Nullification in Missouri

Meanwhile, in my old home state:

Unless a handful of wavering Democrats change their minds, the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the state and making it a crime for federal agents to enforce them here. A Missourian arrested under federal firearm statutes would even be able to sue the arresting officer.

This is called "nullification." We had a war about this once. The nullifiers lost. To their modern imitators I say, with Andrew Jackson, that theirs is a "strange position" and an "impractical absurdity":

I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.

On another occasion, asked by a visitor from South Carolina if he had any words for the people of his (nullification-mad) state:

Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.

Or we might toss in William Tecumseh Sherman's supposed reply to a journalist who asked how he could justify the destruction his men were visiting on the South:

They asked for it.