• On April 19, 1775, the "shot heard round the world" rang out in Lexington Common.On April 19, 1861, seething Baltimoreans attacked Union troops as Lincoln was traveling to Washington for his inauguration.
• On April 19, 1903, the Kishinev Pogrom against the Jews began, sending them fleeing for their lives across Europe, many heading for the new world.
• On April 19, 1936, anti-Jewish riots broke out in the Great Uprising in Palestine; seven years later, April 19, 1943, the SS destroyed the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland.
• On April 19, 1947, the Texas City Disaster saw a serious of explosions that killed at least 522 people.
• The US performed a nuclear test in Nevada on April 19, 1972, and Russia tested their nuke on April 19, 1973, in Eastern Kazakh, USSR. This date was chosen for a number of subsequent atomic tests by the US, Russia, and by France.
• On April 19, 1989, a gun turret explosion on the USS Iowa occurred, killing 47 sailors.
• And on April 19, 2010, Halliburton completed cementing the seal on the Deepwater Horizon. At 7 am the following morning, BP decided to forgo the recommended test of the seal, and by 9:49 pm on April 20, gas, oil, concrete, and flames blasted up the platform onto the deck, killing 11 workers, injuring 17, leaving 98 unharmed survivors of the immediate disaster that kept on devastating the Gulf until it was finally capped July 15, 2010.

In 1985, the FBI set siege to the religious compound known as The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSAL) in Arkansas. The group had ties to the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation and other white supremacist, anti-Zionist groups, and were believers in an Armageddon doomsday scenario involving the US government. It may or may not be a coincidence that the date the siege began was the 210th anniversary of the Revolutionary War's "Shot Heard Round the World." The government was able to gather warrants for some of the leaders of the group and negotiate a peaceful end to the siege.

Related to this time line, though not on the anniversary date, on August 21, 1992, the FBI surrounded a small family farm, at Ruby Ridge in Northern Idaho. Homesteader Randy Weaver insisted he was not a white supremacist, and though he and his wife practiced a fundamentalist form of Protestant Christianity, they had nothing in common with the group in Arkansas. Weaver even made an unsuccessful run for Sheriff. His troubles began when he had a disagreement over a land deal with a neighbor, who began calling the government and accusing his neighbor of planning to assassinate everyone from the President, the Governor, to the Pope. They were investigated and cleared, but were growing tired of being harassed and questioned. The government tried using agents to entrap Weaver into doing illegal arms deals or anything else they could arrest him for, but were unsuccessful. When Weaver refused to cooperate with them any longer, the Marshal's service and the DOJ decided to surround the farm, perhaps hoping to force him into actions they clearly believed him capable of that would allow them to arrest him.

The men initially had strict orders not to confront the Weavers, but the family's dogs were on the alert, and when they heard the commotion the dogs were making, Weaver's 14-year-old son and a family friend armed themselves and headed out to see what was happening. The family and the government agents dispute what happened next, but in the end, 14-year-old Sammy Weaver died of a shot to the back, one of the Weaver's dogs was shot, and one of the agents, US Marshal Bill Degan, was also killed. The Weavers recovered Sammy's body, and on the next day, Weaver, his wife, their baby, their 16-year-old daughter, and friend Kevin Harris went to the shed where they had laid it after he was killed. Government snipers were standing by, and one planned to shoot Weaver in the back to sever his spine and take him out instantly, but Weaver moved and the shot hit him in the shoulder. As they ran back to the house, the sniper took aim again, this time at Kevin Harris, but the shot hit Weaver's wife, Vicki, who died instantly, but collapsed with their 10-month-old daughter in her arms, unharmed.

The siege continued for 10 days, during which the government didn't even realize that Vicki Weaver had been killed. Calling her name, offering her pancakes, agents trying to bring the siege to an end were in reality, taunting the family. After the siege ended on August 31st, efforts to put Randy Weaver in prison were unsuccessful. Out of 10 counts, including the original controversial firearms charges, Weaver was acquitted of 8, the judge set aside another, and convicted Weaver of only one charge of failure to appear. Weaver was fined $10,000, sentenced to 18 months in prison, credited with time served plus an additional three months, and released. Kevin Harris was acquitted of all charges. The Weavers took the US government to court over the wrongful deaths of Vicki and Sammy Weaver. The government settled out of court, awarding each surviving daughter a million dollars, and Randy Weaver $100,000.

From February 28th to April 19th, 1993, the US government maintained a 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco, Texas. The group was an off-shoot of 7th-day Adventists, also believers in a government-involved apocalypse. The siege began with bungling and ended in tragedy on April 19th when fire broke out and raged through the compound. Of the 76 who died at the end, 22 of those killed on the last day of the siege were children under the age of 18. Some say that so many children chose to remain was because they heard that of those who did surrender and leave the compound, the children were taken away from their caregivers, who were arrested. Much dispute remains as to the actual events of the siege, particularly over the origin of the fire; a government investigation concluded in 2000 that sect members themselves had started the fire.

Religious extremists, even those who don't share the white supremacist views of The Covenant, were certain that their treatment by the government was an unjust attack on their religious freedoms. The tactics used by the government fuel their zealous belief that they will die martyrs' deaths at the hands of enemies of God. The events at Ruby Ridge, in 1992, and then in 1993 at Waco, have been cited as the primary motivation for the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing that took place exactly two years later in 1995.

"If there would not have been a Waco, I would have put down roots somewhere and not been so unsettled with the fact that my government was a threat to me," McVeigh wrote in a series of letters before his execution in 2001. "Everything that Waco implies was on the forefront of my thoughts. That sort of guided my path for the next couple of years." – quote taken from article by Lylah M. Alphonse

Timothy McVeigh was executed for his role in the bombing, and Terry Nichols is serving 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Michael Fortier cooperated with authorities in the cases against McVeigh and Nichols, winning a lighter sentence of only 12 years in prison and $75,000 fines for failing to warn authorities of the impending attack, and won immunity for his wife. The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killed 168 people, including 19 infants and toddlers, and injured 680 others.

And though the Boston Marathon bombing occurred on April 15, 2013, a glance at the history of the marathon shows that it is always held on Patriot's Day, which is a floating holiday on today's calendar, but commemorates a fixed date: the day the first shot was fired in the American Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775.

Why so many tragedies and acts of destruction on April 19th? Are terrorists, domestic and foreign, seeking to use significant dates to carry out their attacks? Is the government using our fear of this to engineer incidents to garner support for agendas we aren't aware of? There could be many reasons, or no reason; in a very real sense, it doesn't matter.

Should we let this accumulation of data impact our plans? No! We have to let go of things we can't control and continue to live life to the fullest, or what is the point of living? But we can, and should be, alert, aware, and prepared to protect ourselves and our loved ones in case of any kind of emergency. We don't have to build a fallout shelter. We can learn CPR. We don't have to stockpile food, water, and medicines. But we can learn how to protect ourselves from food poisoning and water-borne illnesses in case of power failure. The best defense we can ever invest in is right between our ears. Pass it on.

Resources:

• Wikipedia
• Yahoo! Shine
• codeword.org
• Prophet's Birthday
• HistoryOrb.com
• History.com
• Boston.com
• BrainyHistory.com

Throughout its history, America's philosophy of God-given individual rights and institutions of ordered liberty have attracted immigrants from around the globe. However, from our nation's founding until 1965, American policymakers understood that immigration is a privilege, not an unalienable right - and that this nation, like every sovereign nation, may properly regulate immigration in its own interest.. -- An excerpt from the article Revolution in America by William Norman Grigg in the John Birch Society's The New American