The Right to Arm Bears

A confluence of recent events – including the election of an African-American President, the rise of the Tea Party, an uptick in mass killings and a bear economy – have exploded gun sales and given rise to another worrisome trend. This movement is particularly malevolent in light of powerful NRA’s support for continued lax or non-existent background checks, allowing assault weapons and oversized magazines in part, according to that organization’s executive director, to assure citizens of an ability to overthrow an unpopular government.

“Radical anti-government ‘patriot’ groups and militias, galvanized against gun control, will continue to grow even as the number of groups operating in the USA reached an all-time high in 2012, a report [in May] by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds.

“The center tracked 1,360 radical militias and anti-government groups in 2012, an eightfold increase over 2008, when it recorded 149 such groups. The explosive growth began four years ago, sparked by the election of President Obama and anger about the poor economy, the center says. That growth is likely to continue as the groups recruit more members with a pro-gun message, the center's senior fellow Mark Potok said… President Obama's second term and a gun control movement bolstered by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School is intensifying anti-government rage and will lead to more growth for the groups, Potok said…

“Daryl Johnson, a former domestic terror intelligence analyst at the Department of Homeland Security whose report on the resurgence of the radical right in April 2009 was withdrawn by the department after criticism by conservative groups, said the center's estimate of radical anti-government groups is low and does not account for some of the most radical groups that operate underground.” USAToday.com, May 3^rd. The rural-values community, God-fearing independents who pride themselves on their self-reliant linkage to the land, abhor the kind of government interference that naturally follows the complex interdependence and regulatory necessities of crowded urban living and increasingly complex global economic realities.

While gerrymandering and gridlock stubbornness in the legislative dealings have bought them a few more years allowing those rural values to hold firm, younger generations – conservative and otherwise – who have changing views on racial equality, marijuana use, same sex marriage and women’s rights – and a massive demographic shift away from “White America” (more whites are dying than being born in the United States) and towards multiracial urban values tell a very different story for America’s future. These ultra-conservative militants, with the powerful gun lobby pretty much insuring that they will be very well armed, are increasingly preparing for a civil war to require that rural values remain the law of the land.

The New York Times (August 29^th), examined one example of how such conservative militias take root in backwater communities where they are less like to be noticed. Paul Craig Cobb, is wanted in Canada as a white supremacist accused of promoting hatred, but recently, he has been quietly buying land in and around Leith, North Dakota, reselling some of these plots to like-minded buyers. Cobb “is using Craigslist and white power message boards to entice others in the movement to take refuge in Leith, about two hours southwest of Bismarck. On one board, he detailed his vision for the community — an enclave where residents fly ‘racialist’ banners, where they are able to import enough ‘responsible hard core’ white nationalists to take control of the town government, where ‘leftist journalists or antis’ who ‘come and try to make trouble’ will face arrest.” With under 30 residents according to the last census, the area if ripe for a relatively small body of new residents to take political control.  

The story is about passionate polarization, people willing to grind government to a halt or even take arms against democratic principles with which they violently disagree. It is the same rural versus urban values conflict that fomented the Civil War, the fear of incumbent minorities that “new folks” are rewriting the rules with which they grew up. As natural disasters increase in both frequency and intensity, as ethnically diverse urban populations indeed reorder our nation’s priorities, this “circle the wagons and defend our view of the world” mentality could eventually fracture our nation into pockets of conflicting views with the arms to defend them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is difficult to see how to create social success in an environment of intolerance and the willingness to use arms to enforce extreme views.