A new push for gun control in Springfield, Illinois’ capitol, had David Campbell feeling angry and powerless.

“It’s time to take stand,” he told himself.

Campbell, a small print shop owner who is a member of the Effingham County Board in rural southern Illinois, was upset that Chicago-area lawmakers 200 miles away were seeking statewide curbs on gun buying. He felt the proposed measures, including raising the age and lengthening the waiting periods for purchasing certain semi-automatic weapons, disregarded the proud tradition of firearm use outside the city and its suburbs.

So he did the only thing he could: He wrote a resolution.

Cribbing from a similar measure another rural county had recently passed, Campbell’s motion called the Illinois General Assembly’s pending gun-control proposals unconstitutional and demanded that state lawmakers abandon them. Campbell ran the draft by the local prosecutor, Bryan Kibler, who wryly suggested adding language that labeled their county a gun “sanctuary” where county employees would be prohibited from enforcing unconstitutional gun laws. The word was a nod to language used by left-leaning cities like Chicago that refused to comply with the federal government’s request for help detaining undocumented immigrants.

This was a way to thumb their noses at all of that.

“Heck, yeah,” Campbell told Kibler.

On April 16, the Effingham board adopted the resolution. Local news media picked it up, then conservative news sites and gun blogs. Campbell and Kibler appeared on “Fox and Friends.” Before long, counties across southern Illinois began passing their own versions of the resolution — 16 at last count.

A full-blown backlash was underway, mirroring others that have sprouted in parts of America where rural citizens feel pushed around by metropolitan gun control advocates. That includes Oregon, where Portland-based petitioners are pursuing a November ballot initiative, proposed after the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that would ban certain semi-automatic firearms. In response, gun rights activists in 10 Oregon counties are seeking to put measures on November ballots saying they can ignore gun laws sheriffs deem unconstitutional — provisions that already exist in four counties.

“Rural areas are losing political power because of population decline, and urban and suburban communities want to come up with solutions to gun violence that infringe on the ways of life of rural areas, and that ticks us off,” Kibler said.

But it’s not yet clear whether these measures are purely symbolic or could truly undermine new gun control efforts across the country. Even proponents acknowledge that their legality is untested. And while they are touted as providing sanctuary for gun owners, they don’t go as far as the better-known, and more effective, immigration sanctuary laws that cities and states have used to resist the federal government’s efforts to track down people who are in the country illegally.

‘We feel our life is ruled by the bigger cities'

Advocates for the gun sanctuary measures describe their work as part of a budding movement. Oregon and Illinois organizers say they’ve been contacted by people in California, Colorado, Utah and Washington state who want to adopt their tactics.

“We are all feeding off each other,” said Rob Taylor, one of the leaders of the Oregon campaign. “We feel our life is ruled by the bigger cities. Their vote always overrides the rest of us.”