Yesterday evening, the late night open thread focused on a particularly disturbing recent tweet by the NRA. The tweet contained a link to an article by one Bob Owens, warning that Democrats are going to come for everyone's guns and that the American people should be willing to slaughter them and anyone in the federal government who tries to help them. The article featured a photograph of a scaffold with a noose hanging from it with the caption "This is where the survivors of the Democrat rebellion will meet their end." (Note: the link in the proceeding sentence is to a Media Matters blog about the article featuring its text. I refuse to link to the article proper.)
The late night comments rightly castigated the article for its stupidity and hateful nature, with some even drawing comparisons with The Turner Diaries, the white supremacist novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh. However, something potentially darker is at work here, a spirit of treason that poses a threat to our very democracy. With this tweet, we see a major American political organization for all intensive purposes endorsing violence against the federal government and people with different political views.
My Gut Reaction: Can anyone imagine how Republicans would react if a major liberal group such as Public Citizen tweeted a link to an article calling for violence against conservatives?
Analysis below the fold...
This article and its promotion by the NRA arguably represent something far more dangerous than some piece of white supremacist propaganda. Even in a worst case scenario like that of The Turner Diaries, one radical is inspired to a horrific act of violence, resulting in a clampdown from federal authorities.
With the NRA endorsing such views, on the other hand, you now have a major political organization with millions of dollars in resources at its disposal promoting insurrection against the federal government. If you read the text of Owens's article, he clearly advocates taking up arms against federal employees in a civil war with different branches of the government fighting each other:
Soldiers, Marines and sheriffs may even defect to actively resist any federal officers from a pool of just over 100,000 who would take on the suicidal task of taking on the military, local police, and a hundred righteously-angry million gun owners, led by over a thousand angry Green Berets that warned President Obama in 2013 not push his luck.
The NRA and its apologists will try and claim that they are only advocating this action if the American government breaks the Constitution. However, their interpretation of the Constitution is so out to lunch that they are likely to see any given federal employee doing his job as a potential target, no matter how legally justified his actions are. Articles like this can get people killed.
This incitement to violence leaves no real room for compromise. I don't want to take everyone's guns away, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit back and let people advocate violence against the government without challenge. The NRA needs to be put on the FBI's official list of extremist groups and subjected to the accompanying legal scrutiny. They pose a potential threat to the United States, its people, and its government.
News stories in the past have suggested that the NRA's overall membership does not share the extreme views of its organization's leadership. Nevertheless, those members, if they do not reject this promotion of extremism and violence, they are as culpable for the results as the NRA leadership.