Quoted in entirety:
Log in: HeraldTimesOnline.com
Log in: HeraldTimesOnline.com
By Mike Leonard331-4368 | mleonard@heraldt.com
November 23, 2008
In all honesty, the origins of this column today were based in humor.
I happened upon a Web site identifying “anti-gun” organizations and found it downright amusing that the list was so long and so inclusive — literally from the AARP and AFL-CIO to World Spiritual Assembly Inc. and YWCA of the U.S.A. — that I laughed out loud.
If you believe that most of the civilized world is against you, I guess you have a reason to feel paranoid.
There was much more on the site, which asks readers not to support, based on their “anti-gun” philosophies, hundreds of celebrities and public figures ranging from Maya Angelou and Bob Barker to former President Jimmy Carter and former surgeon general C. Everett Koop.
I found all of this humorous until I became aware that there is a virulent gun-nut campaign going on right now, targeting President-elect Barack Obama, and that frightens me. With our nation’s shameful history of political and racial assassinations, the last thing we need in this proud moment in history is a hate campaign against the president-elect.
A bit of clarification is on order here. I do not consider gun owners, gun collectors or hunters to be gun nuts. In fact, I’m really hoping that deer hunters have a great hunting season, because deer overpopulation is threatening our wildlife habitats, our forests and the safety of drivers on our roads and highways.
In fact, while driving to work the other day, I stopped at the intersection of Lincoln and Grimes — smack dab in the middle of Bloomington — and found myself five feet from a doe, which ambled off down Grimes. Until we reintroduce bears and wolves into the local environment, hunters are the only predators that can keep the deer population in check.
Gun nuts are the freaks who claim that Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Walter Cronkite are trying to take your guns away.
Gun nuts are the kind of people Fran Quigley encountered at a visit to a gun show on the Indiana State Fairgrounds in late October.
Quigley, the operations director for the Indiana University-Kenya Partnership, went to the show as a curious citizen. “I certainly expected to see the weapons and I knew that there would be automatic weapons designed basically to shoot people,” the Indianapolis resident said by phone last week. “What I didn’t expect was hearing some murderously racist statements or hateful propaganda comparing President-elect Obama to a terrorist.”
Quigley said he overheard an exhibitor at the gun show say the following: “God help us if McCain doesn’t win. I live in South Bend, which is 35 percent black. That’s what you call a target-rich environment.”
He said he found the experience “chilling.” There are several other words I might add.
And in fairness, the former Indiana ACLU director said there were lots of people at the gun show who are simply firearms enthusiasts who privately deplore the Nazi paraphernalia and hate-mongers who show up at these gun shows. But there is little question that the election of the first black president in U.S. history has energized the racists and hate groups.
The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that Obama’s election has triggered more than 200 hate-related incidents, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and talk in modern Confederate circles of secession from the U.S.
The League of the South, a secessionist group, says its Web hits increased from 50,000 a month to 300,000 in the two weeks after the Nov. 4 election, the Monitor reported.
“The vitriol is flailing out shotgun style,” California State researcher Brian Levin told the Monitor. “They recognize Obama as a tipping point, the perfect storm in the narrative of the hate world — the apocalypse that they’ve been moaning about has come true.”
Amid the glee over Obama’s election and the hope that America has taken a huge step toward regaining the respect and admiration in the world that it, based on history, deserves, these developments should give us all pause and cause to be vigilant against the extremists from within.
I no longer find humor in the paranoid rants of the gun nuts, who conveniently ignore the fact that the Supreme Court has made it unconstitutional and impossible for Obama or anyone else to take away people’s guns. And I’ve never discounted the awful evil of racism, even if I did, for a couple of weeks, allow myself to believe that we’ve progressed further as a nation and a people than we apparently have.