The American Thinker posted a follow-up story today about the government’s 2011 raid on Gibson Guitar Company.

The article reminds us of the details of the raid:

In 2011, the Department of Justice conducted raids on the Tennessee facilities of the famed Gibson Guitar company and confiscated large quantities of tonewood that had been imported from India and Madagascar.  The action included armed SWAT teams, with automatic weapons, who apparently feared being garroted with a guitar string by an enraged Gibson employee.  These raids were conducted due to the Lacey Act, which bans the importing of certain woods.  The issue at hand was not that the wood was endangered or illegally harvested, but that it was not of the proper thickness that would have meant that some labor had been performed on it by workers in India and Madagascar.  This was the law in Madagascar and India as a nod to the unions in those countries.  Gibson, who hand-makes its guitars, cannot guarantee the craftsmanship of its products if a portion of the work is done outside their facilities.

There were a number of problems with the justification for this raid. India and Madagascar, the countries involved, were not interested in pursuing the matter. The guitar manufacturers CF Martin and Company and Fender.use the same kind of wood, and they were not raided.

The article reports:

The principle difference seems to be that those companies contributed to Democratic candidates, while Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson, gives openly to Republicans, and Gibson has plants in a right-to-work state.

This is pretty much old news, but there is a new twist to the story. Gibson had a special use for the wood the government returned to it.

The article concludes:

Gibson took that wood and made it into the Government Series II Les Paul.  These special edition guitars are hot stamped in gold with the Government Series graphic, which is an American bald eagle holding a Gibson guitar neck.  It is an admirable statement of defiance of an abusive government and a refusal of a historic American company to be intimidated.

Score one for the good guys!