Williams: ‘Bullet box’ has no place in U.S. democracy

Sounding more like Malcolm X than Patrick Henry, Virginia political candidate Catherine Crabill warned of armed insurrection during a Northern Neck "tea party" last month.

"We have a chance to fight this battle at the ballot box, before we have to resort to the bullet box," said Crabill, the Republican nominee for the 99th District seat in the House of Delegates.

"But that's the beauty of our Second Amendment right. . . . Our Second Amendment right was to guard against tyranny."

But can the tyranny of a distant monarch be legitimately likened to discontent with the policies of a democratically elected president?

And does the inscrutable Second Amendment -- A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed -- give individual citizens the right to take up arms against their government?

Crabill clearly thinks so, as does the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 vote last year, the court struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., and concluded that fear of tyranny is a basis for individuals to possess firearms.

Abraham Lincoln no doubt would have frowned upon that case, District of Columbia v. Heller. "Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet," he wrote before being slain by a man who considered him a tyrant.

When folks such as John Wilkes Booth and Catherine Crabill get to decide what constitutes tyranny, we should all be very afraid.

"This debate has taken a radical turn," Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said during a panel discussion Wednesday at the YWCA of Richmond.

When asked in an e-mail by Richmond Times-Dispatch political reporter Tyler Whitley to explain her "bullet" remark, Crabill hardly retreated. "Rather than scrutinize my comments, why doesn't the media examine how this administration's policies and trajectory into socialism/Marxism has incited the people to buy arms at an unprecedented rate?" she asked.

Indeed, gun sales have soared since President Barack Obama took office. So has the mutinous mood of citizens who oppose his policies, real or imagined, or simply can't stomach him in the White House. A man who shot to death three Pittsburgh police officers in April reportedly had expressed fear of an Obama gun ban.

But Horwitz, co-author of "Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea," argues that the right of individuals to take up arms against the government was not the Founders' intent.

Horwitz said the notion that guns should tilt the balance in a democracy "violates the most fundamental idea we have in America" -- that citizens are political equals.

He was joined Wednesday by a panel of area clergy and the parents of two Virginia Tech massacre survivors. Crabill's "bullet box" remarks, which are making the rounds on YouTube, left an indelible impression.

In his blog the next day, the Rev. D. Wallace Adams-Riley, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond, said Crabill's language is "seditious, reckless, inflammatory, and is an incitement to violence. In a word, it is a threat to the democratic process and thus a threat to Americans."

Indeed, a democracy that resorts to the bullet over the ballot is forsaking liberty for death.

Contact Michael Paul Williams at (804) 649-6815 or .