Brunswick Beacon, 12.08.22
In his Nov. 24 column, D.G. Martin declared Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson “North Carolina’s most interesting political figure.” Martin didn’t mention that Robinson advocates armed insurrection.
One day after a gunman with an AR-15 killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket, Robinson bragged: “I got them AR-15s at home and I like to go target shooting and all that. That’s not what they’re there for…I got them AR-15s in case the government gets too big for its britches, ‘Cause I’m gonna fill the backside of them britches with some lead.”
Gov. Cooper condemned Robinson’s remarks. “An elected official advocating violent overthrow of our [government] shames North Carolina and puts our safety and our democracy at risk.” Attorney General Stein called Robinson’s statement “incredibly dangerous.” Robinson replied: “The Framers gave us the 2nd Amendment to protect us from a tyrannical government. Period.”
The idea that the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so we could turn our guns on our elected government is just nuts. As Justice Robert Jackson put it, that would “convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
The Founding Fathers suppressed Shay’s Rebellion in February 1787 then drafted and signed the Constitution that summer. In 1794, President Washington commanded 13,000 militiamen and put down the Whiskey Rebellion, the only time a Commander-in-Chief led an army in the field.
Last week a federal jury convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and his deputy Kelly Meggs of seditious conspiracy during the Jan. 6 Insurrection. Rhodes, Meggs and three other Oath Keepers, dressed in combat-style gear, converged on the Capitol after staging an “arsenal” of weapons nearby, ready to use force at Rhodes’s direction to obstruct Congress and prevent the peaceful transition of power. All face sentences of up to 20 years in prison.
Robinson’s crackpot views violate his oath of office. They don’t make him “interesting.” They make him a wannabe insurrectionist.
Rich Cooper
Leland