Missouri has joined Kansas, Utah, Texas, and Wyoming in suggesting that it will pass legislation that would empower local law enforcement to arrest federal agents attempting to enforce a still un-passed federal ban on assault weapons.
State laws that purposefully contradict federal laws are unconstitutional, and federal officials are immune from state and federal prosecution for actions they take in carrying out their official duty. I’ve already explained the reasons behind that. But I find it worthwhile to once again note that going so far as to arrest federal agents who are just doing their jobs qualifies as armed insurrection, which is both secession and treason when practiced by a state.
Missouri’s law sets itself apart from the others in how far it goes, covering things like ammunition and other firearms laws other than those involving assault weapons.
There are two things worth noting that I haven’t talked about, and for good reason. First, all of these proposals are coming from Republicans in very conservative red states, which means these tantrums aren’t really about the second amendment so much as they are an excuse for truly fringe politicians to act out their secessionist fantasies. I doubt that very many citizens want their states to wage war against America, least of all because it would bring their citizenship into question and make certain that the U.S. Constitution no longer applies to them, including the second amendment.
Second, the sheer breadth of Missouri’s law places the state — should the law pass — roughly on the same level as the branch Davidian’s in Waco, who also thought they had an unlimited right to their guns and turned those guns on their own government in order to keep them, murdering a handful of innocent ATF agents who were just doing their jobs by serving a lawful court-approved search warrant.
The similarities between violent anti-government extremists like the Davidans, Freemen, and people like Randy Weaver, and Republicans pushing secessionist legislation in Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Kansas, and Missouri, are not a coincidence. What you’ve got brewing in those states are the result of elections like 2010 and before, that have seen previously shunned anti-government extremists on the fringes of society welcomed into the Republican Party as a means of gaining political power, in order to counterbalance an increasingly GOP-hostile United States where minorities are pushing the Democratic Party towards being a permanently dominant party in national politics here.
In other words, the right has resorted to absorbing so many people from the far right fringe in order to gain a foothold at the state and municipal level to counter Democratic dominance at the national level, that it’s finally sucked up the lowest of the low from the bottom of the barrel. While Randy Weaver may not have been able to rise to the prominence of a presidential candidate, I have no doubt that people just like him are the ones pushing this secessionist legislation that is placing those five red states on a path towards civil war against America.
One would hope for the sake of us all that this is more talk than action.
It helps to remember that many polls have shown a majority of Americans want more regulations on guns. Not only are these five red states moving towards secession from America and the Constitution, they are flipping off a majority of the American people as well.