April Violence

The Oakland Press asks, "When it comes to national tragedies, what is it about mid-April?"

. On April 19, 1993, following a 51-day standoff, federal agents raided the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. A fire, later determined to have been set by the Davidians, destroyed the compound and killed 57 of its residents.
. On April 19, 1995, a bomb inside a rental truck exploded at the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in what was then the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
. The killer turned out to be 27-year-old Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh's ex-Army buddy, Terry Nichols, was also charged in the crime.
. On April 20, 1999, two armed highschool seniors, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, walked through Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. In the end, 12 students, one teacher and the two murderers were dead.
. Add Monday's slaughter of 32 by a 23-year-old South Korean student at Virginia Tech to the terrible list.

The common element in all these incidents of violent aggresssion is the federal government. The government was the aggressor at Waco. The government trained the aggressors in Oklahoma (and armed the terrorists [or "patsies"] in what would later become "the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil"). The government requires the teaching of "the survival of the fittest" in public schools, the ideological motivation of the Columbine killers. And the government blames guns, not the killers, leading to a defense-free killers' paradise at schools like Virginia Tech.

April 19 is also the anniversary of Lexington and Concord, the battle that began the American Revolution, when the British attempted to seize ammunition held by the colonists. The Second Amendment was the result of this conflict, an amendment which guarantees rights -- not of hunters and gun collectors, but of opponents of tyranny and those who are carrying out what the Declaration of Independence describes as a "duty" to abolish tyrannical governments.

Mid-April is also "tax day." The American Revolution was fought over tax rates which historians estimate at between 3-5%. The Bush-Clinton regime now confiscates over ten times as much in taxes. The British government would never have dreamed of using colonial tax revenues to fund planned parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the world, and remove all copies of the Ten Commandments from government-run schools. By every conceivable measure, the U.S. Federal government is a far greater tyranny than the one overthrown in 1776, and represents the greatest source of violence in the world today.

Happy Birthday Tom!

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743.

Gen LaGreca has posted this on George Reisman's blog. D. James Kennedy asks if Jefferson was a deist or a Christian.

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence speaks of certain "self-evident truths." These are "the doctrines of Jesus" as Jefferson called them, and are "simple, and tend all to the happiness of man":

1. That there is one only God, and He all perfect.
2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3. That to love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion.…
Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.
—To Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse. (1822) The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Albert Ellery Bergh. 20 vols. Washington: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907. (Memorial Edition) vol. 15, p. 383. [More]

I would venture to guess that Jefferson would recognize the practice of these "self-evident truths" in less than one percent of our current government. He would have been outraged (as Laurence M. Vance has shown) at the consuming event of our day (for which hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent): the "war on terrorism."

Perhaps (if Jefferson were alive) it would not be such a happy birthday after all.