Joe Walsh, former Congressman from McHenry County, took on civil disobedience next at his Town Hall Meeting at Crystal Lake’s McHenry County College.

“You have to be willing to go to jail,” Walsh said.

He pointed to  last week’s Illinois Supreme Court decision and the Federal Appellate Court decision on concealed carry.

The two decisions, taken together, “say we have the right to carry,” Walsh asserted.

“Start carrying now.”

“State’s attorneys in fifteen counties in Illinois have said, ‘We’re not going to prosecute.'”

“How come the Left gets to own civil disobedience?

“We must prepare ourselves literally to go to jail for what we believe.”

He said when he thought about gun control he thought of a 28-year old black woman on Chicago’s South Side who got off work at 8 PM and had to walk through a rough neighborhood.

She is the one who needs a gun to protect herself, he contended.

Returning to the theme of Republican Party candidates having to earn his support from now on, Walsh established his conservative bona fides, Walsh told, as a teen in Barrington, he had a Phil Crane poster on his bedroom wall.

Despite his statement that Republicans would not automatically get his vote in the future, but would have to earn it, “Joe Walsh’s not leading a Third Party movement…[pause]…yet.”

He then urged those in the audience,

“Come out of the closet and tell the Republican Party, ‘You don’t have me anymore.'”

He listed five requirement for those seeking his support:

1. Cut taxes
2. Diminish government influence over our lives
3. Eliminate the debt
4. Respect our God-given rights
5. Self limit – be a citizen legislator not a professional politician

[By this time Walsh had talked an hour.]

“We’re doing this for a generation that’s not even born yet,” he said.

“I don’t know if I’ll see it.”