In my novel 2006: the Chautauqua Rising, which was published in the year 2000, New York State officials exploit a school shooting to strip state citizens of their constitutional rights.  This provokes a grass roots insurrection in Western New York that seemed, to some critics at least, far-fetched.  I excerpted a relevant section of the book in these pages after the Newtown shooting in December.

A recent forum held by state officials in Western New York explaining Gov. Cuomo's new gun legislation suggests that life sometimes does imitate art.  As one protester said in summary, "When angry people get together they form militias, folks.  This country, this western New York area, is primed for something like that." Here is how I described the fictional "rising" that occurred in Chautauqua (shuh-TAWK-wuh) County just miles from where this real life meeting was held:

The gun people came first.  By noon, thousands of them were on their way.  From all over the East, hell, from all over America, Canada too, they converged on Western New York in pick-ups and SUVs and RVs and who knows what else, many of them bearing the banner, Chautauqua or Bust. 

At least 100,000,000 people lived with a day's drive of Chautauqua and if just 1% of them hit the road, TJ began to imagine the chaos they could unleash.  These were ordinary Americans, many of whom had never walked a picket line or e-mailed their congressman.  But they had seen the Chautauqua presentation over the Net, and they had decided almost spontaneously that they had had enough. They were 2nd amendment people and constitutionalists and right-to-lifers and property rights people and anti-taxers and home schoolers and  populists and patriots and school choicers and welfare reformers and anti-globalists, all sick to death of what the libertarians were calling "tyranny creep," all honking and waving their banners. 

Word to Gov. Cuomo: Read my book!