Mass: Anti-gunner Sees his Waterloo

[AZRickD]

These observations were sent to an Arizona RKBA list by a friend who used to live in the People's Republic of Taxachussetts.

Some wry irony expressed the the anti-gunnie below who, perhaps rightly, fears the Patriot Act for the very same reasons he derides the RKBA folks as being paranoid (ie, the gubmint can abuse powers). Whoda thunk?

Rick

Spread this around.

None of the following was written by me:

http://www.sacurrent.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10705756&BRD=2318&PAG=461&dept_id=482778&rfi=6


Oh, hoo hoo hoo! Check out the quote by Massachusetts militia-watch maven
Chip Berlet, bleating about how the government is overstepping its
constitutional limitations:

Opponents of the PATRIOT Act and its expansion claim that safeguards like judicial oversight and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable
search and seizure, are essential to prevent abuses of power. "There's a
reason these protections were put into place," says Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, and a historian of U.S.
political repression. "It has been shown that if you give [these agencies]
this power they will abuse it. For any investigative agency, once you tell
them that they must make sure that they protect the country from
subversives, it inevitably gets translated into a program to silence dissent."

But wait! Here's what ol' Chippie was saying as little as 18 months ago:

People who monitor the activities of extremist right-wing groups, like Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates of Somerville, MA, say that the kinds of messages from LaPierre, Robinson, and others at the NRA
convention have a familiar ring. Berlet says that he's seen the NRA moving
toward a broader political agenda for several years, to the extent that he
now considers it "a kind of above-ground element of the patriot movement."

But Berlet says that all patriot groups share two absolute core beliefs: "First, the characterization of the government as being controlled by some kind of special-interest elite, and the idea that the government is involved in some plan to impose massive oppression." This comes very close to describing the NRA's essential belief.

Or how about this:

Lynda Lyon Block considers herself a member of the patriot movement, a small but avid militia group whose advocates believe that many of the day-to-day governmental functions that most people take for granted -- such as income tax, birth certificates and drivers licenses -- are illegal.

They are illegal, they argue, because the U.S. government has been swallowed up, gradually and surreptitiously, by power-hungry bureaucracies that have made a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and eclipsed the intentions of the founding fathers.

"The fact that I love my country enough to be outspoken about the abuses
I've seen and encountered by government agents or agencies makes me no more 'anti-government' than the NAACP or NOW," she writes.

In spite of her revolutionary zeal and her insistence that she is willing to "die for the Constitution," her voice is so soft and her movements so hesitant that people who meet her often come away with the impression of a lost soul rather than a fiery zealot.

She did not fit the profile of the kind of person drawn to militia groups, because there is no such profile. White-collar, blue-collar, male, female -- the only commonality that experts acknowledge is that connection to such groups fills an emotional need.

"All these people dream that they are facing the redcoats on Lexington
Green," said Chip Berlet, a researcher at Political Research Associates in
Boston who has studied the militia movement for 25 years.

Well, Chip... we none of us like redcoats or jackboots, including those of
us whose only shortcoming was to be able to see and hear them coming from
longer off than you could.

And should I now happen to detect that the jackboots are likely to reach
your neck before they reach mine... well, my reaction time may very well
suffer an inexplicable temporary impairment.

 

[Blain]

Amen to that, brother. Taxaxchussetts is a $#%^ hole for sure.