BILL WHITE: GUN GROUPS SEE STEADY BLEED INTO MILITIAS; DOMESTIC UNREST STILL GROWING IN UNITED STATES
When agents of America’s US Marshals surrounded the Indiana Baptist Temple, accusing the church and its parishioners of violating US tax laws by refusing to pay social security taxes on non-clergical employees, they didn’t charge in with guns blazing, as they did at Waco. Concern about bad publicity was there, but there was a more serious concern just under the surface – the Southern Indiana Regional Militia, a 250-man “unorganized” citizen’s militia unit, had pledged to defend the church – and their threats were taken seriously.
"Steps have been taken and we are ready to respond if something does happen," Roger Stalcup, elected commander of the militia, told Indiana’s Hoosier Times, “It's my opinion that if you've got people in that church and the U.S. marshals go in, anything can happen”
His statements were taken seriously, and his unit, which marches under the slogan “God Bless The Republic -- Death to the New World Order”, was listed in a press release by the US Marshals as a major reason they chose to negotiate, rather than raid, the dissident religious group’s headquarters. The Southern Indiana Regional Militia had been trained in small-unit tactics by former US military personnel, several of whom hold officer ranks in the citizen’s group, and their ability to take on the US government in a fire fight could not only have been difficult for the federal police forces – it could have been disastrous.
The Southern Indiana Regional Militia is not an isolated phenomena – it is one of hundreds of similar units which have been growing in size and influence across the country since the announcement by George the First of his plans for a “New World Order” – a New World Order that many Americans believe is planning to destroy the US Constitution and enact dictatorial martial law in the name of the United Nations and the international corporate-socialism.
Origins In America’s Gun Activist Community
There are three issues that motivate America’s militia movement – support of gun rights, opposition to taxation, and opposition to the United Nations and the loss of America’s sovereignty to global corporate rule – a system the militias see as socialism and anti-globalists label capitalism, and which is really a blend of the worst elements of the two. Among these issues, the most important, the one that seems most immediately threatening, and which has been the prime motivation for the existence of the militia movement, has been the possibility of nation-wide confiscation of firearms by the US Federal government. In America, the people know that the foundation of their liberty is their ability to use firearms to resist government police and military personnel, and it is widely believed that an attempt to confiscate their arms will be the first step in imposing a dictatorship on US citizens. Daily this has seemed more real, and thus there has been a steady bleed of activists out of mainstream groups like the National Rifle Association, and into more confrontational activist groups, like Gun Owners of America and the Tyranny Response Team, and eventually into militias and other armed non-governmental formations.
The NRA recently reported in the last election, with voters faced with the threat of anti-gun Al Gore
winning the presidency, that its membership surged from under three million to over four million. Some say that number is slowly edging closer to five. In a nation of 280 million people, nearly 1.5% of the population – one person out of sixty six – is a member of the country’s largest gun lobby.
It is from these membership figures, and from the ability to mobilize large numbers of activists at the local level and bring them out to work polls and fill campaign offices for pro-gun politicians, that the NRA has always derived its power. While there is no doubt of the NRA’s monetary power, it’s opponents, often funded by billionaires like Andrew J. McKelvey, can usually match or exceed it in that arena. What the NRA has that anti-gun groups don’t is the ability to bring out tens of thousands of Americans each election cycle to hand out literature, plant road signs, fold mailings, and engage in the community activism needed to fight anti-gun legislation. But it is in this arena that upstart groups have offered the most competition.
Gun Owners of America, headed by Larry Pratt, is a radically pro-gun organization that, in contrast to the NRA, has called for the elimination of all regulations on firearms purchases and ownership, including mandatory background checks, and which has taken a hard line against the United Nations. Pratt is a radical Constitutionalist and Christian who openly mixes his religious beliefs with his politics, and has been accused of sharing the stage with even more extreme leaders – including members of the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan (though he has not been accused of sharing their views). In 1996, that accusation forced Pratt out as an aid to the Buchanan campaign. In 1998, according to anti-gun researcher Kenneth Stern, Pratt’s organization had 100,000 members. Now, similar anti-gun researchers estimate his group has grown to as many as 150,000 – 200,000 in size, and there is no question that the core of his strength is NRA grassroots activists who are leaving the NRA to be involved in more militant forms of activism.
Another group that has worked with Pratt’s, and which forms an even more confrontational front of its own, is the Tyranny Response Team, a network of pro-gun “minute men”, based on the minute men militias of the American Revolution, who go out to anti-gun events and to speeches by anti-gun politicians to confront and challenge the often skewed and distorted presentation of gun politics. The TRT, founded by Jewish gun store owner Bob Glass, has also gone beyond gun activism, holding regular 500-man protests against the Internal Revenue Service and the United Nations conference on small arms. While the TRT declined to give out membership information, it has branches in approximately 33 states, and most branches have 50 to 100 regular active members, meaning the group comprises at least 1500 regular activists nationwide – with an unknown number of less-active “supporting” members.
These groups, with their anti-globalist, anti-UN rhetoric and primitive class perspective – what Americans call “populism” – have begun to draw more radical elements of the NRA, such as Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, to adopt similar rhetoric. In a recent issue of America’s First Freedom – the NRA’s fast-growing political magazine – LaPierre denounced global corporations, the wealthy, and ruling-class billionaires as being behind the plot to take away America’s Second Amendment rights.
And while groups like Gun Owner’s of America and the Tyranny Response Team are not militias per se, and often engage in very mainstream pandering in some of their rhetoric – the headquarters branch of the TRT in particular is ultra-Zionist, with its members sometimes appearing in public with yellow Stars of David reading “gun owner” in an attempt to link the current conflict between gun owners and the US government with the conflict between Jews and the German Third Reich – they serve as a bridge for gun owners who don’t want to engage in the compromising, pro-Republican politics of the NRA, but who also reject the more extreme step of joining armed formations that openly challenge the power of the central government – groups like the Southern Indiana Regional Militia.
A Case Study In Radical Growth
Recently, in Montgomery County, Maryland, a relatively affluent suburb of Washington, DC, the local government attempted to ban gun shows – large, open exhibitions where guns and traded and sold on tables set up at the local fairgrounds. The result was a series of protests that destroyed the local NRA organization, led to the radicalization of its local head, and which left a definite imprint on local politics.
Augustus Alzona, an official in the Maryland Republican Party Central Committee, and the head of the County NRA’s lobbying division at the time (NRA-ILA), was incensed at the decision of local officials to ban trading in guns. When he heard that a hearing was planned, he began organizing members to show up and protest the government’s decision.
But Greg Costa, the NRA’s official lobbyist in the State of Maryland, was equally incensed at Alzona’s decision to hold protests. Costa views the NRA as a “moderate” and “non-confrontational” organization, and decided to make his legislative priority in the state not a pending local ban on gun shows, but stopping a noise ordinance that would have threatened a business investment he had made in a local shooting range. He ordered Alzona not to hold protests, and when Alzona refused, Costa fired him from his position in the NRA:
“I told him I didn’t want them to protest and he wouldn’t listen. I can’t have people doing what I tell them not to do,” Costa told a Pravda source.
The meeting collapsed in a raucous bout as pro-gun protestors threatened to shoot local Councilmembers if they passed the legislation. Local news media focused on the role of the Tyranny Response Team in the protests, though the truth was that most of the anger came from more radical elements not affiliated with the TRT group. For Alzona, it was a decisive moment. He took on a new role in the TRT Maryland group as its Volunteer Media Coordinator. Regarding the NRA, he told Pravda that Costa was a liar, and that his non-involvement in activism was a motivator for this defection:
read the rest here....
primitive class perspective?
When agents of America’s US Marshals surrounded the Indiana Baptist Temple, accusing the church and its parishioners of violating US tax laws by refusing to pay social security taxes on non-clergical employees, they didn’t charge in with guns blazing, as they did at Waco. Concern about bad publicity was there, but there was a more serious concern just under the surface – the Southern Indiana Regional Militia, a 250-man “unorganized” citizen’s militia unit, had pledged to defend the church – and their threats were taken seriously.
"Steps have been taken and we are ready to respond if something does happen," Roger Stalcup, elected commander of the militia, told Indiana’s Hoosier Times, “It's my opinion that if you've got people in that church and the U.S. marshals go in, anything can happen”
His statements were taken seriously, and his unit, which marches under the slogan “God Bless The Republic -- Death to the New World Order”, was listed in a press release by the US Marshals as a major reason they chose to negotiate, rather than raid, the dissident religious group’s headquarters. The Southern Indiana Regional Militia had been trained in small-unit tactics by former US military personnel, several of whom hold officer ranks in the citizen’s group, and their ability to take on the US government in a fire fight could not only have been difficult for the federal police forces – it could have been disastrous.
The Southern Indiana Regional Militia is not an isolated phenomena – it is one of hundreds of similar units which have been growing in size and influence across the country since the announcement by George the First of his plans for a “New World Order” – a New World Order that many Americans believe is planning to destroy the US Constitution and enact dictatorial martial law in the name of the United Nations and the international corporate-socialism.
Origins In America’s Gun Activist Community
There are three issues that motivate America’s militia movement – support of gun rights, opposition to taxation, and opposition to the United Nations and the loss of America’s sovereignty to global corporate rule – a system the militias see as socialism and anti-globalists label capitalism, and which is really a blend of the worst elements of the two. Among these issues, the most important, the one that seems most immediately threatening, and which has been the prime motivation for the existence of the militia movement, has been the possibility of nation-wide confiscation of firearms by the US Federal government. In America, the people know that the foundation of their liberty is their ability to use firearms to resist government police and military personnel, and it is widely believed that an attempt to confiscate their arms will be the first step in imposing a dictatorship on US citizens. Daily this has seemed more real, and thus there has been a steady bleed of activists out of mainstream groups like the National Rifle Association, and into more confrontational activist groups, like Gun Owners of America and the Tyranny Response Team, and eventually into militias and other armed non-governmental formations.
The NRA recently reported in the last election, with voters faced with the threat of anti-gun Al Gore
winning the presidency, that its membership surged from under three million to over four million. Some say that number is slowly edging closer to five. In a nation of 280 million people, nearly 1.5% of the population – one person out of sixty six – is a member of the country’s largest gun lobby.
It is from these membership figures, and from the ability to mobilize large numbers of activists at the local level and bring them out to work polls and fill campaign offices for pro-gun politicians, that the NRA has always derived its power. While there is no doubt of the NRA’s monetary power, it’s opponents, often funded by billionaires like Andrew J. McKelvey, can usually match or exceed it in that arena. What the NRA has that anti-gun groups don’t is the ability to bring out tens of thousands of Americans each election cycle to hand out literature, plant road signs, fold mailings, and engage in the community activism needed to fight anti-gun legislation. But it is in this arena that upstart groups have offered the most competition.
Gun Owners of America, headed by Larry Pratt, is a radically pro-gun organization that, in contrast to the NRA, has called for the elimination of all regulations on firearms purchases and ownership, including mandatory background checks, and which has taken a hard line against the United Nations. Pratt is a radical Constitutionalist and Christian who openly mixes his religious beliefs with his politics, and has been accused of sharing the stage with even more extreme leaders – including members of the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan (though he has not been accused of sharing their views). In 1996, that accusation forced Pratt out as an aid to the Buchanan campaign. In 1998, according to anti-gun researcher Kenneth Stern, Pratt’s organization had 100,000 members. Now, similar anti-gun researchers estimate his group has grown to as many as 150,000 – 200,000 in size, and there is no question that the core of his strength is NRA grassroots activists who are leaving the NRA to be involved in more militant forms of activism.
Another group that has worked with Pratt’s, and which forms an even more confrontational front of its own, is the Tyranny Response Team, a network of pro-gun “minute men”, based on the minute men militias of the American Revolution, who go out to anti-gun events and to speeches by anti-gun politicians to confront and challenge the often skewed and distorted presentation of gun politics. The TRT, founded by Jewish gun store owner Bob Glass, has also gone beyond gun activism, holding regular 500-man protests against the Internal Revenue Service and the United Nations conference on small arms. While the TRT declined to give out membership information, it has branches in approximately 33 states, and most branches have 50 to 100 regular active members, meaning the group comprises at least 1500 regular activists nationwide – with an unknown number of less-active “supporting” members.
These groups, with their anti-globalist, anti-UN rhetoric and primitive class perspective – what Americans call “populism” – have begun to draw more radical elements of the NRA, such as Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, to adopt similar rhetoric. In a recent issue of America’s First Freedom – the NRA’s fast-growing political magazine – LaPierre denounced global corporations, the wealthy, and ruling-class billionaires as being behind the plot to take away America’s Second Amendment rights.
And while groups like Gun Owner’s of America and the Tyranny Response Team are not militias per se, and often engage in very mainstream pandering in some of their rhetoric – the headquarters branch of the TRT in particular is ultra-Zionist, with its members sometimes appearing in public with yellow Stars of David reading “gun owner” in an attempt to link the current conflict between gun owners and the US government with the conflict between Jews and the German Third Reich – they serve as a bridge for gun owners who don’t want to engage in the compromising, pro-Republican politics of the NRA, but who also reject the more extreme step of joining armed formations that openly challenge the power of the central government – groups like the Southern Indiana Regional Militia.
A Case Study In Radical Growth
Recently, in Montgomery County, Maryland, a relatively affluent suburb of Washington, DC, the local government attempted to ban gun shows – large, open exhibitions where guns and traded and sold on tables set up at the local fairgrounds. The result was a series of protests that destroyed the local NRA organization, led to the radicalization of its local head, and which left a definite imprint on local politics.
Augustus Alzona, an official in the Maryland Republican Party Central Committee, and the head of the County NRA’s lobbying division at the time (NRA-ILA), was incensed at the decision of local officials to ban trading in guns. When he heard that a hearing was planned, he began organizing members to show up and protest the government’s decision.
But Greg Costa, the NRA’s official lobbyist in the State of Maryland, was equally incensed at Alzona’s decision to hold protests. Costa views the NRA as a “moderate” and “non-confrontational” organization, and decided to make his legislative priority in the state not a pending local ban on gun shows, but stopping a noise ordinance that would have threatened a business investment he had made in a local shooting range. He ordered Alzona not to hold protests, and when Alzona refused, Costa fired him from his position in the NRA:
“I told him I didn’t want them to protest and he wouldn’t listen. I can’t have people doing what I tell them not to do,” Costa told a Pravda source.
The meeting collapsed in a raucous bout as pro-gun protestors threatened to shoot local Councilmembers if they passed the legislation. Local news media focused on the role of the Tyranny Response Team in the protests, though the truth was that most of the anger came from more radical elements not affiliated with the TRT group. For Alzona, it was a decisive moment. He took on a new role in the TRT Maryland group as its Volunteer Media Coordinator. Regarding the NRA, he told Pravda that Costa was a liar, and that his non-involvement in activism was a motivator for this defection:
read the rest here....
primitive class perspective?