Editorial: Why I Need An AR

You tell me I don’t need an AR-15.

I don’t need the three wristwatches, eight pens, shelves of books, and many, many other things I own.  But I need an AR.  Because one day, things may change, and I will need it.

                    Polish Jews being loaded onto trains at Umschlagplatz of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942. 

Anti-gun liberals don’t want to hear about Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, and mentally disabled people being loaded in boxcars by Nazis.  Just like you don’t want to hear we were traveling down the eugenics road, like Germany.  Many liberal elites (John Harvey Kellogg, Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson) supported it and, were in fact, jealous of the progress the German eugenicists were making.  Perhaps we were closer to concentration camps than you thought.

That was an aberration, you tell me.  We have laws to prevent that.  Until we don’t.

Texas has abortion laws that allow you to turn in a woman if you think she has had or will have an abortion, even if she goes to another state.  Ohio abortion law forced a 10-year-old rape victim to go out of state for her abortion.  Women are now second-class citizens in many states, my home state included.

There are more than a few fundamentalist Christians who hate Catholic papists and would have them as second-class citizens.  You know there are more than a few morons who would have opened camps for the Chinese following the arrival of Covid-19.

I thought Richard Nixon would try a Trump-like takeover of the Federal government and I’d be in a militia killing men and women my age to restore our government.

Aberration, my ass.

No, no, no, you tell me.  We have laws and a legal system to challenge that.  Don’t make me laugh.  I remember the civil rights movement when dogs were sicced on marchers and water cannons were used to punish marchers and black men were lynched for looking at a white woman.

Let me tell you about an armed revolution in Athens, Tennessee and how veterans used the force of arms to restore democracy to their community.

It was 1936.  The E. H. Crump political machine based in Memphis had extended to McMinn County with the introduction of Paul Cantrell as the Democratic candidate for sheriff.  Paul was reelected sheriff in the 1938 and 1940 elections, and then to the state senate in 1942 and 1944.  His former deputy, Pat Mansfield was then elected sheriff those years.  It was a thoroughly corrupt system.

Access to voting was restricted by reducing the number of voting precincts from 23 to 12.  The sheriff and his deputies were paid under a fee system, receiving money for every person they booked, incarcerated, and released.  This caused extensive arrests on trumped-up charges lodged against tourists and travelers.  Between 1936 and 1946, these fees amounted to almost $300,000.

Paul Cantrell engaged in electoral fraud, both by intimidating voters who voted against him, and by allowing ineligible people to vote.  The U.S. Department of Justice had investigated allegations of electoral fraud in McMinn County in 1940, 1942, and 1944, but had not taken action.  The Federal government just stood by and watched.  Doesn’t this sound familiar?

The political problems were further entrenched by the economic corruption of political figures, who enabled gambling, bootlegging, and other illegal activity.  Most of McMinn County's young men were off fighting World War II, which allowed the political machine's goals and exerted control over the county’s citizens.  The machine controlled law enforcement, the newspapers, and schools.  And the machine wasn’t happy to see the veterans return from WWll.  It’s hard to intimidate men who have killed, watched their friends die, and seen the suffering they had.

The elections were rigged.  It went beyond legal tomfuckery.  “Windy" Wise, a patrolman, prevented an elderly African American farmer, Tom Gillespie, from casting his ballot at the Athens Water Works polling place.  Wise struck Gillespie with brass knuckles, causing Gillespie to drop his ballot and run from the deputy who shot him. 

WWII veterans were arrested, and some were beaten to prevent them from voting.  But enough was enough.  A pitched gun battle occurred, the locked ballot boxes were seized and held by a newly formed political group representing the illegally disenfranchised citizens, GI Non-Partisan League.

The armed men had made a difference.  The "Battle of Athens" was followed by movements of veterans in other Tennessee counties promoting a statewide coalition against corrupt political machines in the upcoming November elections.

So, the Second Amendment is the firewall that allows us to change our government when no other option is available.  You may not like that thought, but fallible, imperfect governments change and arms may become necessary.

Not in my lifetime, I hope.  But if ill winds blow, I’ll stand.  So that’s why I need an AR.

Yes, it can happen again.



None of these photos are mine.  Better photographers took them, but they have power in them.