Olympia rally draws defiant gun owners to protest new edict … A crowd of gun rights activists, many armed, estimated at 1,000 by the Washington State Patrol and at up to 3,000 per a photo gallery caption accompanying The Seattle Times' report, gathered at the State Capitol in Olympia Saturday to collectively declare "I will not comply" with the recently passed Initiative 594. The "background check" ballot measure was developed by Everytown's Michael Bloomberg and financed in large part by a cadre of the ex-mayor and fellow billionaires, including Microsoft's Bill Gates. The rally was put on "illegally" by organizer, Washington State activist and congressional candidate Gavin Seim and colleagues, who refused to apply for a required permit for the event, citing instead the right of people to peaceably assemble on their own authority. – Examiner
Dominant Social Theme: These gun control crazies are getting worse.
Free Market Analysis: Gavin Seim and people like him are perhaps the fruit of this Internet era. They are educated and fervent about protecting constitutional freedoms. Yet there is a big difference between understanding what has been lost and regaining it.
Seim is already on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch, which devoted a post to his planned protest: "New Washington Gun-Control Law Spurs 'We Will Not Comply' Rally Led by Youthful 'Patriot'."
Here's how the article began …
Gavin Seim believes that it's self-evident that Washington state's recently approved gun-control initiative is unconstitutional, which in turn means that the state's citizens don't have to obey its requirement of a background check for most gun sales. And he is organizing a rally – "We Will Not Comply" – at the state capitol in Olympia in mid-December to make their defiance manifest in a massive act of civil disobedience.
The article also pointed out that Seim didn't believe he needed a permit to assemble even though state officials had sent Seim a letter stating that another rally was planned for the same site that Seim intended to use for his.
Nonetheless, as we can see, the rally appears to have taken place without any difficulties. The Examiner reports on the rally as follows:
The noncompliance with gun laws pledge was backed up with acts of civil disobedience throughout the afternoon, as various activists "transferred" firearms to one another without going through any government oversight checks. For their part, the Yes on 594 Twitter account has argued that handing off a gun is not a violation, claiming without further clarification when challenged, that "law enforcement agencies have been clear for months: that's #NotATransfer." That contention of an exception is not supported by the Ballotpedia description of "the effect of the … measure."
At the end of the rally, organizer Seim and others burned their concealed carry permits, noting rights are not bestowed by government officials and thus do not require their permission. In spite of uncounted acts of civil disobedience and a crowd armed with long guns and side arms, rally attendees, while exuberant and defiant, remained peaceful.
The rally was supposed to include Amon Bundy, whose father was involved in a standoff with federal officials earlier this year. What occurred late in the 20th century is now reappearing with greater vigor.
At the time, it was easier for law enforcement officials to paint the patriot movement as extreme and even unjustified. But that is growing more difficult now after 15 years of file sharing and historical research.
The lawlessness of the transformation of an agrarian republic into what can only be seen today as a kind of mercantilist empire has been limned in detail and is available in numerous places and numerous forums.
Of course, what is less commented on, certainly in the alternative media, is that it really doesn't matter very much. Republics cannot be reconstituted for numerous reasons … most having to do with the creation of citizens whose well-being is highly correlated to the continuance of the empire.
What happens in such situations is that confrontations typically become bloodier and often the elites of the day seek these confrontations because it is far easier to confront an insurrection than to explain the evolution of the policies that have led to it.
It is for this reason that – as much as we would like to see a return to a viable US republicanism – we are trying to be quite clear about what is actually taking place. There are solutions to what is going on, but they likely lie at a family and community level.
Mostly they are individual and involve overseas property, the purchase of physical metals, the acquisition of second passports and farmland or involvement in communal farming etc.
The idea that the West's current mercantilist power centers are going to be overturned by either violent rebellion or peaceful protests is likely naïve. What will more predictably take place is a gradual disassociation of citizens with the nation-states they are located in.
People will take care of themselves and their families as best they can and protect their assets as carefully as possible. They will seek to understand history so they do not repeat it.
The protests of Seim and others are certainly in a sense admirable and their intentions are surely honorable but it is through individual human action that people will retain and expand their freedoms.
The actions of communal protest and rebellion, especially on a large scale, will likely further the very unfortunate trends that protestors seek to counter.