Government-Monopoly-of-Force Advocate Horwitz Sounds The Alarm About "Insurrectionists" Like Me.

The Town the Militia Took Over.

This is no idle threat the chief is making. Kessler is the head of a private militia called the Constitution Security Force (CSF) whose members swear an oath to "respond to the call if... needed to resist tyranny that seeks to destroy our republic." Kessler recruits CSF members at his website ChiefKessler.com, combining his personal and professional identities in one neat little package.

CSF openly affiliates with anti-government extremist groups like Oath Keepers and the "Three Percent" movement, which was founded by former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh. Vanderboegh made his own headlines in 2010 when he urged supporters to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide following Congress' passage of health care reform. Many offices were vandalized in response, including that of then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

Later in his screed. Horwitz says:

In 2009, I co-authored a book called Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea. In the book, Casey Anderson and I exposed the threat of insurrectionists -- those who believe that they have an individual right under the Second Amendment to shoot and kill elected officials, police officers and military service members in response to what they see as "tyranny." We warned the nation that insurrectionism was anathema to our democratic society and, if allowed to spread, could lead to serious violence.

Some thought our warnings were overblown or alarmist. Even as Congressional offices were vandalized and Gabby Giffords was shot during an assassination attempt, the conventional wisdom held that we were too advanced as a country to succumb to political violence. But now -- out of the same state where rebellious farmers launched the Whisky Rebellion in 1791 -- we have seen the true face of "Second Amendment remedies." A one-man police force and his private militia -- accountable not to the local government, but to him -- appear to have taken over the small town of Gilberton.

Too many of our leaders have indulged insurrectionists as if they were bullying in-laws -- unpleasant but not really dangerous. Mark Kessler has shown us a grimmer reality: How democracy is compromised when access to the political process is blocked through brute intimidation and dissenters become an endangered species. Thanks to the gun lobby and its minions, armed political violence is no longer just something we see in the news in some far away third world country, but a contagion that is beginning to inflict our culture right here in the United States.

In response to the Whiskey Rebellion, the retired General who led our nation to victory in the Revolutionary War literally put his uniform back on, got in his saddle, and physically confronted the "insurgents" threatening our young nation. What is true then is still true today. Our democracy will not survive if we allow "the guys with the guns to make the rules."

In truth, Horwitz wants the guys with the guns to make the rules, only he wants them to be HIS guys -- the FEDERAL government that he explicitly desires to have a "monopoly of force."