I was reading diaries a few nights ago, and I came upon a reference to something called "Operation Vampire Killer 2000". Being the curious soul that I am, I consulted the oracle of Google for enlightenment.
Oh my, I was enlightened.
magical folding fold activate
As I said, I am a curious soul. I began poking around the first link Almighty Google gave me. It linked to a pretty typical right wing web site, complete with Legal Chauvinism^4 (thats Chauvinism to the fourth power, for those mathematically challenged), pro-gun propaganda, and general New World Order/Socialist/Fascist/Jewish/Cheesian nuttery.
I've been to much larger, more aggressive web sites, so it all really was underwhelming, if not totally uninteresting (did you know that you are required to be in a militia? I never knew that...where do I get my noose and white pajamas?). Again, fairly ho-hum in the spectrum of right wingertude.
And then an article caught my eye. An ordinary hyperlink like all the other articles on his web site, but this one had a name. This name should be familiar with those who follow the Militia movement. The guy who really started the wave of right wing terrorism in the 90s that we have not even seen the crest of. The name may not be totally familiar to most of us, but the place surely will be. That quaint little cottage in the middle of beautiful Northern Idaho. Ruby Ridge.
For those of you not intimately familiar with the Ruby Ridge incident, a cliffnotes version is in order. In the late 1980s, Randy Weaver and his Wife, Viki (along with their 4 children), moved to the small cottage in the middle of the forest to home school their kids and escape from a "corrupted world". Evidently, complete isolation was too much for the Weavers, as they joined the Aryan Nations white supremacist/Nazi group. As the Federal Government likes to keep tabs on groups promoting violent racial revolution with the goal of ethnically cleansing every single minority ethnic group in the United States, Aryan Nations had been infiltrated by the BATFE sometime before the Weavers joined. It was here BATFE learned that Randy Weaver had a substantial arsenal of deadly firearms in his home.
In this arsenal were two or more shortened shotguns, illegal since the 1934 National Firearms Act. Since BATFE evidently had bigger fish to fry then a redneck yokel with two sawn off shotguns, they offered Weaver a chance to be an informant on Aryan Nations activities. He refused. He was then arrested and arraigned on the weapons charges in Federal Court. Released on Bond, he returned to his cabin, vowing to never interact with de big bad gubmint ever again.
The next interaction came with bullets. Weaver's 14 year old son shot and killed a US Marshal while the kid was patrolling Weaver's property line. Other agents returned fire. So began a standoff that would claim all of Weaver's children and his wife. Weaver did surrender, and was somehow acquitted of almost all charges.
Anyway, back to the present. The article I proceeded to read presented Weaver not as the law violating rascist child abusing nut he was, but as a simple misunderstood guywhoyouwouldhaveabeerwith who just wanted to be left alone. This is hardly out of the ordinary with right wingers. Weaver and David Koresh (of Waco fame) are easily the two most deified figures in the right wing constitutionalist movement. They are seen as two men of character, willing to stand up to the evil Government, damn the consequences. But the publisher of the article stunned me.
The publisher of the article heroising Weaver is The Rifleman, one (and the most important) of 3 periodicals published by the National Rifle Association.
So, Kossacks, we have an organization that is a thinly veiled front for right wing constitutionalist groups, promoting a white supremacist secessionist. Now, I follow the NRA, and it's pretty rare for them to publish something so bluntly anti-government. I can't peg exactly when the article in question was published, but since the mailing address is to their previous headquarters, (and their present headquarters was built in the mid 1990s) we can deduce that this article was published sometime quite soon after the incident at Ruby Ridge.
What, besides the obvious, does this have to do with right wing terrorism? Well, everything. The incident at Ruby Ridge was cited by Timmy McVeigh as a cause of him deciding to bomb the Federal Building in OKC. However, this was use by congressional lawmakers as a reason to pass the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. Which was, in retrospect, a terrible decision for the time.
With Ruby Ridge and Waco in recent memory, the NRA was presented with a chance of a lifetime. The 1994 AWB was the first time in years that the Federal Government would be legislating on a class of firearms. The NRA, ever the politically astute organization, shifted the goalposts, so to speak. Instead of buying the common sense notion of the Federal Government acting to make further mass shootings and violence harder, the NRA phrased it to those on the fence. They could point to Ruby Ridge and Waco as examples of tyranny of the Federal Government, and then point to the AWB as the Government trying to disarm those that resist. And, facts be damned, people bought it.
People joined the NRA in droves. Gun owners, for the first time in ages, mobilized as a voting bloc and significantly contributed to the so called Republican Revolution of 1994. And history tells us the rest.
The main unanswered question is why the NRA would politicize itself to the degree that it did in the early 90s. Reagan was the first presidential candidate the NRA ever endorsed. If not apolitical, the NRA had been tepid in it's political dealings largely up until that point. The NRA had a good thing going for it as a pro-conservation, pro-hunting, and pro-education organization. How did it evolve from that to an extremely partisan(and powerful) political group?
The answer is Money. The NRA is funded largely by big gun manufacturers, contrary to it's grass roots image it likes to project. And Big Gun needs its profits. And what better way to get profits then present a group that "wants to ban guns"?
We can see the fruits of Big Gun and NRA plotting right now. We have a semiliberal, nonwhite president. He has voted for gun control in the past and has not take it completely off the table for his presidency. And now we have huge paranoia in the right wing gun nut arena, leading to large firearms and ammunition purchases (and huge profits for the gun companies and NRA) due to fear of gun control. And this fear of gun control leads to shootings by crazy gun nuts, killing people that want to take their guns (supposedly). And in turn this leads to a reaction by the broad right win to buy more guns as a response to phantom calls for more gun control.
It's the perfect scheme. An organization trusted by the right wing tells the right wing that they need more guns. They buy the guns from the gun manufacturers, which then fund the organization to tell more right wingers to buy more guns. Which leads to more shootings, which leads to more guns, which leads to more shootings.
I have to hand it to the gun companies and the NRA. When they conspire, they do it pretty well.
Oh, linkto story if anyone wants to see it.