The Most Important Day of All, Rarely Remembered

[Nemo]

is tomorrow.  April 19.  Go back to 1775 and close your eyes to remember the sunrise on the morn at the Lexington bridge and on to the North Bridge.  Remember it.  Make a decision on what will require your actions.  Raise a toast in confirmation of your commitment.  Intend to keep that commitment should the requirement arise.

Nemo

https://web.archive.org/web/20100504181939/http://www.examiner.com/x-5619-Atlanta-Gun-Rights-Examiner~y2010m4d19-This-day-in-history

This day in history--April 19
Atlanta Gun Rights Examiner Ed Stone

The North Bridge, Concord, Massachussetts

"Disperse, you rebels; damn you, throw down your arms and disperse!"

-- Major John Pitcairn, April19, 1775, at Lexington, Massachussetts, while waving his sword in the air.

With all of the focus given to the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, many Americans forget that today is the day the war actually broke out, when militiamen gathered on the bridge at Lexington and exchanged shots with government troops coming in force to disarm the colonists.  Major Pitcairn hardly expected the resistance that he met.   The first shots were fired at dawn at Lexington, but the seventy or so Americans quickly retreated, with the shootout lasting only a few minutes.  Things turned in the colonist's favor at Concord, which had Minutemen who went to the town's North Bridge after government troops looking for weapons started burning buildings in town.  During the Concord engagement, the government troops were the ones to beat a hasty retreat, followed by militia harassment as the government troops fled all the way back to Boston.

    I’m not afraid to go, and I haven’t a man that’s afraid to go.

-- Isaac Davis,  Captain of the Acton Militia, said when heading from Acton to Concord.  Captain Davis was fatally shot by government troops. His wife, in 1835, said, "He knew well his danger, but was a stranger to fear." 

We owe a great debt of gratitude to these men who stood up and resisted when the government sought to remove the means of resistance.  It is the government actions on that day, and the fact that arms in the hands of ordinary farmers gave them the means to resist, that lead the Founders to adopt the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.

    They [the Founders] were thinking about Lexington and Concord, where they stood with their families and friends to resist an imperial army. If you get Lexington and Concord, you get the Second Amendment.

----- Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale University law professor and scholar of the Bill of Rights, quoted in USA Today