Friday, April 27, 2007

On Enemies, Domestic. Militia terrorists and their admirers.

This story about a federal raid on an Alabama militia group was all the news this morning. Six males were arrested, one of whom had been a federal fugitive for over a decade. They allegedly had machine guns, suppressors, short-barreled shotguns, hand grenades, a home-made rocket launcher, and many other improvised explosive devices and booby-traps. Worse, they were selling some of these items, presumably to whoever they found with the desire and the cash. (Think about the worst or dumbest kids in your neighborhood running around with hand grenades and bombs.) And the suspects also had a number of marijuana plants, because we all know that there's nothing like getting stoned while playing with guns and bombs, right?

Predictably, I made my rounds of several of the gun-related forums and saw thread after thread started in support of these criminal pot-heads. It seems that you can never be too bad for a segment of the internet posters as long as you: 1. have guns, and: 2. profess a hatred for our government and the laws of our nation. If Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer had owned an AK-47, worn camouflage and made a few anti-government comments, they'd have been the darlings of the internet commandos at AR-15.com and FALfiles. Sheesh.

So what's up with the internet revolutionaries who sit around all day masturbating over fantasies involving not hot women but they themselves shooting and blowing up police officers and elected representatives of the American people? Most claim to worship out Constitution and the Founding Fathers who wrote it, but none seem to understand that Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and others who worked on the Constitution were setting up a government that was intended to apply to everyone in this country. The self-described "Constitutionalists" (their word, not mine)will tell you that Thomas Jefferson was some bloodthirsty radical who wanted an overthrow of every government every twenty years or so, and they'll back that up with a ton of single-sentence quotes attributed to Jefferson and other Founding Fathers. Unfortunately for their claims, most of those quote are taken out of context from the voluminous works of those great peace-loving gentleman, or else they are completely made up. Our nation's founders set up to create a government, not advocate anarchy 200 years later, and the Constitution sets up that government and establishes many checks and balances that include allowing the citizens to elect their representatives and vote directly on many laws. It also sets up a court system through which anyone can sue to block or overturn legislation, and it grants everyone the virtually unfettered right to speak out publicly about perceived injustices.

Of course the militia set only recognizes the Second Amendment, which they loosely and incorrectly interpret to mean that there can be no laws whatsoever that restrict who can have what kind of guns or where they can take them. They would have us all believe that while every other Right enumerated in the Constitution is subject to reasonable regulation pursuant to legitimate government interests, the Second somehow is holy and guns cannot be subject to legislation as can free speech, property rights, etc. And of course they've also decided that they--each individual hero-in-a-box militia man--gets to decide which laws are "unconstitutional" without bothering to take it to court. No surprise but they always seem to determine that the laws that they already desire to break are the "unconstitutional" ones. It follows then in their warped minds that anyone who would object or stop them--a police officer, a judge or a lawmaker doing their jobs--must be the real enemy.
Sadly they can't see how silly their position really is or how goofy they look when they espouse it. Seriously, almost all of them are heavily armed and thanks to the internet, they can geek each other up with tales of government "tyranny" and their plans to do battle with the "forces of evil" (police officers, judges and lawmakers again) when "the time" comes. When's that time? Well none of them seem to know. But they all agree that when it comes, they'll be ready to start shooting.

Now in the case of the Alabama goobers, I couldn't help but notice that every one of these guys was within the age limits required for enlistment in the armed forces--the real military. Yet as far as I can tell, none of them was in the service or ever had been. You'd think that with two wars currently under way, any red-blooded American boy who wanted to be a soldier would have no trouble being able to do it for real. But these guys don't strike me as red-blooded Americans any more than the internet Rambos do. The adjectives "posers", "pretenders", "wanna-be's" and "losers" come more quickly to mind. Oh--and "cowards". They want to live in a world where they're armed warriors, but they really don't want to deal with other armed warriors on the other side. They prefer to terrorize neighboring farmers and teenagers. And of course like every other militia wing-nut, they talk smack about how they'll fight off the cops "when the time comes", however as always happens when the time really does come, they fold up like a bunch of lawn chairs and surrender without firing even a token shot.

Of course they probably worship Randy Weaver. That whole cammie-crowd does. Weaver, if you recall, was the no-job-having white supremacist who was arguably set up by federal agents on an illegal gun charge but instead of going to court and defending himself like a man, he ran away to a mountain cabin, where he taunted the feds via short-wave radio for about a year, daring them to come get him, until finally they did. Weaver's son murdered a courageous Deputy United States Marshal by the name of William Francis Degan by shooting him from ambush, and was himself justifiably shot down. Weaver's wife was erroneously shot by a federal sharpshooter a few days later, but she was a grown woman who was aiding and abetting her husband and she'd also had every opportunity to surrender but refused to do so. After she got show, Randy, not really the bravest guy when the heat was on, realized that he would probably be next and meekly surrendered. He sued the government for millions of dollars when he got out of prison, but he lost when the jury said that he had no one to blame but himself. He now ekes out a pathetic living going from gun show to gun show, hawking his book and charging people to have their picture taken with him.

I've seen the guy--he's scrawny, his hygiene sucks, and he rarely makes eye contact with anyone. And I was amazed this this is the guy that the Walter Mitty wanna-be-Rambo crowd views as their Messiah. If anything, it only underscores how pathetic THEY are.

Frankly I'm tired of logging onto some gun-related website and having to wade through post after post by some non-hacking, french-fry-burning, fat-bodied headcase who insists on using the site as a forum to spout off about the Federal Reserve System, the black people and their abuse of welfare, what a great President Ron Paul will be, and how the police are bad, the legislators corrupt, and everyone's conspiring to take their guns then establish Martial Law and start putting "patriots" (their label for themselves) in prison. I resent having some minimum-wage flunky who probably lives in a trailer or with his parents trying to tell me--a law-school graduate and once-practicing attorney--what the Constitution says and means and running down the country that I love because it does not mirror their ideal of what a "free" country should be like. ("Free country"=place where any militia member can wear camouflage when they go to the mall, own and shoot machine guns and blow things up in their back yards all day. That's really all they care about.) And I'm tired of these fools making law-abiding, responsible gun owners look like terrorists just because they insist on following us, posting on our websites, and standing around gun shows in XXXL cammies trying to get mistaken for an actual veteran and bragging about how high-speed they are. Most don't vote, or if they do, they vote for some third-party whack job. They hate everyone who doesn't share their world-view and they despise lawful authority. Folks, these people are not with us reputable gun owners and more than Doctors Kervorkian and Mengele are representative of the medical community or Geoffrey Fieger serves as an example of what all lawyers are like. These militia guys aren't the good guys and I wouldn't want them behind me when times get bad. (These are the ones who seriously plan for a disaster by stockpiling 30,000 rds of ammunition but no food or other supplies. Comforting thought, eh?)

I once took an oath to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Many of us in America have. Well when I see these militia types, either being paraded off to jail on the news or posting crap on internet websites, I'm pretty sure that I'm looking at some of those very "enemies, domestic" that I and other great Americans swore to protect this great country against.

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