“This ruling will have enormous implications – especially here in California and across the US,” said Sam Paredes, speaking on behalf of the Board of Directors of Gun Owners Foundation and as the Executive Director of Gun Owners of California.
Paredes continued his comment on the stunning victory against New York’s poorly named “Concealed Carry Improvement Act.”
“Legislators be warned – introduction of any bill that will strip responsible gun owners of the right to carry a concealed weapon is unconstitutional. Any attempt to override the courts will be met with robust legal opposition.”
See below for the complete press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 7, 2022
Washington, D.C. – Today, Gun Owners of America (GOA) and Gun Owners Foundation (GOF) secured a preliminary injunction in federal district court against most of New York’s poorly named “Concealed Carry Improvement Act.” This follows GOA and GOF securing a temporary restraining order against the law in October, which was frustratingly blocked by a federal appeals court.
The ruling from Judge Glenn Suddaby, who indicated this law has imposed “unprecedented constitutional violations,“ enjoins the following provisions:
Requiring good moral character
Requiring the names and contact info of spouses and other adults in the applicant’s home
Requiring applicants to disclose social media accounts for review
The restrictions on carrying in public parks, zoos, places of worship, locations where alcohol is served, theaters, banquet halls, conferences, airports and buses, lawful protests or assemblies, and the prohibition on carrying on private property without express consent from the owner
The injunction will take effect immediately, despite the State of New York’s attempt to delay the injunction.
Erich Pratt, GOA’s Senior Vice President, issued the following statement:
“Just like we warned politicians after the Bruen decision, fall in line, or we will force you to. We are excited to see Kathy Hochul finally served a plate of humble pie, and we are fully prepared to continue the fight should she again attempt to disarm the citizens of her state at a time when her party’s policies are only escalating the danger that everyday citizens face.”
Sam Paredes, on behalf of the Board of Directors for the Gun Owners Foundation, added:
“This is very exciting for the citizens of New York, as today liberty won and tyranny lost. GOF and our allies remain fully prepared to defend this ruling from the foolish appeals that the anti-gunners in Albany will inevitably bring.”
GOA spokesmen are available for interviews. Gun Owners of America is a nonprofit grassroots lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. GOA represents over two million members and activists. For more information, visit GOA’s Press Center.
Surveillance footage released by the Car Care Auto Spa shows the encounter.
An armed robbery attempt was foiled last month in Chicago when a business owner grabbed the suspect’s gun and chased him out.
James Suh, owner of Car Care Auto Spa in the Windy City, was at work one evening when “all of a sudden, it’s just, ‘hey give me all of your money,’” he told ABC7Chicago in a recent interview.
He looked up to see a man with a gun leveled at his face. At first, trying to de-escalate the scenario, he stalled as the man continued demanding money, explaining that a key was necessary for the cash drawer to be unlocked.
Suh is a concealed carry license holder, although his firearm was unfortunately absent during the incident.
During the verbal exchange, Suh noticed something about the robber’s pistol.
“He kinda like tries to rack his gun and it looked to me like it got jammed, the slide was locked back,” Suh explained.
In a moment that Suh later identified as a purely emotional decision, he grabbed at the gun, and the robber tried to evade him.
Surveillance footage shows the fight that ensued inside the shop, in which Suh eventually gained control of the pistol. The attacker then fled the scene.
Police are saying that while the footage has been studied, no arrests have been made yet. Luckily there were no injuries, a detail that could easily have been different had Suh not been prepared.
Emphasizing that the decision he made was risky, police instruct others to not follow Suh’s course of action if faced with a similar circumstance.
But with crime on the rise, perhaps it’s time for more business owners to get their CCL the way that Suh did — they just need to remember to have it on their person while at work!
The movement to restore carry rights the way the founders and framers of the Constitution intended notched two more victories as Alabama and Ohio became the 22nd and 23rd state, respectively, to enact permitless carry.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed House Bill 272 into law last Thursday and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 215 into law on Monday.
“Unlike states who are doing everything in their power to make it harder for law-abiding citizens, Alabama is reaffirming our commitment to defending our Second Amendment rights,” said Governor Ivey in a press release obtained by GunsAmerica.
“I have always stood up for the rights of law-abiding gun owners, and I am proud to do that again today,” she continued.
DeWine did not release a statement celebrating the occasion, but the Buckeye Firearms Association, which backed the measure, did.
“This is a day that will go down in history…,” Buckeye Firearms Association Director Dean Rieck said in a statement. “This is a great moment for Ohio and for those who wish to more fully exercise their Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”
“Gov. DeWine made a campaign promise to Buckeye Firearms Association and to Ohio’s 4 million gun owners that he would sign a Constitutional Carry bill if it was put on his desk. And he has fulfilled his promise.”
Again, for those unfamiliar with constitutional carry, it does not change the law with respect to prohibitive persons. It will still be illegal for felons, minors, drug addicts, fugitives from justice, those adjudicated mentally defective to possess, let alone, carry firearms.
“Constitutional carry empowers law-abiding citizens who are already otherwise eligible to obtain a carry permit to exercise their right-to-carry without having to go through government red tape and delays,” as the NRA-ILA notes.
Anti-gunners like to fearmonger about permitless carry, suggesting that it will lead to a “Wild Wild West” type environment.
But a recent study from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) dispels that myth.
Per the study, allowing permit-less carry hasn’t led to increasing rates of violent crime. If anything, these rates have gone down in states that removed the requirement to obtain a permit before carrying a handgun.
It appears that when more responsible citizens have the opportunity to bear arms outside the home for self-defense, the safety of the public increases.
Ohio’s constitutional carry law rolls out about 90 days from now. Meanwhile, Alabama’s will take effect in Jan. 2023. Other states, including Indiana and Georgia, are also considering constitutional carry. As always, stay tuned for updates.
In 1968, American troops in Vietnam reported scattered incidents where dead NVA soldiers were found with parts of their exploded rifles protruding from their skulls. Technical Intelligence attributed this to poor metallurgy and bad ammunition. The situation was a little more complicated than it appeared.
The Type 56 rifle could handle 40,000 p.s.i. of chamber pressure. The kinetic disassembly in the picture was caused by firing a modified cartridge which produced 250,000 p.s.i. This blew up the gun and threw the bolt straight back through the top cover.
My uncle Harvey was a Green Beret who served with MAC-V SOG in Vietnam. When I was a kid, I pestered him to tell me about their missions. They would go deep into the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) base areas and tap communications wire, take prisoners and do bomb damage assessment.
My favorite story was how they used to carry in ammunition and put it in NVA storage bunkers. Well, to be accurate, they put it BACK in the bunkers and some other places too.
Military Assistance Command Vietnam’s Studies and Observations Group (SOG) was America’s top-secret special operations task force in the Vietnam War. SOG’s operators worked directly for the Joint Chiefs, executing highly classified and deniable missions in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. From 1966 to 1968, SOG was commanded by Colonel John K. Singlaub.
Singlaub was an old school unconventional warfare pro. He parachuted behind German lines with the OSS in August 1944 to fight with the French Resistance fighters supporting the D-Day invasion.
After WW2, Singlaub joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and worked in Manchuria during the Chinese Civil War. In 1951 he became Deputy Chief of the CIA station in South Korea. Later he ran CIA operations in Manchuria and led troops in the Korean War. He was the perfect guy to run SOG.
SOG teams ran deniable missions into Laos and Cambodia to gather intelligence, wiretap communications, kidnap personnel, ambush convoys, raid supply dumps, plant mines, and generally spread the joys of unconventional warfare across the NVA rear.
SOG recon teams normally consisted of two or three American Green Berets and four to six indigenous soldiers.
This may not sound as romantic as fighting front line infantry units, but without a secure rear, the bad guys at the front got less food and ammunition. As these operations began to effect NVA operations, several divisions of NVA regulars were put on security missions along the Ho Chi Min trail.
Special NVA units were formed and specific tactics were developed to find and kill SOG teams. Landing zones were watched, trackers and dogs were deployed, and a system of communications established to allow a rapid response to any contact with SOG. While finding the NVA could be a problem for infantry units, they trucked guys in for the SOG teams to mow down.
While skulking around, these teams often encountered ammo caches with millions of rounds. Being Green Berets, their first inclination was to steal the ammo, but there was just too much of it and it was in very remote areas. Demolition was not feasible as it would only scatter small-arms ammunition, not destroy it.
They could have booby-trapped the caches so that when the NVA picked up a case it would blow up but that would have only impacted a small number of enemy soldiers and the NVA could develop countermeasures. Singlaub came up with a deeper game. He would take some of the ammo, booby trap the individual rounds of ammunition, and give them back.
Like most unconventional tactics, ammunition sabotage was nothing new. In one well-documented operation, the British slipped exploding rifle cartridges into enemy caches during the Second Matabele War (1896-1897) in what is now Zimbabwe. The British scouts were led by an American, Frederick Russell Burnham, who probably put them up to it.
During World War, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) collaborated on Operation Natterjack to plant sabotaged ammunition in the Japanese supply chain. OSS Detachment 101 distributed the ammunition in Burma but little is known about the results.
NVA soldiers with AK-47 rifles.
The SOG ammunition enhancement plan was briefed all the way to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. On August 30, 1967, they approved the plan and two weeks later, Singlaub watched a CIA technician load a sabotaged 7.62X39 mm cartridge into a bench-mounted AK rifle at Camp Chinen, Okinawa. “It completely blew up the receiver and the bolt was projected backwards,” Singlaub said, “I would imagine into the head of the firer.”
The first cartridges were reloaded with an explosive powder similar to PETN high explosive. The problem was that this white powder looked nothing like Chinese gunpowder, so if the NVA pulled apart an altered round it would be detected. SOG’s technical expert, Ben Baker obtained a substitute explosive that so closely resembled gunpowder that it would pass inspection by anyone but an ordnance expert.
NVA soldiers armed with (from left to right) SKS rifle, RPD light machinegun and AK47. All of these weapons fire the same 7.62X39 ammunition simplifying logistics.
Communist block 7.62X39 weapons such as the SKS, RPD, AK47, and Type 56’s could handle up to 40,000 p.s.i. of chamber pressure. The new powder produced 250,000 p.s.i. enough to blow up the weapon and kill the soldier shooting it.
The secret CIA lab in Okinawa developed more than just rifle ammunition. Tiger striped fatigues, Time Delayed fuses and Astrolite explosive (developed from NASA rocket fuel) all came from this small group of evil geniuses. Later CIA ordnance experts developed a special fuse for the 82 mm mortar round that would detonate inside the mortar tube. Rounds for 12.7x108mm heavy machine guns soon followed.
After the process was developed in the lab, a specialized ordnance team was formed to modify the ammo. Chinese AK bullets were sealed into steel cases with a thick coat of lacquer where the bullet entered the case. The rounds were pulled apart by hand and the powder was replaced with a high explosive substitute. The bullets were then re-seated and the ammo cans and crates resealed just like the original.
While operating deep in enemy territory on other missions, Green Berets carried booby-trapped rounds and cases of ammunition cases with them and slipped them into the enemy ammunition supply chain whenever possible. If the SOG team encountered an ammo dump, they would plant a case of doctored ammo.
82 mm mortar ammo was not stored as loose rounds, it came in three-round, wooden cases. SOG teams must have been very amused by this concept to volunteer to carry a 28 pound case of mortar rounds in addition to all of their other equipment.
When a SOG team ambushed an enemy patrol, they would load one round into an AK magazine or RPD belt left on enemy bodies with the expectation it would be recovered and re-used. When the gun later exploded, all the evidence of sabotage would be destroyed as the round was fired.
The rigged ammo turned up all over the battlefield, weapons exploded, killing NVA riflemen and sometimes entire mortar crews. Now it was time to initiate SOG’s black psychological operations exploitation plan. The strategic objective was to aggravate the Vietnamese traditional distrust of the Chinese.
At the tactical level, individual soldiers questioned the safety of their Chinese-supplied arms and ammunition. One forged Viet Cong document spread rumors of exploding ammunition while another acknowledged ammo problems resulting from poor Chinese quality control.
The forged document stated, “Only a few thousand such cases have been found thus far,” and concluded, “The People’s Republic of China may have been having some quality control problems but these are being worked out. We think that in the future there will be very little chance of this happening.”
Chinese ammunition was shipped in sealed metal cans with lot numbers stenciled on top. These type cans are still in use. I have seen thousands of these cans all over the Middle East and Afghanistan. American AK shooters who use surplus ammunition are very familiar with “Spam” cans and the big can openers shipped in each wooden case of two cans.
Any NVA soldier, looking at ammunition lot numbers, would see that, due to the length of the supply chain, his ammo had been loaded years earlier. No fresh ammo could possibly reach soldiers fighting in the South for years. The possibility of compromised ammunition would never disappear.
Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) Technical Intelligence Brief No. 2-68
Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) published a Technical Intelligence Brief titled “Analysis of Damaged Weapons” which was widely circulated to U.S. and South Vietnamese units. The study examined several exploded AKs, concluding they were destroyed by “defective metallurgy resulting in fatigue cracks” or “faulty ammunition, which produced excessive chamber pressure.” Enemy agents passed this information directly back to Hanoi.
American G.I.s were warned against using enemy weapons in public service announcements on Armed Forces Radio and TV which were duly monitored by the Vietnamese. The Army Times warned, “Numerous incidents have caused injury and sometimes death to the operators of enemy weapons.”
NVA 82mm Mortar Team laying in their gun.
Mortars work by using a low pressure charge to throw a bomb with a fragment producing case down range. There is a firing pin in the bottom of the tube which hits a primer in the mortar round when the round is dropped in the tube. A fuse ignites the main charge when it hits the target. The modified fuse blows the main charge inside the mortar tube.
As the rigged ammo spread through the system, Forward Air Controllers observed mortars in Laos, Cambodia, and even in Southern Vietnam blown apart in a star shape pattern. Usually, there were a few 3-4 NVA bodies present.
Planting munitions was risky. On November 30, 1968, a helicopter carrying a SOG team with seven cases of CIA modified 82 mm mortar ammunition was flying 20 miles west of the Khe Sanh Marine base. It was hit by 37 mm anti-aircraft fire and exploded in mid-air with no survivors. The remains of Maj. Samuel Toomey and seven U.S. Army Green Berets were recovered at the crash site 20 years later.
Despite the warnings, American soldiers fired captured arms, and at least one souvenir AK exploded, inflicting serious injuries. To avoid ironic self-injury, SOG stopped using captured ammunition in their own AKs and RPD machine guns and purchased 7.62X39mm ammunition from Finland. This ammo, which SOG’s Green Berets fired at the NVA had been manufactured in a Soviet arsenal in Petrograd. Thank you, Comrades.
To keep it secure, the code name changed through the course of the war. The Project began as Eldest Son, then was changed to Italian Green and ultimately Pole Bean.
In mid-1969, articles in the New York Times and Time magazine compromised the mission. Ordered by the Joint Chiefs to dispose of their remaining stockpiles of ammo, SOG teams rushed to insert multiple missions on the Laotian border to get rid of the stuff before their authority expired.
Even after the enemy was aware of the sabotaged ammunition, the program was psychologically useful. The NVA could never again trust their ammo supply. Radio intercepts confirmed the NVA’s highest levels of command were disturbed by their exploding weapons, Chinese quality control, and sabotage.
Declassified reports reveal that SOG operatives inserted 3,638 rounds of sabotaged 7.62 mm, plus 167 rounds of 12.7 mm and 821 rounds of 82 mm mortar ammunition over the life of the program.
Like all great ideas, this one has been copied. Doctored ammunition of undetermined source is still turning up all over the world. There are reports of a special thermite rifle round that melts in the chamber destroying the gun with no injury to the shooter. This protects innocent users such as American G.I.s while denying weapons to the bad guys.
Who knows if the Americans did this or it was just a happy accident.
Former Green Beret Jack Murphy, author of “Murphy’s Law”, tells the story of attempting to shoot a captured SVD in Iraq. The primer popped and the round got intensely hot melting the chamber and barrel together. No need for fake Technical Intelligence Bulletins to protect friendlies here.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the doctored ammunition is high-explosive 120-millimeter and 82-millimeter mortar rounds. Like SOG rounds, the fuses are altered so they explode inside the mortar tube, destroying the entire mortar system and crew.
The advantage of this particular sort of booby trap is narrow targeting. Unlike rifle ammunition, which might turn up with a homeowner keeping a firearm to protect his family, mortar rounds do not have legitimate home security use.
This 120mm Russian mortar had an unexpected detonation. There are reports the Syrian state military launched an operation secretly passing booby-trapped rounds to insurgent fighters at illegal arms bazaars across the middle east. The New York Times thinks that they got the idea from the US.
While it is gratifying to see the direct results of your efforts, it can be more effective to set the conditions for success and then stand back and watch the enemy do the work for you. The results from Eldest Son, Italian Green and Pole Bean exceeded all expectations.
Green Berets are trained to anticipate the second and third order effects of their actions. These projects killed hundreds, frightened the entire North Vietnamese Army, and sowed distrust between Vietnam and China at the highest levels of government for years to come. In 1979 the two countries went to war.
It pays to know the source of your ammunition and where it has been before it got to you.
There are no gun shops in Redwood City, California at the moment, and city council members want to keep it that way even if that means enacting a complete ban on their operation inside the city limits.
This week council members invoked the nuclear option after a pair of businesses applied to open up gun shops in the city, voting unanimously to impose a 45-day ban on gun shops while city attorneys investigate whether the city can make that ban permanent; a tactic that other anti-gun locales are likely to adopt… at least until courts step in.
One of the proposed gun shop locations is at Roosevelt Plaza, which is near Roosevelt Elementary School.
Katie Gaets, a parent who serves as Pastor of Woodside Road United Methodist Church in Redwood City, was among those who spoke in support of the ordinance at Monday’s council meeting.
“Just today a teenager was convicted of killing four people in a school shooting and two more people died in a school shooting in St. Louis,” Gaets said.
“One of the ways we can take a clear and definitive stance of no against such violence, is by taking a clear and definitive step away from firearms dealers in our local community.”
You don’t send an anti-violence message by making it harder for legal gun owners to protect themselves, which is exactly what this gun store ban does. California law already requires every would-be gun owner to go through a background check and twiddle their thumbs for ten business days before they’re allowed to take possession of their newly-purchased firearm, and every time they go and purchase ammunition they’re subjected to additional background checks.
If criminals obeyed the law, these restrictions might actually make a difference. Instead, according to the FBI California had the most active shooter incidents of any state in the Union last year. The real message that Redwood City’s proposed gun store ban sends is that city council members are willing to bend the knee to anti-gun activists at the expense of the rights of the law-abiding.
Unfortunately, as we discuss on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, Redwood City isn’t alone in trying to curtail gun purchases. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is also considering a laundry list of new restrictions on current and future gun owners and gun store proprietors, and other communities across the state are taking aim at gun shops that are already in existence. In Torrance, for instance, the owner of Red Rifle Ltd. was originally given approval to move his shop from an industrial part of town to Torrance’s upscale Old Town neighborhood before activists complained and convinced the city’s Planning Commission to rescind the permit they issued to the store.
Now store owner Jack Brandhorst is appealing that decision, arguing that the city’s claim the shop is “incompatible” with the other businesses in Old Town doesn’t fly, and that there’s no reason in state or local law to prohibit the move to a better location.
“Red Rifle is a legal, reputable, long standing business that is not prohibited from opening in Downtown Torrance by any law, statute or rule,” Brandhorst wrote in his appeal, which was filed with a $750 fee on Oct. 11. “Thus, legally we should be allowed to move our boutique to Downtown Torrance.”
Brandhorst said in an interview that his store will only serve to elevate the area, with its high end products, personable customer service and smithing services. He said he takes stringent safety precautions, including all mandatory background checks, requiring customers complete a 30-minute gun safety lesson, requiring customers with children to purchase a safe, and securing all ammunition in store.
Former Councilwoman Maureen O’Donnell, one of the four residents who filed the initial appeals, said she remains steadfast in her belief that Old Town Torrance is not a safe location for a gun store.
“The gentleman is within his rights to appeal and we will go again and present our case before the council as we did before the (Planning) Commission,” she said.
“I think that the commission’s decision is the correct one,” she added. “I hope that the City Council will see the reasonableness of that decision and our position.”
O’Donnell also said that there are already 12 licensed firearms dealers in Torrance and that regardless of the safety precautions taken by the store, the owner cannot know a person’s true intent in purchasing a weapon.
If that’s her argument then I don’t know how O’Donnell would be okay with any gun being sold anywhere in Torrance, whether in the tony Old Town neighborhood or the grimiest part of town. Regardless of her hostility towards the right to keep and bear arms, it is a right that we’re talking about here, and one that by necessity includes the right to acquire a firearm as well as the right to keep and carry it for self-defense.
As many gun control restrictions are ruled unconstitutional in the wake of the Bruen decision, look for more anti-gun locales to set up as many hurdles as possible for new and existing gun store owners to navigate.
It might be restrictive zoning ordinances limiting gun stores to just a few acres of land in undesirable locations, as we’ve seen in Torrance, or it could be an outright ban on gun stores like the one Redwood City council members are hoping to permanently impose, but either way we have some major legal fights brewing over buying and selling the arms we have the right to keep and bear.
Though most of them are gone now, the United States was once awash in WW2 combat veterans.
When I was a kid the entire country was covered in a thin patina of combat veterans. The local car salesman served on a PT boat, the owner of the shoe store jumped into Normandy with the 82d, and one of my dad’s co-workers earned the Silver Star as a combat engineer in Italy. They all dressed like the Blues Brothers. As soon as the pastor uttered the final Amen they would all herd out to the front of the church to smoke. About an hour was all they were good for between cigarettes.
The grizzled warrior coming home to fight corruption has become iconic.
The plot device has been exercised so many times in Hollywood as to have become a trope. Dishonest local law enforcement has the muscle to impose their nefarious will on innocent local townsfolk. Then some moody combat veteran comes back home and is forced to make things right. Whether the setting is the Old West or modern urban America, the story of the ex-soldier with the skills and the will to face down corruption is reliable box office gold.
The movie First Blood established a genre.
When John Rambo disassembled the little town of Hope, Washington, with his liberated M60 in First Blood he defined a generation of movies. However, it turns out that there was actually a real-world historical precedent. Back in 1946 a group of combat veterans fresh from winning World War 2 took up arms to liberate an oppressed people closer to home. What is even more amazing is that they shot up the town, deposed the criminals, and came out of it heroes.
The Setting
Crooked politicians were an unfortunate way of life in many parts of the country in the 1940s. This is E.H. Crump, one of the most notorious of the day.
It’s tough for those of us outside of Chicago to imagine today, but back in the 1940’s many parts of America were dominated by ruthless well-organized political machines. Two-bit, sawed-off dictators suppressed voting, shook down local citizens, and generally enhanced their lot at the expense of the little guy. In no place was this worse than in Athens, Tennessee. Athens is the McMinn County seat.
E.H. Crump became emblematic of political corruption during this era.
In 1936 the E.H. Crump organization based out of Memphis enthroned Democrat Paul Cantrell as McMinn County Sheriff. Democrats riding on FDR’s coattails used intimidation tactics to seize this position and engage in systematic police brutality, predatory policing, voter intimidation, and general political corruption. The Sheriff and his deputies were paid a fee for every person they incarcerated. This led to gross abuses of power.
Tourists were forced to cough up bribes or face arrest.
The tactic was called “fee grabbing.” Busloads of tourists passing through the county were pulled over and random citizens were ticketed for crimes such as drunkenness whether they had been drinking or not. In the decade between 1936 and 1946, this shakedown racket netted more than $300,000. That would be around $4.5 million today.
With the fit young men off fighting in the war, the cops in McMinn County were little more than uniformed thugs.
The corrupt Democratic Sheriff Paul Cantrell used his deputies to intimidate voters. Dead people and the underaged voted when it benefitted Cantrell and his minions. With most of the county’s young men off fighting the war, Cantrell hired ex-convicts as deputies. It really was like a bad movie.
Guys like these typically enjoy a fairly refined sense of justice. They came home ready to make things right.
At the height of the war, two veterans home on leave pushed back against the political machine and were killed for their trouble. Word of this filtered out to the troops on the front. Ralph Duggan, a Navy veteran who served in the Pacific and later became a prominent lawyer, said, “I thought a lot more about McMinn County than I did about the Japs. If democracy was good enough to put on the Germans and the Japs, it was good enough for McMinn County, too!”
Attempting a Political Solution
The fellowship of warriors offered a non-partisan foundation for political action.
Around 3,000 young men from McMinn County had gone off to fight, roughly one-tenth of the population. Upon their return, these combat-hardened warriors formed the GI Non-Partisan Voting League. They remained politically neutral and fielded three Republicans and two Democrats for the upcoming local elections. Veteran ID was required for admission to meetings. Local businessmen sick of the oppression funded their efforts. Their formal motto was, “Your Vote Will Be Counted as Cast.”
This is a photo of a High School rifle team from the period. Young people were considerably harder then than is the case today.
When the corrupt Sheriff moved to interfere local veteran Bill White organized what he called a “fightin’ bunch.” He later stated, “I got out and started organizing with a bunch of GIs…I learned that you get the poor boys out of poor families, and the ones that was frontline warriors that’s done fighting and didn’t care to bust a cap on you…So that’s what I picked. I had thirty men and…I took what mustering out pay I got and bought pistols.” The fuse was lit.
The Catalyst
The local crooked Sheriff made no bones about the fact that he and his men were going to count the ballots in private. The result was a foregone conclusion.
The corrupt Sheriff brought in 200 armed deputies from other precincts on election day, August 1, 1946. These deputies were paid the princely sum of $50 per day for their services (more than $650 today). GI poll-watchers complained of voter fraud and intimidation and were arrested for their trouble.
A local farmer named Tom Gillespie was shot for trying to vote against the local Sheriff.
Around mid-afternoon, an elderly African-American farmer named Tom Gillespie was physically prevented from casting his ballot by a crooked patrolman named C.M. “Windy” Wise. When the old man objected, Wise struck him with a set of brass knuckles. Gillespie dropped his ballot and ran for the door. Wise then drew his sidearm and shot the old man in the back.
The McMinn County government was simply rotten throughout. Local veterans resolved to take care of business.
Word of this egregious act made the rounds fairly quickly. When Republican Election Commissioner and local Party Chairman Otto Kennedy asked Bill White, the ad hoc commander of the “fightin’ bunch,” what he planned to do. White replied, “I don’t know Otto; we might just kill them.”
Bill White’s orders were, “Get the hell out of here and get something to shoot with. And come back as fast as you can.”
The corrupt deputies closed the polling place, seized the ballot box, and took two poll watchers hostage. In response, somebody in the agitated crowd shouted, “Let’s go get our guns!”
Once the local veteran’s group obtained the weapons they needed they used them just as they had been trained.
Bill White dispatched his lieutenant Edsel Underwood to the local National Guard armory. Underwood returned with sixty M1917 bolt-action Enfield rifles, a pair of Thompson submachine guns, three M1 Garand rifles, five M1911 pistols, and ample ammunition to feed them all. Now with more than sixty trained, experienced, and motivated veterans well-armed and itching to fight, the corrupt local Law Enforcement began to realize they had bitten off more than they could chew.
The Guns
The M1917 Enfield is not as svelte and pretty as the M1903 Springfield. However, it was a rugged and accurate combat rifle.
The M1917 Enfield rifle was a British design that incorporated features from the proven German Mauser system. Utilizing a front-locking, dual-lug bolt action with a Mauser-style claw extractor, the M1917 was widely produced in the US by Remington, Winchester, and Eddystone Arsenal. The M1917 saw widespread use during World War 1.
The M1 rifle carried American combat forces to victory around the globe.
The M1 rifle is referred to today as the Garand after its Canadian designer John Cantius Garand. However, every WW2 combat veteran I have ever known just called it the M1. A semiautomatic gas-operated design that fed from an eight-round en bloc clip, the M1 offered a quantum advance in firepower over the bolt-action weapons of the day. Though heavy at 9.5 pounds empty, every vet I have met who used the weapon for real revered it.
The M1A1 Thompson submachine gun was ungainly and sinfully heavy, but it hit like a freight train downrange.
The Thompson submachine gun was obsolete at the outset of WW2. The M1928A1 was a slightly modified version of the same weapon used by John Dillinger during the Roaring Twenties. These guns were boat anchor heavy and ridiculously expensive. The subsequent M1A1 was somewhat simplified and saw ample use in all theaters. Around 1.5 million copies were made during the war.
The M1911A1 was the definitive WW2 version of John Browning’s classic combat handgun.
The M1911A1 pistol was a national treasure. Designed by firearms luminary John Moses Browning as a replacement for the anemic .38-caliber revolvers used during the Spanish American War, the M1911 and the .45ACP round it fired set a standard for terminal performance yet to be bested. Most anyone who wore a uniform during WW2 would have been intimately familiar with Browning’s epically powerful hogleg.
The Fight
This is a snapshot of a few of the local veterans who comprised the “fightin’ bunch” as they rained suppressive fire down on the occupied county jail.
Some 55 armed deputies retreated to the local jail with the ballot boxes and barricaded themselves inside. They were armed with a single Thompson SMG as well as a variety of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. In response, White and his men made a tactical assessment of the situation and dispatched an overwatch element to the nearby bank to establish a base of fire. White then called out, “Would you damn bastards bring those damn ballot boxes out here or we are going to set siege against the jail and blow it down!” Somebody squeezed a trigger, and the otherwise peaceful little town erupted in a hail of gunfire.
The liberal application of high explosives turned the tide of the battle. The Fighting’ Bunch methodically blew up the deputies’ patrol cars.
When the deputies failed to surrender, somebody amidst the fightin’ bunch produced dynamite. Explosive charges were thrown underneath the sheriff’s patrol cars, flipping them upside down in the street. Charges were detonated against the front door as well as on the roof of the jail. With this, the besieged deputies had had enough and surrendered.
The Aftermath
A few determined American patriots with guns proved to be more than a match for corrupt politicians and their paid lackeys.
Miraculously, no one was killed during this tidy little war. Many to most of the deputies were injured, some severely, but no one died as a result of combat action. When the ballots were tabulated the GI Non-Partisan League won in a landslide.
Knox Henry, the GI candidate for Sheriff, had served with distinction in combat in North Africa.
Bill White was himself installed as a Deputy underneath respected combat veteran Knox Henry, the GI candidate elected Sheriff. By early September the local mayor, as well as all four corrupt aldermen, had resigned. This marked the irrevocable downfall of the local political machine.
Veterans across the country were inspired by events in Athens, Tennessee, to clean out their own towns and cities.These are the crooked Sheriff’s thugs disarmed and incarcerated after the fight.
The Battle of Athens inspired similar less bloody uprisings against entrenched corrupt politicians across Tennessee and much of the rest of the country. The GIs frequently found that the practical aspects of governance bore their own unique challenges. However, the corrupt politicians of the E.H. Crump machine learned the hard way that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution really does guarantee all the rest.
The Battle of Athens was the very embodiment of the Second Amendment in practice. When the political situation became intolerable it was armed American patriots who finally put things right.
The elderly farmer Tom Gillespie survived. Windy Wise did three years in prison for his shooting. When the dust settled, the Good Guys won.
California must stop sharing the personal identifying information of the state’s gun owners with academic researchers, a state judge has ruled.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal issued a preliminary injunction against California’s Assembly Bill 173 on Friday. Judge Bacal noted that allowing the law to remain in effect while the case continued sufficiently threatened the privacy rights of California gun owners.
“Accordingly, plaintiffs have shown that the balance of harms weighs in favor of issuing the injunction,” she noted in her order.
The injunction represents a win for gun-rights advocates in their fight against the state’s attempts to share gun owners’ identifying information for outside research. The state already collects extensive data on gun and ammunition purchases–including an ammo registry. California’s practices make it an outlier, but one with the potential to be copied by other blue states seeking tighter gun laws. The successful injunction suggests advocates may be successful in permanently stopping the state from sharing that data with non-law enforcement entities and quash the potential for other states to follow California’s lead.
Assembly Bill 173, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D.) last September, directed the Attorney General to disclose personal information on gun purchasers to the California Firearm Violence Research Center at UC Davis. The information includes details such as the buyer’s name, address, date of birth, what they purchased, when and where they bought it, and more. It also authorized the center to share the information with any other “bona fide research institution.”
The now-blocked law is not the only time California officials have garnered controversy over how they handle gun owners’ private data. Earlier this June, The Reloadbroke news that the California Department of Justice had inadvertently leaked the names, racial identifications, home addresses, dates of birth, and permit classifications of the state’s concealed carry permit holders during a botched rollout of its 2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal. That information was made publicly available for download for several hours before eventually being scrubbed from the website. The state has since offered credit monitoring to all those it believes were affected by the leak.
Judge Bacal cited this incident as an example of the potential harm faced by gun owners if AB 173 were allowed to stay in effect.
“Defendant responds plaintiffs cannot establish irreparable harm because the personal identifying information has already been shared with researchers as recently as November of 2021,” she said. “Yet this does not account for the potential ongoing and future harms that could occur by continuous use of the information. Furthermore, and while this motion has been pending, a massive data breach reportedly occurred that leaked personal identifying information from the firearm databases for concealed carry applicants in or about June of 2022.”
A coalition of gun-rights groups, including the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), filed suit against the law in state court in January. The groups celebrated the injunction.
“The California government has proven time and time again that it can’t be trusted with the private personal information of its residents,” Bill Sack, FPC Director of Legal Operations, said in a press release. “Today’s ruling reinforces what FPC has been arguing all along; that you needn’t be forced to open your front door to immoral government intrusion in order to exercise your fundamental rights.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D.) told The Reload that despite the ruling, he planned to continue defending the law in court.
“We are disappointed in this decision,” he said. “Research and collaboration would help protect our communities from gun violence and save lives. We will continue this fight in court.”
UPDATE 12:58 AM EASTERN 10-18-2022:This piece has been updated to include comment from Attorney General Bonta’s office.
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