Republican Governor’s Betrayal in Vermont Shows How Public Ignorance Lets Practiced Liars Say Anything

 Reposted from 2018. Copied from Internet Archive, so links may no longer work.

Time was Vermont produced men like Ethan Allen, who had a differrent response for tyrants than obeying them. (1875 engraving depicting the capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen on May 10, 1775)

1,200 standard capacity 30-round magazines from MAGPUL Industries were supplied free-of-charge courtesy RECOIL magazine to Vermont gun owners in a protest operation appropriately called the “Green Mountain Airlift.” The magazines were distributed Saturday to gun owner rights demonstrators at the statehouse in Montpelier in anticipation of the governor signing a law banning them.

They were protesting bans on magazines, bans on rate-enhancing devices, bans on selling guns to citizens under 21, the end of private sales, due-process trampling confiscation orders, and more proposed infringements in the wings.

Mike Vanderboegh had an answer for those who would ban tools tyrants didn’t want their subjects to have.

Magazines owned before their banning will be “grandfathered,” although how that can be reliably verified is unclear. The giveaway is reminiscent of civil disobedience actions conducted by my late friend and colleague Mike Vanderboegh, although he smuggled ammunition and magazines into states (and sent to oath-breakers governing them) where band had been enacted as acts of defiance against edicts seen as unconstitutional and tyrannical:

“But even before the shot heard ’round the world, the colonists understood their weaknesses and their military needs and did something about it. They smuggled. They smuggled Dutch gunpowder and French flints. They smuggled tents and uniform cloth and artillery and ammunition. Boston was the high headquarters of anti-British smuggling and John Hancock was its prime minister. Connecticut was a small empire built on patriotic smuggling. The colonists knew what to do and they did it, regardless of the risk — regardless of all the King’s ministers and the King’s soldiery. They defied the King. They resisted his edicts. They evaded his laws and they smuggled. Lord above, did they smuggle.”

That’s part of the “I will not comply” paradigm popularized by Thoreau, and still available as a form of nullification for when all “legal” means of redress have been closed off from complying with a higher law, “the supreme Law of the Land.” It’s no different, morally, from refusing to obey edicts requiring firearms be surrendered, or disobeying orders to do the confiscation.

The real lawbreaking comes from those who would pass and enforce such totalitarian edicts under color of authority. And in this case, the villain is “Republican” Governor Phil Scott, who says he has “every intention of signing it.”

“What’s being passed at this point in time doesn’t intrude on the Second Amendment,” Scott flat-out lied. “It doesn’t take away their guns, and I believe that we will get accustomed to the new normal.”

How the fork-tongued weasel-worder figures these aren’t infringements is not stated. Of course they are, and the magazine limitation is a direct assault on Founding intent – as recognized by the Supreme Court — that the people have a right to “arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time [and] the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear … ordinary military equipment … that … could contribute to the common defense.”

As for this being “the new normal,” it won’t be for long. Once these points have been surrendered, the gun-grabbers will be back for more, and then there will be a new “new normal” – all the way down the “slippery slope” until the collectivists are ready to try for their end game, as treasonous ex- Supreme Court “Justice” John Paul Stevens made clear.

The new normal will be a monopoly of violence, exactly what the Founders opposed.

Time was, Vermont was the gold standard for the right to keep and bear arms, being relatively free of infringements to the point where permitless carry was once dubbed “Vermont carry.” Like everything else they touch, “progressives” in the state can’t resist tampering with freedom and imposing their obsession with control over everything.  This was, after all, the state that gave “us” the out-and-out national socialist Bernie Sanders for a presidential candidate.

It’s fair to wonder what Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys citizen militia would make of the mostly ungrateful and oblivious beneficiaries of the sacrifices they made to win liberty from despots.  Allen, too, was once declared an outlaw by a tyrannical governor for his acts of defiance.

I have a feeling Scott wouldn’t want to open the door.