America's Gun Crackpots: Our Homegrown Al Qaeda?

Mike & Friends Blog

Joe Lapointe

Joe Lapointe has worked as a sports reporter with the New York Times and a segment producer for "Countdown With Keith Olbermann'' on Current TV

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January 18th, 2013 11:13 AM

America's Gun Crackpots: Our Homegrown Al Qaeda?

By Joe Lapointe

We keep hearing that Wayne LaPierre, the fire-breathing mouthpiece for the National Rifle Association, is far more radical than most members of the N.R.A. and that most of them would support common-sense gun safety measures if they could.

Really? How many have stepped up to challenge LaPierre? What are they afraid of? When will they speak up? Will they be on Fox News?

One of them could say that it is vile for LaPierre’s N.R.A. to smear the President’s daughters in an ad filled with gun propaganda and constitutional paranoia and that there is no equivalence between this cheap shot and the President appearing live on stage with sincere school kids who wrote to him about a school-room gun massacre last month and asked him to try to stop the next one and the one after that, too.

We know that common-sense gun safety legislation will need more than the support of President Obama and many Democrats. Why aren’t clergy, police and average parents in the streets demonstrating against the mass-murder industry represented by the N.R.A.?

And where are the common-sense Republicans who have faded from the scene – intimidated -- since virulent Reaganism contaminated the American political landscape more than 30 years ago? And don’t tell us Reagan favored the Brady Bill. That was long after he left office, when he risked no political capital.

Delusion is easy. We can tell ourselves that most gun owners don’t become mass murderers, but the fact is that some right-wing gun owners own many guns and much ammo and that some of them would be willing to use them against the police and the armed forces of our country.

What kind of “patriot” claims that sort of right? Do they live among the crackpots who think secession is the next logical step if you don’t agree with the President?

Or next to that guy on the corner with the big “Don’t Tread on Me” snake flag blowing in front of his house in the winter breeze?

Would they really start political mass murders if gun-safety laws are improved by elected legislators?

Perhaps they would. As we learned on 9-11, it doesn’t take many terrorists, thinking and acting alike, to kill thousands of people and cause hellish over-reactions, especially when the national leaders are as dim-witted and impulsively reckless as George W. Bush.

If you get the chance, look up “The Turner Diaries” on the internet. It’s a right-wing cult book about what happens when “the government” starts taking away weapons from “citizens” after the “Cohen Act.”

“The Turner Diaries” is sort of the Book of Revelation for angry, crazy racists who define their “patriotism” to following the views of a narrow slice of militant fanatics who agree with them.

They’re sort of like an American al-Queda. A lot of them are looking forward to a race war and common-sense gun laws might be their easy excuse to start one.