Our First Civil War is a Culture War

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

I continue to see articles on the internet about how we are now engaged in our second civil war, and although the folks that write most of them are sincere and present some interesting facts, I have to disagree with them on that one point.

Our first “civil war” was not  truly a civil war. It was a War of Northern Aggression to prevent Southern  independence.

I recently read a good article on https://spectator.org/americas-next-civil-war-will-be-worse-than-our-last/  It was a good article, but the author made a statement on page 2 that showed it was not a “civil war” and I doubt he even noticed. He stated, accurately, that “In the end, the war was fought over a single legal issue: whether the states that had freely ratified the Constitution to form the Union could freely leave the Union if they felt it no longer served their interests.” That comment alone takes the War of Northern Aggression out of the category of a civil war in which both sides are contending for the control of one government. That was not the case. The South had no interest in controlling the federal government—all they wanted to do was to separate themselves from it.

The author of the Spectator articles notes that: “The difference between the America of today and the America of what seems like just yesterday is that we once had a common culture” even through the War of Northern Aggression. To be sure, there were differences, even theological differences between North and South, and the author observes this, but for all of that there had been a common culture. Today, whatever commonality there had been is fast disappearing.  He notes that “Today, however, our divisions are so deep and fundamental that Americans cannot even agree on what marriage is or what a man and a woman is (which is pretty darn fundamental).” Well, it used to be fundamental until the Marxist college professors stuck their noses into it. Now it’s all up for grabs and college students are being taught “politically correct” (culturally Marxist) drivel that wouldn’t have been imagined fifty years ago except by the folks at the Frankfurt School. So our culture has been played with, twisted, and is in the  process of being turned into something no one in his right mind wants to see happen. The war on all things Confederate is part of this cultural shift. The author mentions the “lunatic self-righteousness of the Left” among whom “disagreement is bigotry to be prohibited by law or even condemned and prosecuted as treason.” He says that this is a “fire that will not easily be quenched and cannot be reached by cool waters of rational argument.” He’s right there. The Left will brook no disagreement and you cannot rationalize with them. They have an agenda, provided to them by the One World Government people who finance them and you are wasting your time trying to debate with them. All you can do is resist them with the truth and do it in such a way that you can reach that broad group of people in the middle,  most of  whom will not realize we are currently in a civil war until the storm troopers march up to their houses and demand their firearms on pain of death!

Another part of the civil war to change our culture is the concept of voting rights for non-citizens, which several liberal cities are pushing. If they get enough people to fall for that one the non-citizens who voted will end up helping to change our culture just the same  way as giving illegal immigrants the vote will end up changing our culture. That’s something else the Deep State has been pushing. Check out an article by James Murphy on https://www.thenewamerican.com for July 27^th, 2018.

Think we are not involved in a civil war, even as I write this?  Check out an article by Paul Craig Roberts on https://www.lewrockwell.com for July 27^th 2018. Mr. Roberts, who has followed national trends for decades, notes that: “The evidence is overwhelming that CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, Robert Mueller, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the Democratic National Committee are engaged in high treason against the American people and the President of the United States and are actively engaged in a plot to overthrow the President of the United States. Yet the traitorous intelligence officials  retain their high security clearances and have not been indicted, arrested,  and put on trial for high treason.” We have a culture in Washington that is totally okay with this. Civil war against the President and the American people is perfectly alright—as long as the denizens of the Deep State win.

That is the culture that persists in our present civil war—our first civil war. Will the American people be awakened enough to realize this is a civil war they may end up having to fight in—and I’m not just talking about using guns. That’s a good question.

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“Love and Peace” and Multiculturalism Really Equal Hate (But you are not supposed to know that).

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

We seem to be wallowing in a politically correct (cultural Marxist) sea, (bilge included) of love, diversity, sensitivity, multi-culturalism,  and a few other “isms” I won’t mention here for the sake of decency. Most of those involved in various aspects of these “movements” really want to convey the idea that they are involved in what they do for the betterment of the world. Yet, if you look at them and what they say and do, you begin to realize that the one thing they all have in common is an abiding hatred for Jesus Christ and the Christian faith. Anything built upon any kind of Christian foundation is anathema to these people and they will go to great lengths to tear it  down.

They loudly proclaim that Christians are hate-mongers, yet we don’t see Christians running around tearing down historical monuments and flags, even those they may disagree with. We don’t see Christians with masks over their faces loudly claiming they are “anti-fascists” as they race to break up demonstrations and parades they don’t agree with. Only the proponents of Leftist love do that—all in the name of sensitivity and diversity.

It should have become more than obvious to thinking people by now that those on the Left that engage in this sort of behavior in the name of diversity really want no opinions out there that dissent from their Leftist dogma. They really don’t want people to have a chance to know the truth. They are nothing more than liars who want to shut down all opposition to the far-left agenda they promote for those big money moguls that finance them. They love no one and hate everybody, and  then they have the gall to call Christians purveyors of hate.

You have to realize that this is all by design. These people may claim to be opposed to capitalism or private property or unequal distribution of the wealth, but what they really seek to do is to tear down completely whatever remains of our Christian foundations. Nowhere is this more obvious than in their assaults on our Christian heritage and culture, especially here in the South!

Our Christian history and culture has to be replaced by some grotesque vision out of the Communist Manifesto, the Illuminati’s handbook for the destruction of a Christian society. And to think, our universities teach this  stuff and we pay to send our kids there to be indoctrinated. Then we wonder why kids are leaving the churches. And I haven’t even touched on what the kids get fed in grades K-12.

I’ll note one small instance here. When we lived back on the East Coast, there was a school over in Rhode Island that invited a prostitute to come in and lecture either one of the middle school grades or high school grades, I can’t recall just which right now. So how much benefit were those kids supposed to get out of this? And this wasn’t someone who had repented and was there to tell the kids how bad it was—she was still in business.

I have looked at a lot of the aberrations that have gone on in government schools over the decades and one thing I have noted—all of them were anti-Christian in some way, no exceptions! But then, the history of the government school system is shrouded in anti-Christianity. That should probably tell parents with kids in public schools that their kids would be better off in some other more Christian educational environment. Unfortunately, in the 40-plus years I have been observing this phenomenon most Christian parents don’t seem to have gotten the message. There are times when you almost feel like asking—“Oh Lord,  how long???”

Evangelicals and the Culture War

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Four years ago last January, in 2014, I did a four-part series titled Evangelical Marxism for this blog spot.  I don’t know if it woke anybody up but I hope it did reach some. If you care to check back, it is still up. I suppose I could call this part five, or maybe just the continually sleeping church, as it seems to take an awful lot anymore to wake the church up to much of anything. In many cases we seem to be sleeping our way through history and then we wonder why in heck we are losing the culture war.  Maybe if we just woke up and started to fight back we wouldn’t lose so often. The Lord ain’t about to bless the efforts of the comatose to remain asleep.

The New American magazine for June 5, 2018 had an informative article by Alex Newman,  https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/faith-and-morals about some of what is going on in the Southern Baptist Convention, which is to have their annual meeting this year in Dallas, Texas between June 12th and 13th.

Mr. Newman wrote, in part, “The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest protestant denomination and a historically conservative wing of the Christian church in the United States is on the verge of falling to organized ‘progressive’ social-justice forces and anti-Trump activists, according to media reports and insiders involved in the battle. One leading opponent of the scheme has even blasted what he described as the ‘Evangelical Deep State’ working to infect the church with unbiblical ideologies. The goal of these forces, dubbed ‘neo-Marxist’ by some critics, include softening and eventually quashing Christian opposition to homosexuality , normalizing gender confusion in the church, promoting left-wing politics at all levels of government, fueling constant obsession and angst over race and gender, facilitating mass Islamic  immigration into the United States, and much more. Most rank and file Southern Baptists remain oblivious to what is happening, insiders said. But the implications for the church, the culture, the nation, and politics could be earth-shattering.”

That’s the main problem right there–most Southern Baptists remain oblivious to what really goes on in the denomination. And you can’t just point the finger at the Southern Baptists–the same situation holds true in many denominations.  Lots easier to just stay asleep and let the church leaders handle everything. The question of what to do if they don’t “handle everything” never comes up until it is too late.

There is a resolution scheduled to be introduced into this year’s annual Southern Baptist meeting by conservatives that will “…strongly condemn the ‘unbiblical’ and ‘Marxist-based’ so-called ‘social-justice’ movement. We’ll have to keep an eye out to see what happens to that resolution. The man who introduced the resolution suspects there may well be an effort to prevent its being voted on. The purpose of the resolution is to wake people up to what the Left is trying to do within their denomination. He said “Most of these churches in the heartland,  most of these are rural churches and most of them have no idea of what is going on.”

He said: “My fear is that if progressives get in control of the Southern Baptist Convention–(Summit Church Pastor) . J. D. Greear is one of their guys–the people in the heartland are going to start seeing this stuff infiltrating the literature, the bookstores, but by then it will be too late and these progressives will be running the show. At that point the response will be too little too late.” There’s a lot of meat in Mr. Newman’s article that I can’t include here for space reasons. Check it out on the internet and read the article in its entirety.

Another article I came across along this same line is one written by Rev. Thomas Littleton back in July of 2017 entitled How Evangelicals Lost the Culture War Before it Started. You can probably find this by typing the name of the article and the author. Just for kicks, try that on duckduckgo.com search engine. Lots of stuff on that one I haven’t seen other places, and supposedly they don’t track what you look up like Google and others do.

Rev. Littleton wrote: “Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to change the churchs’ biblical stand on LGBTQ. In 2014, the Human Rights Campagn (HRC) came to the deep south with $8.5 million to push Project One America with ‘A Christian Conversation Guide’ training manual  to organize and mobilize the LGBTQ community into the churches.  The Reformation Project and gay activist Matthew Vines have since made their way into many churches and onto Bible college campuses like Biola University. Just this week a LGBTQ won Faculty approval on Southern Baptist affiliated Samford University. Why is this happening? While the church is being manipulated and distracted, pre-K-12 schools are being invaded by the LGBTQ.” Some of you who know what goes on in public schools already realize that. Seems like your churches are now going to get it too.

Maybe the evangelicals need to begin to realize they are losing the culture war because the other side is the only one doing any real fighting! Most evangelicals (with some exceptions) are just sitting it out–hoping all this really nasty stuff will just go away if only they are “nice enough” to the anti-Christ types on their block. It won’t. And you all better realize that you are in a spiritual battle that you won’t win unless you start resisting the evil being thrust upon you.

Being Watched Over? Or Just Watched?

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

On May 30th Tyler Durden had an informative article up on https://www.zerohedge.com that was written by a former Green Beret on http://www.SHTFplan.com

It was definitely food for thought and something we should be aware of.I am going to quote a bit of it here and urge folks to check it out on their own.

The author wrote: “We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state. Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and  practically abrogated.”

And he continued: “The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, with the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.”

With the article is sort of a poster, showing a line of kids with the tops of their heads open and something being poured in.The poster reads Education is not a right. Knowledge is power. Power is dangerous. Keep them stupid.

The author observes the increased police presence in schools and then he says: “…as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students. Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the ‘troupe’ of juveniles, driving the herd. Collective, community thought is the mantra…Gone is  personal development, let alone fun, the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective ‘consciousness’ has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed…directed by authorities or ‘approved’ controllers/managers…”  You might label such people as change agents   because that’s exactly what they are. They are there to change your kids’ mode of thinking from what you taught them to what they want them to “learn.”

One thing this author notes is our “fostered dependency” on electronic gadgets where many, if not most people, think that they absolutely cannot do without them, especially the latest models of most of them. He says “Every week a new report or story surfaces that shows just how far the government and the corporate interests are pushing this electronic dependency, while the schools are shaping the consciousness of the public and  making it ever more malleable. Toward what end? Toward the one that recurs throughout history. We have been warned by Orwell, by Solzhenitsyn,  and many others. Whether we will heed those warnings and take preventive measures remains to be seen…”

The Deep State is all about power (holding onto and expanding it) and money (stealing all they can from the public while telling us it is all for our own good).

No matter who sits in the White House, this continues to go on, and I am not sure any sitting president can really do all that much about it, well intentioned though he might be.

One thing some folks can do, though, is be aware of just how much your pubic school system contributes to all of this and take steps to get your kids out of it and into private Christian education. The public (government) school system is a major contributor to all of this and you need to be aware of that–and act accordingly.

Karl Marx—Deadbeat Daddy

 

By Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

On May 5^th of this year many celebrated the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. You’d think from some of the articles  I read, mostly on the internet, that  Marx was a daring, bold economic visionary who had come up with a new economic system that proved to be a boon to mankind. Of course that’s the line today’s current crop of Marxist professors have been programmed to parrot. Unfortunately they parrot it to a whole batch of college students who, thanks to inadequate economic education at the high school level, really don’t have a clue and if the professor is good enough he can,  as they say, “baffle them with his BS.”

Supposedly, Marx’s economic vision was put forth for the benefit of the  poor working  people. That that idea was a total charade has been proven by the millions of poor working people that have  perished under various Marxist regimes around the  world. Anyone who believes that hogwash truly has to have spiritual and economic blinders on.

Steve Byas, writing on https://www.thenewamerican.com for May 5^th wrote: “While Marx is certainly a central figure in the history of communism, he was by no means the lone originator of communism. And his background demonstrates  that communism did not  spring from the toiling masses of the working class. The reality is that Marx, like almost all socialist revolutionaries, was a product of academia and self-proclaimed intellectual secret societies.” It has been reported that Marx didn’t write The Communist Manifesto on his  own, but rather he wrote it for a group called The League of the Just  (Illuminati) and his name does not even appear on the cover of the first edition.

Donnie Kennedy and I, in our book, Lincoln’s Marxists, noted that Charles A. Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune hired Marx to write columns for the paper, which was owned and published by utopian socialist Horace Greeley. From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed about 500 articles to Greeley’s paper—his associate Friedrich Engles probably wrote about a quarter of them. He was more well versed in English than Marx was, and besides, Marx was a bit on the lazy side. It seems, though, that he had no trouble taking pay for the articles Engels wrote.

Leopold Schwarzschild, in his book The Red Prussian published in 1947 by Charles Scribner’s Sons noted of Marx that: “In all this there was nothing to indicate that from now on collections, subscriptions and charity were to be this brilliant young man’s sole means  of support. Nobody could have imagined it, and yet so it was. With the collections and subscriptions of 1844 he embarked on a life which was never again, in all the long decades, to have any other basis.” In other words, for all his supposed economic prowess, Marx and his family mostly lived on charity—and a lot of that came from his friend Engels.

Recently I ran across an article from 2010 on https://hubpages.com entitled Karl Marx Lived in Filth and Neglected His Children. The article observed that: “When an educated man chooses to live in poverty , and raise his children in poverty, that is abuse. When Marx and his wife and children were living in London, a visitor wrote a description of  their lifestyle in their 3-room flat. Not only did the Marx children have to endure the hunger of  poverty, they were raised in filth, or what his friend described as ‘a pig-sty’….Both Marx and his wife came from comfortable homes, hers more prominent. Her father was a Prussian baron. And she, Jenny, was an educated woman when she married Marx. Together they had seven children. Four of those children died young. Only three survived to achieve adulthood. Every biography of Marx reports that his four children who died  young died because of the poverty they had to endure…Marx occasionally wrote articles for newspapers and he wrote his long papers and books full of his philosophies about the ‘struggle’ of workers, but he never worked a day in his life”

He also fathered an illegitimate son, but you don’t hear much about that little indiscretion. The hub pages article observed, in closing, that “By any standard, Marx’ life was a failure, as a husband,  as a father, as a provider.” But, hey, Marx didn’t have time for any of that bourgeois stuff.  He and his fellow socialist revolutionaries/terrorists had  an agenda to push onto the world. They just didn’t have any time available for being good fathers and good providers and good husbands. That was for the plebes, not them. They were above all that!

So all those useful idiots that want to enthuse over Karl Marx should take a step back and realize that, when push came to shove, Marx was little more than just another Deadbeat Dad!

America’s Second “Civil War” will really be our first!

 

By Al Benson  Jr.

Member, Board  of Directors, Confederate Society of America

 

There has been lots of stuff on the internet, both  videos and articles, lately about what they are calling “America’s Second Civil War.” Actually, that title  is based on a false assumption. The war that was fought from 1861-65 was not a civil war. It was a war of Northern aggression to prevent Southern independence, because Southern independence would have meant no more tariff money from the South for Lincoln and his friends to finance their pet projects in the North.

The North and South were not fighting over the same government. The South had no interest in capturing the Northern government—they just wanted out, but the North needed the tariff money and so they fought.  The slavery question we have all been taught to believe was the North’s  Holy Grail was, at best, peripheral.

So if we have “another” civil war, it will be our first one and it may well happen in some form because there are people and groups that want it to happen—people and groups that you can’t sit down and talk rationally with, because they have a vision for a “new Amerika” as part of a “New World Order” and they are not about to compromise on that. The fact that most Americans don’t want that matters not at all to them. They want it and that’s what’s important to them. In their minds all we get to do is pay for it.

In an article by Pat Buchanan that was on www.wnd.com back in August of 2017 Buchanan noted that this country has changed since 1965. Before that, statues of our Southern heroes were venerated and honored, as were our flags. Buchanan said: “What his changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores..” And he noted that, today, the names of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate heroes evoke “raw hatred and howls of ‘racist and traitor’.” In part,  our “institutions of higher learning” and the prostitute press are responsible for this—and they do it for a price.

Later on in his article, Buchanan notes President Trump’s question about this—“Where  does this all end?” And then he makes a chilling statement. He says “It doesn’t. Not until America’s histories and biographies are burned and new  texts written to Nazify Lee, Jackson, Davis and all the rest, will a newly indoctrinated generation of Americans accede to this demand to tear down and destroy what their fathers cherished.” As long as we continue to feed our next generation into these public education brain laundries, whether at the high school or college level, we are contributing to that destruction-and quite frankly, too many are too lazy to give a damn!

And Buchanan observes that, once the Left gets  through trashing the Confederates, they will push forward with the same agenda for whoever else is on their hit list. If you are naïve enough to think that “because I’m not a Confederate they won’t bother me” you had better learn to disabuse yourself of that fantasy right quick! If you are white, Christian, conservative, or patriotic you can bet the  farm you are on their list. You might not be as far up as the Confederates but you are there somewhere and when they get through destroying the cultures and heritage of those above you on the Leftist hit list, they will come for you!

In a column on www.dennisprager.com for January 24, 2017 it was stated: “This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way. It has  thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents’ offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence  is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War. The same article later states: “Unity was possible between the right and the liberals, but not between the right and the left.” There are reasons for that. The article continues: “Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America’s Judeo-Christian foundations…Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously there cannot. There will be unity only when the left vanquishes the right or the right vanquishes the left…” In other words, if you think you can make common cause with the Left and preserve a little of  what you still have—you are whistling Yankee Doodle!

The cultural Marxists, the political and theological Left, the Deep State (they are all kissin’ cousins) have as their plan your destruction and the destruction of your family and your faith and your history. Their “second Civil War” will be a war of extermination, in every understanding of that word! Do you get that yet???

One of the main questions here is—Who finances the Left?  They don’t do all that they do to work for your destruction for nothing. Someone has to pay for all this, and what do they expect to get out it all? I know it’s a rough go, but maybe you better start thinking and praying about all this and what you can do about it. Doing nothing gets you nothing but the destruction of your history, heritage and progeny.

The “Spontaneous” Anti-Gun Movement

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Anyone who has followed the outbreak of “spontaneous” popular movements in the past four decades and done a little homework has to realize that such popular movements, all lack one basic ingredient–spontaneity. They didn’t just “happen” they were organized and planned and lots of people were used to set them  in motion all at once.

I recall the Kent State riots in 1970. At that particular point in time I was close to two college campuses, one of which I worked at. As the students poured out of both campuses to riot and cause mayhem in the streets, I remember, being there to see some of what went on, that this looked like the most well-orchestrated riot I had ever witnessed. Spontaneous it was not. Those students had been prepped for this, in  some cases by the professors, most of which leaned solidly to the Left. I actually saw one professor with a group of students, lecturing them about how to act and react once they hit the streets.

The little college I worked at had a ton of Leftist propaganda on hand for the students to pass out, some of it printed in North Viet Nam. I know because I took a box full of it home and read through much of it. With the Viet Nam War going on at that time, this was actually a not-so-subtle enemy invasion of our college campuses. I  wondered, if there was all that much enemy propaganda at this little school I worked at, how much of this stuff got shipped to Columbia University?  And who paid for all  this stuff to be shipped in to  these schools?

And now, fast forward to today. We have had a whole series of shootings at schools, all in “gun free zones” and the cry for gun control after each one has continued to escalate. This latest one in Parkland, Florida is a classic case in point. Let me say at this point that I consider most of these events to have been false flag events–something done by some group to create a public response so a  planned agenda can then be forced on the American people–a classic “pressure from above and pressure from below” situation, so  that this situation can be used to fuel a strong anti-Second Amendment fever amongst the public.

Arthur Thompson, CEO of the John Birch Society, has made some interesting comments in regard to this latest Florida situation and to such events in general. He said: “Let us use a little logic in this regard. Someone has to decide the who, what, when, where, and why of any event, movement, etc. Someone, or some group, has to put it all together so that seemingly diverse organizations all come together  at the same time, whether physically, such as a demonstration,  or where all are on the same page with their influence or propaganda.” He noted that social media plays a role in this. And then he noted a group of seemingly “diverse”groups that all  came together using the Parkland situation as their catalyst. He noted such groups and individuals as “Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, the  Women’s March LA, Everytown for Gun
Safety,…and the socialist American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to name a few. (Nearly every head of the AFT has been a leader in the Socialist Party or its successors.) Kind of makes you wonder who’s running the public schools doesn’t it? But then, most of us already know the answer to that one–and it ain’t the parents or the local community!

Mr. Thompson found it difficult (and so do I) to believe that all those companies that had worked with the NRA now suddenly stopped, as though the shooting were, somehow the NRA’s fault. He said: “There had to be an effort to prod dozens of companies to make such a decision literally overnight. Particularly since the NRA had nothing to do with the shooting…” But demonizing the NRA makes all guns look bad to the public and that is a main part of the agenda.

And Mr. Thompson observed, again, quite accurately, that “…the Left exploited the Parkland shooting by blaming the gun and rallied immediately to coordinate a movement that has as its ultimate intent the disarming of every American citizen, starting with a few changes now to be followed up by more and more after each new act of terror.” So we are not nearly done with this Leftist  disarmament agenda. There will be more and you can bet the farm that good ol’ David Hogg(wash) will be out there with his Communist clenched fist salute as he and his Leftist buddies work  for the removal of your Second Amendment rights–and that’s what they are all about–make no mistake! You will recall how one of those Leftist girls at the first anti-gun march on March 14th of this year said in a speech–“You give us an inch and we will take a mile.” She told you right there what it’s really all about–gun confiscation! And those that deny that are, quite  plainly, LIARS!

Keep your eye on your congress critters in this election year because most of them will have their fingers up in the air testing which was the anti-gun sentiment is blowing and unless we keep their feet to the fire, they will slip the traces and sell us out! A word to the wise!