Besides which, you don't want to take up the space that can be profitably put to use by the mortars and quad fifty.
Posted on 09/24/2011 5:56:24 AM PDT by marktwain
“When all else fails … vote from the rooftops.” That’s how a T-shirt logo advertising Michael Dukes’ radio show reads. What can that statement, in blood-red lettering over a black background and paired with the image of an assault rifle, possibly mean except that people who aren’t satisfied with election results should use an assault rifle to take matters into their own hands. That they should climb to the top of a building and start killing people?
It is, of course, a despicable logo. Most people, conservative to liberal, get that. Just this month, an AK47 owner blasted 11 folks having breakfast at a pancake house in Nevada, killing three. “You can’t believe the firepower,” said a witness, “the kind of rounds coming out of that weapon.”
So when Michael Dukes suggests that the text and image of his 2007 logo is some kind of joke (“satire … not to be taken seriously,” according to the News-Miner), I wonder how many people think it’s funny. (View the logo at http://themichaeldukesshow.blogspot.com/2007/06/artwork-for-firearms-friday-show-almost.html.) Supporters in the online comments below the News-Miner article protest that the intent is serious, that people should prepare for armed revolution if “all else” — however you define that — fails.
I wonder what fraction of the Fairbanks population thinks that this moment in American political history is so desperate that we should be thinking about launching a civil war. Schaeffer Cox does, I guess.
According to the seven-count indictment, Cox told his militia “ … you also have to be ready to kill.” It’s alleged he envisioned “guerilla warfare” and was getting ready to kill judges and troopers, having amassed for that purpose “a tripod-mounted, belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun, a belt-fed, hand-cranked, tripod-mounted .30 caliber machine gun, at least one fully automatic assault rifle, multiple pineapple grenades, at least one grenade launcher … ” — the list goes on.
Dukes, a member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly who is running for re-election, cavalierly blends fatuous macho talk with gun-rights advocacy, but this kind of talk isn’t bluster to Cox and his ilk. In Cox, a sometimes political candidate, we see the fusion of a Second Amendment activist and a radical accused of actively planning to use gun violence as a political tool.
What kind of mind thinks this way? What sort of values must these people hold? What part of “Thou shalt not kill” eludes those who tend to tout Christian values? For that matter, what part of criminal law eludes this brand of conservatives, usually champions of “law and order?” What deep sense of victimhood and impotence leads one to prop up his inadequacy with an assault rifle and to snicker at the prospect of shooting his neighbors?
It isn’t just in our town, either, where it sometimes seems the lunatics are running the asylum. Tea Party-backed candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada offers the same message as Dukes and Cox when she refers to “Second Amendment remedies.”
And then there’s our gal Sarah Palin, saying “Don’t retreat — reload,” and graphically targeting congressional Democrats by placing rifle scope crosshairs on their districts. Of course, all it takes is one delusional fanatic, infuriated with the government, to pull a gun and send a bullet through the skull of one of those people, Rep. Gabby Giffords.
Michele Bachmann makes a point of telling audiences that her favorite gun is an AR15 assault rifle. She told Minnesotans that she wanted them “armed and dangerous” for upcoming political battles and that she needed her supporters to “take out some of these bad guys.”
Joyce Kaufman, a conservative radio host and Florida Republican Rep. Allen West’s chief of staff, said, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will.” Not much ambiguity there. Stephen Broden, a conservative candidate for Congress in Texas last year, is even less metaphorical: “Our nation was founded on violence; the option is on the table.”
This, of course, is the talk of children. Or of adults stuck at a profoundly immature level of thinking. It’s the kind of thinking that informs those who bring guns to public meetings, intimidating ordinary folk from testifying, or even attending.
It’s the kind of thinking that results in noxious smoke pouring into a grade school for years before the citizenry rises up and demands a stop to it.
It’s what allows our borough mayor, an unfailingly polite and thoroughly decent man, to be utterly pilloried — shrill voices threatening and denouncing him as a socialist — for an eminently sensible wood stove replacement program.
It’s what scuttles Vision Fairbanks, a modest proposal to revitalize downtown, never mind that the downtown business owners requested the reform.
It’s time for people with a little more maturity and soundness of mind to take back their town.
Dan O’Neill is the author of “The Firecracker Boys” and “A Land Gone Lonesome.”
Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - The voice of Interior Alaska since 1903
This is a crazy article. Everyone knows you don’t shoot from a rooftop. You want to be on one of the top two floors back inside a room.
You’d be way to exposed on the actual rooftop.
Silly liberals...
Besides, it does say “when ALL ELSE fails”.
That means we’ll use peaceful/political means to retain our individual liberty from encroaching communists,
but...
when all else fails, we must reserve the 1776 solution.
No need to worry about voting. Just here today in NC our Governor Bev Perdue floated a trial balloon suggestion to cancel the upcoming Congressional elections so our dedicated elected leaders won't have the stress of worrying about re-election and will be able to concentrate on fixing our problems.
Heh. Good. I likes it.
The left would NEVER use gun violence as a political tool.
Would they?
Gun Violence when used by the left is usually perpetrated by uniformed members of the state military. So, they think of it like Lenin/Stalin, "An individual death is a tragedy. Millions of deaths is a statistic."
Molon Labe
TS
Besides which, you don't want to take up the space that can be profitably put to use by the mortars and quad fifty.
Besides who shoots anymore...... 1 ton diesel dualie with a ranch hand brush guard doing 40mph and insurance is way more effective than a rifle in most cases.......ooooops !
Course a bug deflector is handy as well for the little socialist road kills.
As Clint Smith likes to say, drive or shoot, but never try both at the same time.....:o)
Yep read that this AM early and sent to hale and hiredhand........
She’s a silly socialist parrot. Someone in the socialist demon rat party said it and she is just repeating it out loud.
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