Today (April 19)  is Patriots Day and it commemorates the events that began
the Revolution and thus created the United States. Consider this excerpt
from the SierraTimes:


Captain Parker's Musket
© 2002 SierraTimes.com


. It's frustrating (to see policies, law, and the culture degenerate
nationally) but even worse, at least symbolically, is the incident of
Captain Parker's Musket.

On the morning of April 19, 1775 Capt. John Parker and about 70 Minutemen
met the British Regulars on Lexington green. The Redcoats ordered them to
turn over their weapons and disperse. They refused, as Massachusetts men
would have done 200 years ago. A battle ensued, the first in our war for
independence, and 8 Minutemen were killed. That is what we commemorate on
Patriot's day. Among those 70 brave men who stood up to the soldiers of one
of the world's most powerful empires were 8 pairs of fathers and their sons
fighting side by side for freedom. Of course we all know how it turned out.
A new country was born, blessed with the best of everything and destined to
become the greatest ever. But destined too to grow old someday and not care
any more about freedom.

And so today we remember the Captain and his courageous soldiers and while
doing so we dutifully hand over the fruits of our labor and diminish once
again the little scraps of freedom that are left. And in the Massachusetts
Senate Chamber the musket that Captain Parker carried on that glorious day
hangs high up on the wall.

And in accordance with state law, on that musket there is a trigger
lock. And that says it all.

Massachusetts now = [puke]

People should start caring more about THIS country instead of some faraway shithole playing holywar. Wouldn't $2bill a year towards veterans affairs do alot?

I'd love to think about that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness stuff; but I'm too busy earning the money I have to pay our government so they won't incarcerate me.

Very well said! I've been thinking the same thing quite a bit lately, especially given the flood of "Isn't Israel cool?" posts on here in recent days.

Since you brought it up Blaze-Of-Glory I have been trying to get the gun community involved in the tax issue for sometime. It doesn't fly with most. I'm told that they are not interested.
I believe that most of the gun issue hinges on the fact that this government does a number of things that are out and out repugnent to the Constitution. The correlation is that the public must be disarmed before someone wakes them up and convinces them that there is no right nor is there any necessity to tax the individual.
There are number of people who are out there fighting to wake America up but they are given no press coverage and I think we know why.

I think tax and gun-control are intricately related. The founders of America knew that the new government, like all governments in history, over time would demand increasing amounts of money from the citizens; the founders specified that we should be armed just so that we could resist over-taxation by the government.

I have the impression that most Americans -- and most pro-gun people -- do not comprehend just how much time they are forced to work to satisfy the governments current demands. When I show the numbers to my friends, they are usually surprised.

BULLSH*T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS IS A LIE!!! The MORON that wrote this article should get his facts straight.


The MA gun laws, bad as they are, do not specifically mandate any kind of safe storage requirements for pre-1899 designs. I.e, for those of you on the SPED bus who still haven't figured it out, gun locks, cases and safes are not mandated for flintlocks or perc. cap locks.

The musket had a trigger lock on it for all of two days, because the clueless liberal Senate President of Massachusetts, Tom Birmingham of Chelsea (D-, of course....) was goaded into it by the Gun Owners' Action League, the MA RKBA org., who said that the gun law was stupid, and why, since the law is unclear, don't the muskets at the State House have trigger locks on them? When the resulting media frenzy, and the threat by well-connected and politically active (UNLIKE A LOT OF GUN OWNERS!!!!!!!!!) RevWar reenactors to boycott the 225th anniv. reenactments of Lexington and Concord (very lucrative for the hospitality/tourist/transport industries), made Birmingham and the other anti-gun liberal Eastern MA politicians look like idiots, even to the media, they hurriedly took the red locks off the two muskets, apologised profusely, and passed a law specifically exempting all pre-1899 designs from this new trigger lock ordinance. How do I know this to be true? It's because I was one of the reenactors who marched on the State House when this happened, and watched when the police took it off the muskets. (I also march on the State House and protest re modern guns, too, so there!)

Yes, NOBODY should have to have a govt. bureaucrat telling us to put trigger locks on any kind of gun, but don't paint things worse than they are, or your credibility goes right out the window. Unlike Kalif, in MA, we can have any kind of AR we want. Unlike NJ we can have any size mag we want, w/o wooden blocks in it. Unlike MO, we can carry concealed, w/ a CCW lic., etc., etc.... it's all relative, isn't it?

Yep- it's EASY to be pro-gun if you're from a state that has lots of gun owners. Try doing the same thing in MA, where the number of gun owners (licenced ones, anyway) has shrunk to 200,000 in the past decade from well over a million in the 1980s. And, in mA, like elsewhere, the hunters couldn't care less about the black rifle guys and both want to sell out the skeet shooting yuppies. We are, nonetheless, the frontlines, folks, in the fight against the liberal anti-gunners.

So, don't stab us in the back- we can do that quite well ourselves.....[:(]