord, outside Boston, where, also in a weapons raid, and also at a church, one of the king's men had fired "the shot that rang out around the world." In 1775, the local pastor and his flock had been defending their Militia arsenal from the Redcoats on the village green in front of their church when they took eight fatal casualties. Immediately, with most patriots already enrolled at that time in some form of citizen Militia, they had begun furiously to prepare, from one end of the Colonies to the other, to fight for independence. The day that Lexington happened was April 19—long known as "Patriots Day" to commemorate the start of America's Revolutionary War. It was also known as "John Parker Day," after the local minutemen commander, who had said presciently before the shooting began, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a way, let it begin here." Two centuries later, the government's heinous deed at Waco, curiously, would take place on that same day, April 19, in the spring of 1993. It was not lost on 20th-century patriots that, as at Lexington earlier, government troops at Waco also fired on members of a local church and their pastor, also with the intention of disarming them and confiscating their lawful weapons. And so, in the nineties, well-aware of Lexington's place in the nation's short history—even sometimes to the point almost of confusing the two incidents—mostly-rural Americans went about furiously enrolling for a second time in the Militia. From the start of today's Militia movement, the historic date that marked the start of the Revolutionary War, April 19, had been manipulated by shadowy forces to no good end. But, the movement, as I was fast learning, had quickly managed nevertheless to rise above it all -- something that had gone unreported in the mainstream media -- in its best moments achieving an authentic, noble, grassroots expression of the people nationwide. It was as though the Revolutionary War and everything it had come to stand for, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights -- like scripture—was in the end so sacred that anything to do with it was destined to a certain purity of spirit that could not be sullied, despite the many efforts to do so. At the time of Waco in early 1993, throughout the nation, tensions ran high, with jobs being downsized out of existence or moved overseas in deference to the recently-declared "New World Order"—later changed to "global economy," or "globalization." Myself a Democrat at the time, I was horrified by what I saw at Waco, watching with the entire nation a Democratic administration slaughter people—many of them, such as the children, plainly innocent. (It was worse for me than if it had been Republicans, the so-called party of big business, as had been the case during the Persian Gulf War, when I had agonized over the killing of a half million-plus Iraqi civilians.) As if the slaughter of innocents weren't bad enough, my fellow Democrats had remained silent simply because it was a Democratic president, when in my mind, we were supposed to be the party against government abuses—the party of Thomas Jefferson, for individual rights and justice. The Democrats, I had thought, if anything, should be held to higher standards than others. That was what I had been taught by my parents in the '50s when I was growing up. But clearly it was no longer the same party. When I thought about it, I realized that this was because slowly during the '60s and '70s it had become the party of special-interest, group-rights and collective solutions. No longer the defender of individual rights, that were what had made Americans different from other nations, that had been emphasized in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In the aftermath of Waco, it was as if the shades fell from my eyes as I began painfully to realize that fellow Democrats had only beat the drums of Watergate and Iran-Contra because they were crimes of Republicans, not out of some basic principle of decency, or rights, or justice. And there was no getting around the fact that Democrats had looked the other way during Waco simply because those under siege happened to be of a different political persuasion. Something had gone terribly wrong in the nation, and although I did not see it then the way "patriots" did, the immorality of it all, at the time, I found it no different from how the Nazis had started. I had immediately thought, "If they can do it to them, they can do it to me -- us." In my search to try to understand how this could be in the United States of America, at first, I never imagined that my quest, in the last years of the millenium, would consume me. Slowly, though, I would come to understand—albeit with great difficulty—that Waco, whatever else it might have been, was the embodiment and result of a gun control policy that had started during the Depression, now tightening its vise, not on criminals, but on the general, law-abiding population—in full breach of the Bill of Rights—difficult as it was for many Americans to understand, and that if the Second Amendment did not survive, neither would our other rights. What we were living was the sundering of the very foundations of the nation—one paid for in full in the 18th century with the blood of Americans yearning to be free of a European order that had its roots in feudalism, where land often was not privately owned and there was little freedom for ordinary people (especially when there was peace—in wartime, ironically, there was often greater freedom in the chaos), and government police power was highly centralized. It was an order that at the time had sat badly in this vast new world, and it continued to do so. For this was how it all looked to the newly-pledged Militiamen and women I encountered in my quest, who believed they could change things back to the way it was meant to be in the Constitution—through a purely educational process. In the beginning, so certain were these patriots that all that was needed to awaken their fellow Americans was to teach them their history and their rights, that many Militias were highly visible and held public meetings, going so far as to advertise in the local papers. For them, it seemed only natural to use the tools that were the legacy of the Founding Fathers—the First and Second Amendments in the Bill of Rights: the rights to freedom of expression and assembly, and to keep and bear arms, for all to see, as a reminder of who held the power under the Constitution.

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