John Cinque, one of 20 armed school security officers, said violence was a response to "further encroachment of our natural rights."

Manatee County School guardian John Cinque remains on restricted duty while school officials investigate his social media posts that show possible affiliations with anti-government groups.

But what Cinque said during public town halls and wrote to a newspaper before moving to Florida offer deeper insight into the man who would guard schoolchildren.

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Cinque has been reassigned to a security position where he is not working in schools or with children, district spokeswoman Linda Lambert said in a statement Thursday. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing nature of the investigation.

Cinque did not respond to calls from the Herald-Tribune seeking comment for this story.

Before he moved to Manatee County, Cinque lived in Branford, Connecticut, where he was a vocal critic of the federal government and of a state gun control bill inspired by the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

“With the stroke of a pen, from the ivory tower with the gold top, you’ve decided to create me to be a felon,” Cinque said during a 2013 town hall. “Since we’re going down the course of China, why don’t we pass a law from the ivory tower up there where you can only have one child. Do I have to choose which of my two (children) I have to kill, since I can only have one child now?”

Cinque said, repeatedly, that he would refuse to comply with the gun control law, regardless of the legal consequences for him.

A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Cinque told the Connecticut crowd he had taken an oath “to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Such rhetoric echoes that of the Oath Keepers, an organization that describes itself as comprising “current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders” who swear to defend the Constitution and refuse to follow orders that violate it.

Cinque reportedly claimed on his Facebook page to be a member of the Oath Keepers.

The Anti-Defamation League labels them as “one of the largest anti-government extremist groups” in the United States.

The ADL says the organization’s focus on refusing unconstitutional orders comes from a belief that martial law or a New World Order headed by the United Nations will soon be established and that military members may be called upon to confiscate Americans’ guns or send them to detention centers.

The video of Cinque at the town hall made him a minor celebrity, leading Connecticut gubernatorial candidate Joe Visconti to shoot a series of videos with him in 2014.

In one video, Visconti says that “we don’t have a lot of time left" to stop the encroachment of the federal government. Cinque responds, “No, I don’t think we do — and I’m hoping. This may be the last election. This may be the last ability, if people do not take a stand.”

In March 2014, Cinque wrote an opinion piece in the Hartford Courant decrying the aforementioned gun control bill. In it, he echoes the justifications for civil disobedience that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others like him made, writing that “those who stand in defiance of unconstitutional laws do so out of duty, honor, oath and love of country.”

But his version has a violent twist.

“Those in government who choose to rule by fiat instead of by representing us have a choice to make: This choice is reason or force,” Cinque wrote in his opinion column. “The line is drawn and the people will no longer allow further encroachment of our natural rights. An armed society is a polite society.”

Guardians required

Twenty-two school districts across Florida, including Manatee’s, created guardian programs after the state Legislature mandated that a “safe-school officer” must be present in every school.

The statute establishing these programs requires sheriffs to maintain “training, certification, inspection and qualification records of each school guardian appointed by the sheriff.” The Manatee County Sheriff's Office did not immediately comply with a request made by the Herald-Tribune for copies of these documents Thursday afternoon.

Kinnan Elementary principal Paul Hockenbury said that his school had played no role in Cinque's hiring.

Hockenbury said he knew nothing about the investigation into Cinque beyond what he'd "read in the newspaper."