American gun culture breeds domestic terrorism
- By Mitchell Blatt
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E-mail China.org.cn, June 20, 2014
A group of gun-toting militia members gathered at a farm to fight the government in the western American state of Nevada this spring. The assembled cheered when they were asked by a farmer," Are you guys domestic terrorists?"
"That's what I thought," said the farmer, Cliven Bundy, who was trying to maintain control of government land he was illegally occupying. Bundy had been farming on that land since 1954, but he stopped paying land-use fees in 1993, in a sort of protest against federal government ownership of land. American conservatives dislike the federal government, so they rallied behind him. He even won the support of Republican Senator Rand Paul. But when the government finally sent federal agents in April to evict Bundy, 20 years after he lost his rights to the land, Bundy responded by threatening them, convening a personal army against the government. As the leader of the U.S. Senate Harry Reid said, using violence to achieve political goals makes Bundy a terrorist.
On June 8, Jerad Miller, one of the attendees at Bundy's rally, and his girlfriend murdered two police officers and a civilian in Las Vegas and left a note that read, "This is the beginning of the revolution." Domestic terrorists indeed.
This kind of anti-government terrorism in America isn't just the product of twisted, hateful minds. It's also encouraged by the prominent position of guns and violent, revolutionary rhetoric in American culture.
The United States is one of the few countries in the world that has a right to bear arms written into its Constitution. America was founded by a revolution against the British. Many of America's founding fathers spoke favorably about revolution, including Thomas Jefferson, America's third president. Jefferson wrote to a colleague in 1787, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Today, Jefferson's words are repeated at protests and in speeches and texts by anti-government activists. The anti-government movement that arouse in 2009 to oppose President Barack Obama has modeled itself after the American revolutionaries, naming themselves the Tea Party, after the Boston Tea Party, a protest event in 1773. Tea Party protesters often carry signs paraphrasing Jefferson -- "It is time to water the tree of liberty!"
The imagery, while meant to inspire patriotism, is also a not-so-veiled nod to the need for a revolution. In American politics, "revolutions" are supposed to occur at the ballot box. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 is routinely referred to as "The Reagan Revolution," and Obama campaign volunteer Alan Kennedy-Shaffer titled his book about Obama's election, "The Obama Revolution."
Yet, the language of revolution can easily go over-the-top and inspire real violence. In 2010, the Republican senate candidate for Nevada, Sharron Angle, asked, "If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?"
An armed insurrection, said Angle: "Our founding fathers, they put that Second Amendment [protecting gun rights] there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government… If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."
Angle lost, but she gave voice to a popular right-wing argument -- that the right to bear arms exists to allow for Americans to revolt against the government.
Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the leading pro-gun advocacy group in the United States, said at a 2013 Congressional hearing that the Second Amendment was written to "make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny."
In Bunkervile, Nevada, this April, Cliven Bundy saw "tyranny" in the federal government asserting control over its own land.
That the standoff ended with no casualties is only a result of Bundy's army having intimidated the government out of going through with the raid -- the goal of terrorism. As far back as 1996, another federal raid on Bundy was canceled after threats.
Had they attempted the raid and faced resistance, the deaths on Bundy's side would have caused a political firestorm, similar to that of the Waco siege in 1993. The 51-day siege on a cult suspected of stockpiling illegal weapons ended with 87 people dead after the FBI pumped tear gas into their residence.
Timothy McVeigh, an activist who went to Waco, detonated a truck bomb outside an Oklahoma City government building two years later, killing 168 people.
Bundy's radicals saw themselves as the oppressed cult at Waco, and Jerad Miller was the Timothy McVeigh of the Bundy ranch. Richard Mack, a former sheriff and an inductee into the NRA Hall of Fame, said, "We were actually strategizing to put all the women up front. … …[I]t's going to be women that are going to be televised being shot by those rogue federal officers."
Before Miller went on his rampage, he shared an image on Facebook that said, "The police have never attacked a pro-gun rally. … Attacking armed people has consequences."
Miller is dead and gone, but the rhetoric and ideas that inspired him live on.
The author is the producer of ChinaTravelWriter.com and an editor at a map magazine in Nanjing.
Opinion articles reflect the author's own opinion, not necessarily that of China.org.cn.
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