Hard as gun haters try, freedom won’t die

There are some anti-self-defense activists who feel so strongly about depriving Americans of their Second Amendment rights that they work to deprive these same Americans of their First Amendment rights as well.

We’ve seen this in vandalism of our Guns Save Life highway signs along the Interstates.

We put the kibosh on a rash of nearly a dozen incidences of vandalism in the space of a couple of months during the early 2000s by erecting a “double decker” set of signs which featured vandalized signs with the following message underneath.

AS YOU CAN SEE
THUGS SPRAY LIES
HARD AS THEY TRY
FREEDOM WON’T DIE

Amazingly, our vandalism spree came to a abrupt end and incidents since then have been almost unheard of.

A couple of years later, the Illinois Department of Transportation sent letters to some of our sign project landowners, claiming our signs were in violation of some highway beautification act or another and threatening to remove the signs and charge the landowners for the costs of removing the signs.

Our corporate counsel, the late Paul Vallandigham sent them a pithy one-page letter citing LaDue v. Gilleo, a 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision which basically established that religious or political messages are more or less exempt from government regulation.

Vallandigham tied his citation of LaDue with language that he would hold any State of Illinois Department of Transportation workers, their supervisors and the entire Department liable for damages should state workers trespass on private property to remove the political signage.

We heard later from a friendly state worker at the legal division of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s headquarters in Springfield that their chief legal beagle sent word to regional offices to cease and desist from harassment or action regarding our signs.

We’re far from the only pro-civil rights voice to face activists who wish to return to the Medieval times’ prohibition on the common man’s right to possess weapons by depriving the rest of us of our First Amendment right to free speech as well.

Today, our friend Kurt Hofmann is facing the similar antics from the freedom-hating left.

No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money has a perfect description of Kurt Hofmann in their recent entry Why Does CSGV Feel So Threatened By A Blogger In A Wheelchair?:

Kurt Hofmann is the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner. Due to a horrorific traffic accident which left him in a coma for nearly a month, Kurt now gets about in a wheelchair. For someone for whom life has played such a cruel trick, he is remarkably well-adjusted, even-tempered, thoughtful, and full of life. This is especially true when you consider that at an earlier time in his life Kurt served our country as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. I have had the pleasure to meet Kurt in person more than once and to have an ongoing correspondence with him. I consider Kurt a friend and one of the good guys.

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), which is staffed not by grassroots volunteers from throughout America, but instead by often-times paid professional “activists” is hot after Hofman.

Unable to beat him in the marketplace of truth, science or logic, the CSGV is instead attempting to silence Hofman with ludicrous claims his March 2012 article about researching improvised explosives on the Internet (while that sort of educational information is still widely available) is somehow a call to action to use IEDs against government officials.

Anti-self-defense lawyer Michael Bannerman (read all about Mr. Bannerman here) has led the charge for CSGV.  He’s calling for folks (screen cap 1 & 2, courtesy Mr. Hoffman) to report Hoffman’s March article to the FBI and seeking to have the Examiner drop Hofman as a columnist.

Days of our Trailers has written extensively on CSGV’s use of hyperbole and demagoguery to marginalize their opponents, both in this recent post and others.

We wish Mr. Hofman the best in his fight against this vile and repugnant attack on his First Amendment rights.

It’s a sad day when people need to mislead, confuse and obfuscate people to further their ideological beliefs.  It’s an even sadder day when they look to silence their ideological opposition in order to further their evil beliefs.