Reefer Madness
The determination of NRA leaders to generate paranoia and hatred toward the government has gotten them into trouble before. In a now-infamous fundraising letter sent on April 13, 1995, LaPierre warned his members about the"jack-booted government thugs" of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who have the"power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us...." Six days later, as NRA members found this noxious letter in their mail, Timothy McVeigh, convinced that the time to resist federal tyranny had arrived, bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City that housed the local offices of the ATF.
Suddenly, in the mid-1990s, crazy extremists started worrying that the BATF was maybe kind of overly militarized and bizarrely aggressive. There was no reason for it -- this strange theme just emerged from their crazy mouths, born from the mists of complete fantasy. Then, six days later, Tim McVeigh blew up a building. A complete explanation of cause and effect, neat and entire. Don't send letters that criticize the government, kids -- people will die.
It's everyone-to-the-right-of-Josh-Marshall-is-an-incipient-terrorist theme week in the sillier precincts of the news media this week, and the quivering is unmistakably built on a falsified past.
In a Time magazine cover story that would have made Henry Luce swoon with pride, Mighty Wurlitzer-wielder Barton Gellman uses up much of the world's supply of adjectives. Gellman's rant is, words fail me, hilarious. Watch the master at work:
A small but growing number of these extremist groups, according to the FBI, ATF and state investigators, are subjects of active criminal investigations. They include militias and other promoters of armed confrontation with government, among them" common-law jurors," who try to make their own arrests and convene their own trials, and"sovereign citizens," who respond with lethal force to routine encounters with the law. In April, for example, Navy veteran Walter Fitzpatrick, acting on behalf of a group called American Grand Jury, barged into a Tennessee courthouse and tried to arrest the real grand-jury foreman on the grounds that he refused to indict Obama for treason.
Members of these groups"respond with lethal force to routine encounters with the law," regularly gunning down cops on the street! For example, uh, some guy yelled at a grand jury. 1.) Lethal force, 2.) Routine encounters, 3.) For example (thing that isn't lethal force in routine encounters.) Yes, I see that he also talked about people who"try to make their own arrests." But it's awfully clever to drop in that"who respond with lethal force to routine encounters with the law" along the way, and to follow it with"for example" when you don't have any.
They harvest fruit, bake pies, and engage in mass murder. For example, cherries.
Gellman opens his they-walk-among-us diatribe with an overawed description of a training exercise for members of the Ohio Defense Force, a militia group that Gellman says may be preparing itself for a confrontation with Islamists or the federal government. And then, this:"As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side." So he's led with an example that isn't an example. 1.) Here's my description of a thing that happened! 2.) But this isn't the thing I want to tell you about, 'cause it's way milder than my actual topic, which I don't have any examples of, but it exists, despite the fact that I've just described something else entirely.
Amazingly, people pay to subscribe to this magazine.
Anyway,"extreme militias" are so out there that they believe"only a well-armed populace can enforce its rights. Any form of gun regulation, therefore, is a sure sign of intent to crush other freedoms." Then he places that belief in its historical context:"In a reversal of casting, the armed antigovernment movement describes itself as heir to the founders."
A coalition of armed militias that express a desire to resist government power claims, in a"reversal," that it's the heir to the revolutionaries who waged war against British sovereignty for eight years. An"armed antigovernment movement" strangely describes itself as heir to an armed antigovernment movement. I only wish Barton Gellman had been alive and writing in 1774.
At the Harper's magazine website, Scott Horton finds Gellman's discussion of Holocaust Museum murderer James von Brunn"mesmerizing." Because Gellman, you see, says that von Brunn didn't just kill a security guard at a museum:"What authorities did not disclose was how close the country had come to a seismic political event. Von Brunn, authoritative sources say, had another target in mind: White House senior adviser David Axelrod, a man at the center of Obama’s circle."
My god -- it's mesmerizingly seismic: a batshit crazy near-nonagenarian thought about his fantasy about having a desire to shoot a hired political adviser! It's an event that almost could have shaken America to its very core. Traffic lights almost stopped working! Fires could have burned unchecked as firefighters sat helplessly in their firehouses."Axelrod was almost taken from us," they could possibly have wailed in hypothetical horror over possible events that may have occurred if things had happened differently."What care have we for a fire alarm?"
"How close the country had come to a seismic political event." Some people don't have the sense to feel embarrassed by themselves.