“The ultimate authority … resides in the people alone. … The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any…” —James Madison (1788)

 

In the bowels of New York’s subway system, crime has surged 65%. The city’s new mayor, Eric Adams, had to walk back his assertion that there was an undue “perception of fear” about the subway system after a woman was shoved in front of an oncoming train. Former NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir set the record straight: “Perception often is reality, and if you happen to be one of the victims it’s certainly reality.”

That reality struck hard again Tuesday in the borough of Brooklyn, as an assailant injured 10 people in a premeditated attack, five of whom are in critical but stable condition. After setting off a smoke bomb in a transit car to obscure his actions, the black male suspect, Frank James, fired a weapon into the crowd of morning commuters.

If not declared an act of terrorism, the attack certainly has the imprint of a hate crime, given the suspect’s racist social media rants — except the notion of a “black supremacist” weaponized by Marxist Black Lives Matter radicals does not fit the Left’s profile of a “hate crime.”

His social media posts are littered with angry racist rants and threats of violence. He posted a call to “kill all the whiteys,” loved Fidel Castro and hated Donald Trump. “This nation was born in violence, it’s kept alive by violence or the threat thereof and it’s going to die a violent death,” James declared. “There’s nothing going to stop that.” In another rant he protested: “White people and Black people… should not have amy contact with each other. Blacks and whites… Should not even be in the same hemisphere.” He added, “The white motherf—kers that I want to kill, you know, I really want to kill them because they’re white.” On Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, James said: “I had no idea that she would be married to a white man. Yeah our black sister supreme court justice, power to the people is married to a f**king white man.”

It’s a deadly irony that in a city that ranks at the top of those with the strictest gun control laws in the nation, the bad guy had a weapon, but none of the law-abiding citizens could defend themselves against the assault and stop him. Where weapons are outlawed, only outlaws have weapons, which explains why the deadliest large cities in the nation — including Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Baltimore, and Washington, DC — are those with the most restrictions on firearms, and all under the control of Democrats.

Last week, armed thugs assaulted and killed six individuals in Sacramento, but before the blood had dried and a more detailed narrative could emerge, Joe Biden blamed the deaths and injuries on “gun violence” in our nation’s urban centers rather than the assailants.

Predictably, he used the assault to promote his Second Amendment deconstruction agenda, opportunistically claiming: “America once again mourns for another community devastated by gun violence. … We know these lives were not the only lives impacted by gun violence last night. … We must do more than mourn; we must act … to implement my comprehensive gun crime reduction strategy.”

Despite Biden’s superhero crime fighter facade, “gun violence” was not the cause of death in Sacramento any more than it was the cause of yesterday’s injuries in New York. It is just a manifestation of the violent criminal problem the Democrats have propagated for seven decades.

If Biden really wanted to address what he calls an “epidemic of violence,” he would make the epidemic of black-on-black assaults and murder in America his administration’s highest priority. But he won’t. He is too busy promoting his “white supremacy” bogeyman.

Fact is, almost half of new gun owners are women, and there has been a surge of legal firearm purchases by black citizens. Furthermore, after the election of Biden, there were more than 18 million firearms purchased by all Americans in 2021. There has also been a significant increase in the issuance of carry permits as support for gun rights grows.

But Biden is busy vilifying all of them.

It is notable that last year, the week before our Patriots’ Day commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord — a case study of consequences when tyrannical governments attempt to disarm the people — Biden announced six incremental executive orders aimed at the Left’s ultimate goal of deconstructing and repealing the Second Amendment. He declared then, “No amendment to the Constitution is absolute.”

Likewise, this week, Biden announced his leftist ATF nominee and more gun control regulations, specifically his intent to “ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” and “ghost guns” — two perennial anti-2A straw men and one brand-new one to be trotted out to undermine the first civil right of all Americans, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” James Madison’s Supreme Court appointee, Justice Joseph Story, noted: “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”

In honor of our upcoming Patriots’ Day, April 19th, and with Biden’s latest effort to infringe on the rights of the people as a backdrop, let’s take a brief stroll down the path that gave rise to our Republic and recall the first time central government tyrants attempted to confiscate weapons from grassroots Americans Patriots.

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On December 16th, 1773, “radicals” from Boston, members of a secret organization of American Patriots called the Sons of Liberty, boarded three East India Company ships and threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.

This iconic event, in protest of oppressive British taxation and tyrannical rule, became known as the Boston Tea Party.

Resistance to the Crown had been mounting over enforcement of the 1764 Sugar Act, 1765 Stamp Act, and 1767 Townshend Act, which led to the Boston Massacre and gave rise to the slogan, “No taxation without representation.”

The 1773 Tea Act and resulting Tea Party protest galvanized the colonists in opposition to British parliamentary acts, which they believed violated their natural, charter, and constitutional rights.

In response to the rebellion, the British enacted additional punitive measures, labeled the “Intolerable Acts,” in hopes of suppressing the burgeoning insurrection. Far from accomplishing their goal, however, the Crown’s countermeasures led colonists to convene the First Continental Congress on September 5th, 1774, in Philadelphia.

By the spring of 1775, civil discontent with their royal rulers was growing, and American Patriots in Massachusetts and other colonies were preparing to cast off this yoke.

On the evening of April 18th, 1775, General Thomas Gage, acting as the Crown’s military governor of Massachusetts, dispatched a force of 700 British Army regulars with secret orders. These troops, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, were to arrest 53-year-old Boston Tea Party leader Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Provincial Congress President John Hancock, and merchant fleet owner Jeremiah Lee.

But what directly tied Gage’s orders to the later enumeration in our Constitution’s Second Amendment of the innate “right to keep and bear arms” was the primary mission of his Redcoat brigades. They were charged with undertaking a preemptive raid to confiscate arms and ammunition stored by Massachusetts Patriots in the town of Concord.

Patriot militia and minutemen, under the leadership of the Sons of Liberty, anticipated this raid, and the confrontations with British regulars at Lexington and Concord proved to be the fuse that ignited the American Revolution.

Near midnight on April 18th, a prominent 41-year-old Boston silversmith, Paul Revere, who had arranged for advance warning of British movements, departed Charlestown (near Boston) for Lexington and Concord in order to warn John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and other Sons of Liberty that the British Army was marching to arrest them and seize their weapons caches.

Revere’s Ride was memorably captured by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year. …

One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.

After meeting with Hancock and Adams in Lexington, Revere was captured, but his Patriot ally, Samuel Prescott, continued to Concord and warned militiamen along the way.

The Patriots in Lexington and Concord, with other citizen militias in New England, were bound by “minute man” oaths to “stand at a minute’s warning with arms and ammunition.” The oath of the Lexington militia read thus: “We trust in God that, should the state of our affairs require it, we shall be ready to sacrifice our estates and everything dear in life, yea, and life itself, in support of the common cause.”

In the early dawn of April 19th, those oaths would be tested with blood. Under the command of 46-year-old farmer and militia Captain John Parker, 77 militiamen assembled on the town green at Lexington, where they soon faced Smith’s overwhelming force of seasoned Redcoats. Parker did not expect a battle, but his orders were: “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

Within close musket range from the Patriots’ column, British Major John Pitcairn swung his sword and ordered, “Lay down your arms, you damned rebels!”

Not willing to sacrifice his small band of Patriots on the green, as Parker later wrote in a sworn deposition, “I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse, and not to fire.” But his Patriots refused to lay down their arms. Then, under Pitcairn’s orders, as Parker testified, “Immediately said Troops made their appearance and rushed furiously, fired upon, and killed eight of our Party without receiving any Provocation therefor from us.” Ten other Patriots were wounded.

As the American militia retreated toward Concord with the British in pursuit, their ranks grew to more than 400.

In Concord, the British divided in order to search for armament stores. Before noon, the second confrontation between regulars and militiamen occurred as 100 British light infantry from three companies faced the ranks of militia and minutemen at Concord’s Old North Bridge. From depositions on both sides, we know that the British fired first, killing two and wounding four.

This time, however, the militia commander, Major John Buttrick, ordered, “Fire, for God’s sake, fellow soldiers, fire!”

And fire they did. The volley commenced with what poet Ralph Waldo Emerson later immortalized in his Concord Hymn as “The Shot Heard Round the World.” With that shot, farmers, laborers, landowners, and statesmen alike brought upon themselves the sentence of death for treason. In the ensuing firefight, the British suffered heavy casualties. In discord, the Redcoats retreated to Concord proper and, after reinforcing their ranks, marched back toward Lexington.

During their Concord retreat, the British took additional casualties in sporadic firefights. The most notable of those was an ambush by the reassembled ranks of John Parker’s militia, which became known as “Parker’s Revenge.” Despite reinforcements when they returned to Lexington, the king’s men were no match for the Patriot ranks. The militia and minutemen inflicted heavy casualties upon the Redcoats along their 18-mile tactical retreat to Boston.

By day’s end, the Patriots had suffered 49 killed, 39 wounded, and five missing. The British casualties totaled 73 killed, 174 wounded, and 26 missing.

Upon hearing of those first shots in what would become an eight-year struggle for American Liberty, Samuel Adams declared to fellow Patriot John Hancock, “What a glorious morning this is!”

Indeed it was, and it has remained so with every sunrise over our free nation since.

Thus began the great campaign to reject tyranny and embrace the struggle to secure individual Liberty. “The People alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government and to reform, alter, or totally change the same when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it,” wrote Samuel Adams.

Two months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Continental Congress, under its president, John Hancock, declared on June 12th, 1775: “Congress … considering the present critical, alarming and calamitous state … do earnestly recommend, that Thursday, the 12th of July next, be observed by the inhabitants of all the English Colonies on this Continent, as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, that we may with united hearts and voices, unfeignedly confess and deplore our many sins and offer up our joint supplications to the All-wise, Omnipotent and merciful Disposer of all Events, humbly beseeching Him to forgive our iniquities … It is recommended to Christians of all denominations to assemble for public worship and to abstain from servile labor and recreations of said day.”

Why would that first generation of American Patriots forgo, in the inimitable words of Sam Adams, “the tranquility of servitude” for “the animating contest of freedom”?

The answer to that question — Liberty or Death — defined the spirit of American Patriotism then, just as it defines the spirit of American Patriots now. We, today, are the ideological descendants of those who once pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Just as our forebearers were, we must be willing to “support and defend” Liberty as enumerated in our Declaration of Independence and enshrined in our Constitution.

In 1776, George Washington wrote in his General Orders, “The time is now near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.”

Of that resolve, two centuries later President Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

Indeed, the time is always at hand when American Patriots must reaffirm whether we are to be free men or slaves.

Patriots, through the trials we face now, stand firm and fast, and remember who YOU are, brothers and sisters — and who WE are together.

During the American Revolution, musicians, particularly drummers, were a primary means of communicating and expediting battlefield orders. While the Continental regulars wore blue coats with red cuffs, drummers wore red coats with blue cuffs in order to be more visible on a battlefield.

Like those drummers, The Patriot Post strives to be the signal corps for American Patriots defending Liberty on the frontlines.

In the words of George Washington, “Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind.”

The Patriot Post is the most cost-effective conservative force multiplier on the Web. By supporting our Patriots’ Day Campaign, you ensure the future of Liberty will be bright.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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NOTE: The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

All defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate and refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists. See these updated Footnotes for key points of rebuttal: Firearm Fiction v. Facts.

Only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

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