One Response to “If Liberals Doubt Need For Armed Citizens… Remind Them Of This Little-Known American Battle”

1. Steve Wittlake
   December 11th, 2015 @ 3:33 pm

   https://conservativetribune.com/liberals-armed-citizens/

   If Liberals Doubt Need For Armed Citizens… Remind Them Of This Little-Known American Battle

   Liberals aren’t necessarily the best at history. After all, President Barack Obama is the de facto head of the Democrat Party (as well as the president of the United States), and he thinks there are 57 states in our country.

   So, while liberals claim (erroneously) that the Second Amendment was supposed to deal with muskets, they forget that our right to bear arms is one of the greatest tools against corruption that our country has. That’s why sometimes conservatives need to give them a history lesson.

   Take, for instance, the Battle of Athens, a showdown between a corrupt political machine and the residents of a small Tennessee county in 1946. Eagle Rising described the showdown and how the right to carry saved the day.

   Paul Cantrell — a vicious, corrupt Democrat of the Huey Long style — had been elected the sheriff of McMinn County, Tennessee in 1936, 1938 and 1940, all through good old-fashioned voter fraud. He’d left the office of sheriff to serve in the Tennessee state senate for two years, putting Pat Mansfield, one of his associates, in his stead.

   However, by 1946, Cantrell decided he wanted the sinecure back.

   Veterans of World War II returning to McMinn County, meanwhile, had ideas of their own. They decided to run Knox Henry, a former GI, as a candidate to clean up county government. Other GIs ran against Cantrell’s political machine in an Aug. 1 primary election.

   Paul Cantrell — a vicious, corrupt Democrat of the Huey Long style — had been elected the sheriff of McMinn County, Tennessee in 1936, 1938 and 1940, all through good old-fashioned voter fraud. He’d left the office of sheriff to serve in the Tennessee state senate for two years, putting Pat Mansfield, one of his associates, in his stead.

   However, by 1946, Cantrell decided he wanted the sinecure back.

   Veterans of World War II returning to McMinn County, meanwhile, had ideas of their own. They decided to run Knox Henry, a former GI, as a candidate to clean up county government. Other GIs ran against Cantrell’s political machine in an Aug. 1 primary election.

   In the 1940s South, winning the Democrat nomination was tantamount to winning the election, so the stakes were high. Cantrell knew this, so he sent out 200 deputized “poll watchers” to beat anyone who tried to interrupt the fraud.

   Actual poll watchers from the GI contingent were brutalized and one black man who tried to vote was shot by one of these deputies.

   These were GIs, though, and they weren’t going to take any guff from a corrupt government. They knew the nearby National Guard and State Guard armories had M-1 rifles, British Enfield rifles and .45 caliber pistols. The GIs surrounded the men that Sheriff Mansfield had assembled and trapped them in the local jail in the county seat of Athens.

   The gunfight was a stalemate until the afternoon of Aug. 2, when the GIs lobbed a stick of dynamite into the jail. Mansfield’s crew surrendered. The GIs then made sure the votes were counted in public; Knox Henry won easily and other GI candidates won by a margin of nearly three votes for every two for the Mansfield-Cantrell machine.

   Without the protection of the Second Amendment, the vacuous hacks of the Mansfeld-Cantrell mold would have kept right on treating McMinn County as their own personal fiefdom, plundering the residents and giving them nothing in return.

   That’s what the founders intended the Second Amendment to do — give Americans a bulwark against tyranny.

   The easier it is for us to forget that, the harder it’s going to be when tyranny does come and people aren’t able to defend themselves.

   Please like and share on Facebook and Twitter to spread the example of the Battle of Athens.

   Do you think more Americans need to know about the Battle of Athens?

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