Effingham County, Illinois, Now a "Sanctuary"€™ for Gun Owners

Dana Mathewson

https://www.gunpowdermagazine.com/effingham-county-illinois-now-a-sanctuary-for-gun-owners / Tim adds:

Dana, Effingham is just over a hundred miles outside of St. Louis and I've been there many times. I'm not surprised; this is a nice German community not all that far from the really bad areas of East St. Louis and surrounding communities. They need guns to protect themselves from the criminals who come out of those areas. And most of the people in those German communities are not like the Democrats who run Illinois.

I don't know if I've ever told you about southern Illinois, but it is a rather curious place. There are the German and other ethnic communities - primarily Nordic but also Italian - that are delightful havens, pure Americana, clean, peaceful, and wholesome. Great places to grow up. In fact, Sci-Fi author Ray Bradbury often used southern Illinois towns as a metaphor for paradise. He grew up there, and he remembered them very fondly. My grandmother came from the tiny German community of Trenton, and I have visited many of these places when they have had fairs or other festivals.

But then you have little Appalachia. Coal mines, oil wells, and steel mills abound in large swaths of the region, and the mining companies and mills recruited hillbillies from West Virginia and the like. These are the labor union communities, and they are usually dirty, low class, and violence-prone. Some of the lowest class hillbillies I've ever met came not from Missouri or Arkansas but from Illinois. My mother taught at a school in Granite City when she was young, and she said some of her students literally did not own shoes. They would show up barefoot in bib overalls! Their fathers worked in the steel mills or coal mines and often had to migrate when times got lean. There were always domestic disturbances and the kids were frequently abused. Granite city is a different country from where I grew up, and from the German towns nearby. Most of the strippers and prostitutes who work in the mafia-=run clubs on the "east side" come from these communities.

Lastly there are the black ghetto lands. These are some of the poorest, most violent, crime ridden places in America, and you would not believe you were in America if you passed through some of them. East St. Louis has virtually no street signs because they have all been stolen. There are street lights but people steal the bulbs or shoot them out. There are numerous abandoned buildings, and often people live in part of a building that is collapsing. The streets are more like country cow paths, not maintained. Drugs, prostitution, and all manner of crime is ubiquitous. You never, ever want to be caught there after dark.

The strip clubs are generally in those communities, probably because the town government can be bought easily. There is usually security outside of these clubs. The mafia owns these places.

There are also pure farm communities that are nice in Southern Illinois, an extension of the German towns. It is really a mixed bag there.

And you have the prairie, but also some nice mountainous areas further south, the eastern portion of the Ozarks. I love southernmost Illinois! Little Egypt, they call it, because it is a delta region for the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. I've been going for years to the Shawnee Hills wine region, which is a wine area just south of Carbondale, home to Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and just north and east of Cape Girardo, Mo., home of Southeast Missouri State and home to Rush Limbaugh. The area is wonderful, with quaint little villages (including the hippie town of Makanda, which is still really pleasant even if run by a bunch of moonbeams) and some great natural areas; the Little Grand Canyon (a deep valley cut through the region by the Big Muddy River), a series of great lakes, and Bald Knob, a mountain atop which a 150 foot tall crucifix towers over the region. There are horseback stables, hiking and biking trails, these giant boulders strewn abotu everywhere, and all sorts of wonderful things to do there. The wife and I love it, and have gone nearly every year since we got married.

Little Egypt is far enough away from the rough parts of southern Illinois that they can still leave their doors unlocked and whatnot, but closer to St. Louis the crime rates soar, and so those people in Effingham are going to be determined to hold onto their guns.

And of course Chicago dominates state politics. They get enough support from the union areas and the ghetto regions to maintain an iron grip on the state, and there have been rumblings from the south of secession. Many southern Illinoisans want to leave Illinois and either form their own state or join up with either Missouri, Indiana, or Kentucky. But the state legislature would probably have to aporove it and they never will. The result is that many people are simply fleeing the state, moving here to Missouri or to Indiana. I know; I hear from a lot of them who call our company to find a house to rent.

Anyway, Effingham is one of the farm communities, and a nice place. Wikipedia states:

Since that election, the county has voted Republican in every election except 1948 and 1964, and no Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 has reached 35 percent of the county’s vote. Currently Effingham County is one of Illinois’ most Republican counties, rivalled by a number of southern counties like Edwards. In the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, John McCain carried the county by a 36% margin over Barack Obama, making it McCain's strongest county in the state, with Obama carrying his home state by a 25.1% margin over McCain

End excerpt.

Currently there are more than 24 "gun sanctuary" counties in Illinois, according to the Belleville News Democrat.

At any rate, it's good to see, and maybe this part of the state will eventually be able to sever itself from the rotting head in the north.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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