On September 13, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB), officially known as the “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act.” The bill aimed to ban most semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines and definitively banned the further sale of “high-capacity” magazines to citizens. The signing of this bill was the climax of a series of egregious federal overreaches and acts of hideous maleficence that punctuated the early to mid-nineties.

A bill designed to defang the civilian population of the United States was proposed and passed just a few months after the federal government had initiated and incompetently bungled, with deadly consequences, two aggressive law enforcement actions – Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian compound. Needless to say, the patriot community was literally up in arms over these events. Civilian militias began to pop up as the news media began to warn the public of the dangers of the new “anti-government” militias.

The bald-faced corruption of the Clintons was well known and the passage of the AWB was clearly a meaningless leftist political stunt that seemed to add fuel to the toxic mix. These were dark times for freedom loving people in America and the inevitable discussions began happening in chat rooms across an infant internet. What now? How do you fight back? How far do you push? How bad are things going to get? Is registration and confiscation next? There were even religious undertones to the justifiably paranoid banter. Conspiracy theories began to merge with end-times theology. FEMA was rumored to be building concentration camps throughout the U.S. and pictures were circulated of a UN army preparing to invade the mainland and establish marshal law. Many were certain the New World Order was upon us and the Great Tribulation was just around the bend.

It was during this time that I received the March/April 1995 edition of the American Handgunner. I was a member of the NRA and had been sending small amounts of money to the NRA-ILA in an attempt to help fight the impending AWB. I eagerly turned to the table of contents in my new issue and found an article by Jeff Snyder entitled “A Line in the Sand.” Snyder is a firearms rights advocate and an intellectual best known for his book “A Nation of Cowards.” I read the article several times and then cut it out and saved it. It was one I would never forget. Three points in the article are specifically relevant to us today in light of the New Zealand shootings.

In the article, Snyder walked his readers through the history of firearms legislation and brought them right up to the current day and bravely asked ‘now what?’ It was during this time that Snyder introduces his readers to John Locke, and specifically Locke’s, “The Second Treatise on Government.” Snyder began to quote Locke, answering the questions we were all asking- when should the law be justifiably opposed by force, Locke writes, “…force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force; whoever makes any opposition to any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation both from God and man.” Locke continues, “For when the injured party may be relieved, and his damages repaired by the appeal to the law, there can be no pretense for force, which is only to be used where a man in intercepted from appealing to the law; for nothing is to be accounted hostile force, but when it leaves not the remedy of such an appeal; and it is such force alone, that puts him that uses it to a state of war, and makes it lawful to resist him.”

Snyder elaborates on Locke, “If, however, the same unlawful exercise of power also precludes or obstructs a remedy through lawful means, then the person subjected to such ‘manifests act of tyranny’ has the right to resist. Yet, Locke points out, though persons in such circumstances have the right to resist, their exercise of that right will not “disturb the government” if the government’s exercise of unlawful power be perceived by the people at large as merely affecting only ‘some men’s private cases.’ Moreover, many who are subject to tyranny in such circumstances will not avail themselves of this right to resist because it would be pointless or suicidal: ‘For if tyranny reach no farther than some private men’s cases, though they have a right to defend themselves, and to recover by force what by unlawful force is taken from them; yet the right to do so will not easily engage them in a contest, wherein they are sure to perish; it being as impossible for one, or a few oppressed men to disturb the government, where the body of the people do not think themselves concerned in it, as for a raving mad-man, or heady malcontent to overturn a well-settled state; the people being as little apt to follow the one, as the other’”

Snyder continues, “Armed resistance becomes probable and the government becomes susceptible to overthrow and revolution only when ‘a long train of abuses’ makes the government’s tyrannical design visible to the people at large: Locke again: ‘But if either these illegal acts have extended to the majority of the people; or if the mischief and the oppression has lighted only on some few, but in such cases, as the precedent, and consequences seem to threaten all; and they are persuaded in their consciences that their laws, and with them their estates, liberties, and lives are in danger, and perhaps their religion too; if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected…’”

There are three lessons here for those of us in the Southern Dissident movement:

1. Today, there are some members of the Alt-Right lauding the murder of unarmed Muslims in New Zealand and hailing the actions of an eco-Marxist memelord, as if he were some White Nationalist messiah figure. The First Amendment rightly protects their free speech, despite it being repulsive to men of moral character. We shouldn’t let the killer’s incoherent manifesto obscure the bloody reality of his actions. These killings were not justified; the mosque attendees were no immediate threat to the shooter. The shooter had recourse and he chose not to use it. Political solutions to the West’s dilemmas, while improbable, still exist.
2. Locke would remind us that even if political recourse was closed to us, unless a significant number of people were affected or believed themselves to be potentially affected, it matters little if one acts with force, even if it is justified. We are all painfully aware that a large percentage of the West’s population is still oblivious to the dangers posed by unrestricted Third World immigration, politically, militarily, and culturally. Until the West wakes up, any madman or heady malcontent, who takes it upon himself to “accelerate” the process, will find himself on the wrong end of his “day of the rope” (more like “day of the unmarked van”). We will not win a shooting war now, nor are we justified in starting one. We will be killed, our cause will be wrecked and the crumbling Empire will go on. No, our challenge today and tomorrow is to win people over to our cause.
3. We are fighting a cultural war of ideas and using weapons of communication and rhetoric. And, we must stay in this campaign until we have won a significant number of people over to our side – or, we will lose. It’s that simple. The Empire isn’t going anywhere or anytime soon. Therefore, we must be smart. The Australian senatorspoke truth, but he spoke it untimely and it may cost him his office. We would do well to learn from his mistake. There is a time to point out that “diversity plus proximity equals war,” but it’s not immediately after someone who claims to partially identify with our cause murders 50 people. The Muslims will kill again. MS-13 and the cartels will kill again. Illegal immigration will cost us tens of billions of dollars this year and the next. Despite this, we must continue, through non-violence and without coercion, to convince our people that there is a better way.

We must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves as we endeavor to win the hearts and minds of Dixie.

-By Octavius Hood