The origins of the militia movement: violence and memory ...

[Pages:43]To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement Robert H. Churchill The University of Michigan Press, 2009.

the origins of the militia movement: violence and memory on the suburban-rural frontier

Sometimes change is sudden, and so dramatic that we can hardly believe our eyes. On November 9, 1989, I came home from teaching high school and turned on the television. I had followed the events in Eastern Europe closely that fall, but it still took me twenty minutes to fathom the live images of young people dancing atop a concrete wall. I simply could not grasp what I was seeing. The newscasters reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall were themselves speechless.

Sometimes change is imperceptible, until one day we are forced to confront a new state of affairs and realize that it has been twenty years in the making. I grew up in a variety of communities, urban, suburban, and rural. In one of those rural communities I once attended a Fourth of July celebration in a parking lot in the middle of town. It was a tailgate party attended by most of the town's high school students, who stood in a small crowd drinking beer, in wholesale violation of the town's open container laws and the state's minimum age regulations. At the entrance to the parking lot, about ................
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