“Freedom has always come from a box,” declared the handsome farmer, clad in a plaid shirt and dungarees, brandishing a shotgun, and looking directly into a camera to make a home-made TV commercial, “If not the ballot box, and not the jury box, then at last resort, the cartridge box.” 

He then cocked the shotgun and fired, underscoring the point he made that firearms should be taken up to defend freedom, but only as a last resort.

That was Caldwell County fruit farmer Steve Symms, then 34 and a first-time candidate for office. In seeking the Republican nomination for Congress in Idaho’s open 1st Congressional District, Symms ran as a genuine outsider and full-fledged fighter for the free market.

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