Armed Revolt in the Obama Era? Right-Wing Gun Nuts Share Their Paranoid Worldview
Gun show enthusiasts make it abundantly clear why they’re stocking up on firepower.
On April 18 and 19, I attended gun shows in Antioch, Calif., and Reno, Nev., to probe the culture of gun enthusiasts at the onset of the Barack Obama era.
I came away from these events with a portrait of a heavily armed, tightly organized movement incited by right-wing radio to a fever-pitched resentment of Obama and his allies in Congress.
Even as the economy suffers, gun dealers and their Washington lobbyists are leveraging renewed anti-government sentiment into unprecedented sales figures and fattened membership rolls.
“We’ve been swamped today,” an NRA representative from Antioch boasted. “We’ve practically ran out of our materials that we give away at sign-up.”
Fueled by the screeds of radio hosts Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, and the lesser-known, but increasingly influential, online conspiracist Alex Jones, many gun-show attendees I spoke to were convinced Obama planned to usher in a Marxist dictatorship.
They warned that the president’s power grab would only begin with mass gun seizures. “If Obama takes away our guns,” a young, .45-caliber-pistol-toting man from Reno told me, “it’s just a step into trying to take away everything else.”
Indeed, in their minds, average Americans opposed to the Obama agenda would be herded into FEMA-run concentration camps by a volunteer army of glassy-eyed liberal college graduates.
“When they start imprisoning Americans, and people start seeing that we’re the enemy, then that’ll make it hot,” predicted one young man from Antioch sporting a button for former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. “People talk about a revolution,” the young man continued, “an armed revolution. I think police crackdowns on individuals will tip the scales.”
More than a few gun dealers and attendees echoed the young man’s seeming enthusiasm for armed revolt. One Contra Costa, Calif., gun dealer named Rich predicted, during an otherwise casual off-camera conversation, that “some nut” would assassinate Obama within one year of any Democratic attempt at gun-control legislation.
Oh boy!!! Here they go again, trying to point the finger at someone. Good Grief, guns will NOT disappear. There will always be someone out there selling guns out of their trunk LoL.
Yep, it probably all started with war clubs but now it’s about who has the biggest gun or who can shoot the most bullets per second. Sadly, these self important authoritarians will be singled out as trouble makers in the long run and will find that percussion weapons are ineffective when push comes to shove and will quickly drop their guns when they begin to melt from the microwaves coming at them from direct energy weapons.
Revolution is a crazy idea, and revolution with antiquated weapons is suicidal. These are truly times for change and the best way to be safe is to increase your awareness, like being unnoticeable for instance…G:
This all just makes me wonder what they are so afraid of. Why do you need to fear your citizens? Makes you wonder what THEY have been up to , to have such a fear of the common people.
Well, Max, the FEMA camps were originally instituted by Ronald Reagan and Louis Giuffrida. Giuffrida was a racist who envisioned locking up 21 million blacks. We can presume that white anti-racists would follow.
Col. Oliver North apparently played some key role in preliminary organizing for those camps, while he was busy facilitating mass slaughter against the legally-elected left wing govt in Nicaragua.
Congress looked into that and some Senators were shocked at some of the meetings and activities, and written plans, including military planning meetings where Reagan was the speaker.
Many of these gun enthusiasts are probably pro-Reagan types who would be surprised that Reagan was the president who first moved to institute that, although some are also racists who would support that.