The battle over gun control has exposed a truth the mainstream media is apparently too shy to mention: A bunch of far right white mostly southern paranoid extremists are preparing for armed revolution and apocalypse. They speak treason: literally.<\/p>\n
They are preparing to \u201cdefend\u201d America from<\/em> America with arsenals of weapons and stockpiles of ammunition. Their \u201cenemy\u201d is everyone in America not like them.<\/p>\n They think the world is ending and\/or that the government is out to get them. That doesn\u2019t mean it will happen. But expect violence and assassinations. Their ideology is made up of equal parts racism, evangelical Christian fascination with the \u201cend times,\u201d hatred of president Obama, resentment of the \u201cOld South\u201d variety and a Fox News\/Glenn Beck\/Rush Limbaugh version of world \u201chistory.\u201d As the New Yorker noted<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cEvery demographic and political trend that helped to re\u00eblect Barack Obama runs counter to the [South\u2019s] self-definition:\u2026The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone\u2026 Solidity has always been the South\u2019s strength, and its weakness. The same Southern lock that once held the Democratic Party now divides the Republican Party from the socially liberal, fiscally moderate tendencies of the rest of America\u2026 The South\u2019s vices\u2014\u2018violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas\u2019\u2014grow particularly acute during periods when it is marginalized and left behind. An estrangement between the South and the rest of the country would bring out the worst in both\u2014dangerous insularity in the first, smug self-deception in the second.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Republican\/white\/southern extremists make reasonable gun control impossible.<\/strong> <\/em>Their cataclysmic irrationality risks taking the debate into the twilight zone, and that \u201czone\u201d is a zone of violence: call it the civil war continued by other means. Some \u201cleaders\u201d in the pro-gun lobby have literally said they will kill to protect their right to arm themselves with arsenals that are fit for nothing but murder and war. These delusional paranoid white (mostly) southern Americans are a vocal minority, and they have extreme fears \u2014 gun confiscation, civil instability, a tyrannical government, a \u201ctakeover\u201d of the US by the UN and that Obama is a communist.<\/p>\n If you pay attention to the rhetoric, you hear code words calling out to the types of people who declared Jan. 19, and Martin Luther King\u2019s Birthday, as \u201cGun Appreciation Day. The event chairman, Larry Ward, said in the press release, \u201cThe Obama administration has shown that it is more than willing to trample the Constitution to impose its dictates upon the American people.\u201d Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News analyst, said in a video<\/a> posted on the network\u2019s GretaWire: \u201cHere\u2019s the dirty little secret about the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment was not written in order to protect your right to shoot deer, it was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government.\u201d<\/p>\n Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association, delivered a rebuttal to president Obama\u2019s inaugural address. He accused<\/a> the president of reducing the U.S. Constitution to \u201ca blank slate for anyone\u2019s graffiti.\u201d LaPierre said the president \u201cdoesn\u2019t understand you. He doesn\u2019t agree with the freedoms you cherish.\u201d<\/p>\n In a piece<\/a> in The Washington Times<\/em>, Napolitano said that the Second Amendment \u201cprotects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively.\u201d By definition these \u201ctyrants\u201d are those who \u201cdon\u2019t agree with the freedoms you cherish.\u201d In other words they are the government representing most Americans who are not insane gun collecting survivalists, southern white males afraid of the world, and assorted Fox News watchers.<\/p>\n As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes,<\/em> <\/strong>the number of so-called patriot groups surged after president Obama was first elected president. \u201cThe swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding,\u201d the report said. \u201cFrom 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274.\u201d<\/p>\n James Yeager, the C.E.O. of a Tennessee company that trains civilians in weapons and killing skills, posted a video online (removed but viewable at rawstory.com<\/a>) saying: \u201cI\u2019m telling you that if that [guns are controlled by Obama] happens, it\u2019s going to spark a civil war, and I\u2019ll be glad to fire the first shot. I\u2019m not putting up with it. You shouldn\u2019t put up with it. And I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you\u2019re going to do, load your damn mags, make sure your rifle\u2019s clean, pack a backpack with some food in it and get ready to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n According to MSNBC\u2019s Zachary Roth<\/a>, Larry Ward, \u201cThe lead organizer of Gun Appreciation Day \u2026 helps run a group that warns of \u2018armed government oppression\u2019 and a \u2018world government.\u2019 Another group involved in the event stokes fear that \u2018Barack Hussein Obama\u2019 will impose \u2018martial law.\u2019 A third promotes a fringe constitutional theory beloved by the Tea Party, and a post on its website describes public schools as \u2018progressive indoctrination camps.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In the immediate aftermath of the Newtown Massacre, Ward called for the arming of teachers. \u201cQuite frankly, I\u2019m tired of the argument only being one-sided when there\u2019s a tragedy,\u201d Ward told reporters. \u201cThere\u2019s only one answer: more gun control, more gun control. \u2026 This school was a gun-free zone, I believe. And the truth is, if there was one teacher or one principal armed that could have come in and ended the violence with one shot \u2014 with one shot could have saved dozens of children.\u201d<\/p>\n Alan Gottlieb founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said<\/a>, \u201cWe need to ban politicians who assault our rights, not firearms that are used thousands of times a day to protect lives and property from criminal attack.\u201d<\/p>\n The Social Security Institute<\/a>, describes itself<\/strong> <\/em>as a \u201cnonpartisan seniors advocacy organization.\u201d Its website offers warnings about \u201cworld government\u201d and the \u201cNew World Order.\u201d And SSI\u2019s president, Lawrence Hunter, wrote recently that \u201c[a] heavily armed citizenry is not about armed revolt; it is about defending oneself against armed government oppression.\u201d I.E., against our black president and the people \u2013 the American majority \u2013 who elected him.<\/p>\n Another listed sponsor of Gun Appreciation Day, RightMarch.com, urges supporters to \u201chelp STOP Barack Obama from grabbing unconstitutional powers to declare martial law through all of his new Presidential Executive Orders.\u201d The belief that the president and the federal government will confiscate guns as a precursor to a declaration of martial law is a feature of most gun groups and their far-right conspiracy theories. It\u2019s a line the NRA has pushed. And it edges close as an statement can to calling for the death of government officials.<\/p>\n All this has merged with the Paul Ryan Ayn Rand wing of the Republican Party. A post on the website of Conbustible.com<\/a>, also listed as a sponsor of the pro-gun event, describes public schools as \u201cprogressive indoctrination camps,\u201d and says that \u201cthe givers (sic) shove the producers out of the way as they waddle to the trough for some more free lunch.\u201d (Score one for Rand\/Ryan.) The implication is that the \u201ctakers\u201d need to be put in their place\u2013 by whatever means.<\/p>\n Another post on the site, affiliated with the Ron Paul movement, promotes the theory of nullification\u2014that the 10th Amendment of the Constitution lets states \u201cnullify\u201d federal laws they don\u2019t like. This is a favorite of Tea Party activists opposed to healthcare reform and has been embraced by neo-Confederate hate groups.<\/p>\n I said this in another article<\/a> and I\u2019ll repeat it again here:<\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n These people are literally ill with fear. And their world is turning lopsided. There is a black man in the White House and he\u2019s winning, and worst of all he\u2019s self-evidently smarter than they are. He\u2019s not even angry!<\/p>\n It is time for the mainstream media to stop playing the Republican extremists\u2019 game. Let\u2019s talk about racism and white Southern males who can\u2019t get with the program. Let\u2019s talk about what\u2019s really going on with \u201cgun rights,\u201d which has nothing to do with hunting or home protection or even the Second Amendment, but has everything to do with the delusional paranoia of people who really believe the world is out to get them because it\u2019s changing from white to brown, from homophobic to tolerant, from exclusionary to inclusionary, from anti-woman to pro-woman.<\/p>\n I hope I am wrong but I think that sooner than later an individual or individuals are going to take this paranoid delusional call to arms seriously and kill one or more of our elected leaders.<\/p>\n Frank Schaeffer<\/a>\u00a0is a writer and author of\u00a0<\/em>Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back .<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The battle over gun control has exposed a truth the mainstream media is apparently too shy to mention: A bunch of far right white mostly southern paranoid extremists are preparing for armed revolution and apocalypse. They speak treason: literally. They are preparing to \u201cdefend\u201d America from America with arsenals of weapons and stockpiles of ammunition. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[240,237,238,241,192,25,199,74,239,73,236],"class_list":["post-1154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-congress","tag-delusion-the-south","tag-evangeliclas","tag-gin-controle","tag-guns","tag-hate","tag-nra","tag-president-obama","tag-racism","tag-republican-party","tag-white-men"],"yoast_head":"\n