As far as I know, I’ve never once heard President Obama ever utter the words “I plan to ban all guns.” Never. Of course, that hasn’t stopped legions of morans on the right from claiming that Obama has a secret plan to ban all guns (then again maybe it was a rumor gun shop owners started to drum up business in an otherwise down catastrophic economy). Just another stupid, baseless, but primarily inconsequential wingnut fantasy falsehood spread by fools and believed by even bigger fools.
Until, that is, this happened:
PITTSBURGH — A gunman wearing a bulletproof vest and “lying in wait” opened fire on officers responding to a domestic disturbance call Saturday, killing three of them and turning a quiet Pittsburgh street into a battlefield, police said.
Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn’t clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns. […]
Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon,” said Edward Perkovic, his best friend.
Perkovic, 22, said he got a call at work from him in which he said, “Eddie, I am going to die today. … Tell your family I love them and I love you.”
Yep. That’s right. Three police officers were ambushed by some idiot who believed this insane confabulated fever dream of a rumor that Obama was going to come in the night and take away all his bang-bang toys. It’s sickening. It’s disturbing. And, for the families and friends of the three dead officers it must seem like some bizarre, surreal, absurdist farce. Except, of course, that it actually happened, and they will have to bury and mourn their loved ones because a band of ignorant jackasses (and more than a few right wing opportunists) invented a story that had no basis in reality, a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, but in this case tragically signifying the needless death of three public servants paid to protect their fellow citizens.
Just like the poor innocent congregants of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church who witnessed the murders of two of their community because a deranged individual by the name of Jim D. Adkisson, a connoisseur of right wing hatemongers like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, decided to commit a hate crime as revenge against liberals, once more we see how the inane lies and fantasies spread by of a minority of spiteful, fearful, ignorant, bigoted and small minded people have resulted in the deaths of innocents. We keep saying it can’t happen here, that we will never see a movement among certain members of our society to kill fellow Americans simply because of their political beliefs or status “government employees” or immigrants, or gays, or blacks, etc. We keep saying this country is not like Cambodia, or Rwanda, or other places where mass violence has erupted because of the hateful propaganda preached by a few power mad demagogues. And yet . . .
And yet these deadly incidents keep happening. And evil media clowns like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and even politicians like Michelle Bachmann keep screaming their twisted diatribes of hate over the airwaves, ratcheting up their deceitful, mendacious and dangerous rhetoric to levels we haven’t seen since the days when the Klu Klux Klan dominated vast regions of this country in the twenties and thirties. Days when lynchings were common. Nor do we need to look that far back. It was only 14 years ago, during the administration of another centrist Democratic President that we suffered the worst act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by another crazy bastard who swallowed the far right lies hook line and sinker: a bastard named Timothy McVeigh.
McVeigh’s tragic attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City came at a time when right wing hate radio talk shows and the National Republicans were in full on attack mode against President Bill Clinton and the evils of “Big Guvmint.” The rise of right wing militias were in full flower. A time when a white supremacist made a Jewish community center in Los Angeles a free fire zone. And this all occurred during a time of economic prosperity and relative stability. Before Fox News had fully mutated into the master manipulator and fear monger it has become today. A time before Hannity and O’Reilly were household words, and Glenn Beck was just a small time radio personality and recovering ex-alcoholic, not the self described leader of the 9/12 Project whose motto is “We Surround Them,” the “them” in this case being anyone who voted for Obama, or who isn’t a white, gun loving, tax hating conservative Christian.
The longer the Becks anbd the O’Reillys and the Hannitys and the Limbaughs and the Savages and all their little wannabe imitators continue this campaign of fear and distortion, spreading hate and lies to their audiences and anyone those gullible enough to believe every misleading canard that they screech from their media pulpits, the more incidents like the murder of these three Pittsburgh police officers by deluded and unstable individuals will continue to occur.
Their eliminationist jokes regarding the deaths of liberals and other “Un-American traitors” were never funny, but they are quickly becoming downright dangerous to our public safety. To Your safety. My safety. Our children’s safety. As more and more people lose their jobs the audience for this kind of deluded, scapegoating rhetoric grows larger every day. As does the chance that the violent language of these radical right wing agitators will erupt into more and more instances of actual violence. We already know that President Obama received an unprecedented number of death threats (and several actual foiled conspiracies) before he won election. How long will it be before one of these fruitcake dittohead followers of Beck and Limbaugh and Hannity and Savage make an attempt on his life, or the lives of other prominent liberal spokespeople and/or Democratic politicians?
Downplay the danger all you want, but remember, an animal is at its most dangerous when it is wounded and cornered. We are watching the devolution of the Mighty Right Wing Wurlitzer into an engine of mass insanity, one that could lead us all down a very dark and destructive path if we are not careful and cognizant of the very real danger it represents to our democracy and to our security.
You didn’t mention Ann Coulter who makes staements about using baseball bets on liberals. Might be worth a diary on some of her crazy quotes.
Our society is paranoid and violent. The right’s propogandists our feeding into this problem. Its a really nasty and dangerous way to make a living.
OK. Make that baseball bats not bets dammit.
Shorter Entire Wingnut Nation: “BILL AYERS! BILL AYERS! BILL AYERS! BILL AYERS! Ergo your ENTIRE argument is moot! THE LEFT HAS KILLED JUST AS MANY INNOCENTS WITH RHETORIC! YOU STILL CALL BUSH A FASCIST DAILY!”
Because Rachel Maddow and Daily Kos advocated armed, bloody revolution against Bush instead of, you know, legal avenues of justice.
Totally morally equivalent if you’re a winger, QED.
Are we all REALLY AWARE that the gun slaughter is only beginning? Americans are under threat not from outside enemies, but from the confused lobby driven, unregulated society that we are all existing in. Even the media is scared to attribute all of the gun deaths this past week to the easy access by anyone in the public to heavy duty guns. No one dares to speak against the great Gun GOD, no congressman, no Senator, nobody.
What we are witnessing is the results of NO REGULATION in the federal government for decades. Our streets are awash with guns of every description, and a virtual parade of contaminates are starting to show up in our food. Even the dry wall being used in construction work in our homes is filled with dangerous contaminates, and meanwhile the American dream is fast becoming an economic nightmare. Politicians in the pay of the gun lobby are hoping that the frequency of gun violence will slow down quickly enough so that the public will remain mostly calm and passive over the loss of so many innocent lives.
Meanwhile the media is working hard to divert attention away from the killing power of the guns being used by these shooters, by reporting a lot of gossip about the killer’s motive, his neighbors, his job, his family, etc. 14 people killed, 4 other seriously wounded in New York, but not a single victim’s face or story has yet the hit the MSM. 3 policemen killed in a cold bloody planned ambush, and thus far not one of their faces or stories is center stage on the MSM. The deadly grasp of the gun lobby has such a solid grip on the power centers of America that the most horrific outrageous slaughter simply gets accepted with a few seconds of TV air time to express public sadness and passive regret.
The rottenness of Reaganism that has almost completely infected the entire country is like maggots hatching into flies from an smelly half empty open garbage can in the heat of summer. I’m afraid that we are just beginning to see the tides of domestically caused death and destruction that will be our future burden.
Who started the Obama Wants Your Guns fantasy? My money is on the gun lobby. Follow the money.
I recall this comment from Obama at a rally in Idaho during the primary:
At best Obama has voted on restrictions on gun ownership (like many Dems), but he’s never called for an outright ban that I’m aware of. Any Democrat in high office would get nailed with this canard. Pushing it is profitable.
Eddie: Umm. he was a pretty straightforward guy. he was never on any drugs he never did anything out of line he wasn’t involved in any gangs, any militias, he just believed in his right to bear arms; he believed that hard economic times were, you know, gonna put forth a, you know, gun bans. That sort of thing. ..he uh, he basically believed in what our forefathers had put before us and thought that it was being distorted by the, you know, zionist control of the government, and he didn’t believe in that. Uh Also, I don’t think that the way he went about solving it was the right way to do it though.
Reporter: And did he have a lot of, I take it he had a lot of guns? He collected guns and things like that?
Eddie: he only had about 4 firearms
Q. How do you know him?
Eddie: I’ve been best friends with him since I was born.
Q. What do you think of what happend here?
Eddie: I think it was an awful, you know, tragedy, and as bad as it feels, you know, to see your best friend in a situation like that you also got to take into account the innocent lives that were lost here today and uh, that’s something that can never be, you know, never can be justified.
Q. What do you think made him sn- uh, did what he did?
Eddie: Well there was a domestic dispute in the household and i guess the police came to take his firearms away from him. and he always said that if anyone tried to take his firearms he was gonna stand by what his forefathers told him to do and defend himself. And I guess he went about it the wrong way.
The Google news reports this morning suddenly don’t know why this guy was shooting at cops. The paragraph about him thinking guns were going to be banned has vanished!
…and we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
And Orcinus reports that the shooter’s best friend, Edward Perkovic, who is quoted as saying what a nice, average guy his buddy is, turns out to be a Turner-Diary reading, David Duke quoting, ZOG-believing full-on little Nazi punk. And he writes pretty, racist Nazi songs.
That is, this is how these guys think you start a race war. As Elvis Costello sang years ago: “You think they’re so dumb. You think they’re so funny. Wait until they’ve got you running to the night rally.”
All of this information is out there but somehow the media isn’t reporting the background of Poplawski and his buddies? Why would the media want to cover up that these guys are paranoid Nazis and that the Glenn Becks of the world are saying is identical to what the “Turner Diaries” claims?
Now that Poplawski is arrested and will stand trial, you would hope that all of this will come out. So why when the public wants to know “why” that’s exactly what the press doesn’t want to report?
I replied to you below in the general thread.
Because one can be anti-zionist without being anti-semitic, as we are so often reminded.
Let us pray that the Secret Service is on top of all this. Hopefully when we hear from these people, as we probably will, they will not be as surprised as they were by the guy who hurled the shoes at Bush.
The right-wing in this country has truly devolved into something that is completely unrecognizeable as a political ideology. They no longer even make “politics” a pretense, aynmore. They are all about hatred and irresponsibility. They are egging peole on to committ horrific acts of violence. They have lost their frickin’ minds. and may God help us-but we are all apt to pay a terrible price.
Fixed.
It is disturbing that those who make the logical connection between the hate speech and those who carry out some of these crazy acts are somehow smeared as placing unfair blame. I would bet my life talking point on the right is how liberals are trying to exploit these tragedies for political gain. Thus, the right and those encouraging the hate speech are now the victims again.
It just gets old and I am more scared of these insane highly armed people than any Al Queda terrorists. Living in DC, the fear of 9/11 was nothing compared to the days when the sniper was on the loose. It was a genuine scary time that you could not go out in public without thinking that you might get shot.
More Gun mass murder gun violence today. The NRA still rules our word.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/us/05killings.html?hp
No shit! I just finished reading the latest AP expanded story and there doesn’t seem to be a motive given for this crime anymore. Taken with the way the story of a right-wing whacko building a dirty bomb in his basement was underplayed, this is pretty chilling.
Maybe they don’t want to give people ideas or lend any weight to these lunatic ideologies… that’s the most positive explanation for withholding these details that I can come up with.
Oops. This was meant to be a reply to Bob in Pacifica.
Poplawski’s buddy, Percovic, who was widely quoted yesterday as saying his lifelong pal was just a good guy who was afraid that Obama was going to take away his guns, is promoting THE TURNER DIARIES on his myface page (or iFace or something). THE TURNER DIARIES is a fictional account of a Nazi takeover of the US after the Jewish-controlled government takes away everyone’s guns. You know, Glenn Beck’s schtick. Timothy McVeigh used to quote from it.
Nothing to see here folks. Just keep walking.
UPDATE – The number of deaths from gun violence in the US of A for this past week to the present time is 36 people killed. The gun lobby trotted out a seedy academic, Professor Bullshyt, on Sunday’s Good Morning America for a pseudo discussion on “Gun Control”. This guy was obviously a shill for the gun manufacturers and he just kept repeating that gun control won’t work. His argument was that guns are all over the place both legally and illegally so it is fruitless to pass gun control laws because they won’t keep gun out of the hands of potential killers! Note: there wasn’t any pro-gun control spokesman invited to sit in on the show’s Gun Control “debate” to counter this clown’s silly argument. So much for the “gun control debate” until the next mass slaughter.
The Gun lobby says, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The basic laws that govern human physical energy make it clear that assault rifles, Uzi’s, and other automatic high speed firing pistols are highly efficient killing machines designed to take the least amount of human physical effort to discharge from 300 to 600 round per minute. Take a male slightly built, who weighs 165 to 175 pounds in average physical condition and give him a knife or some blunt instrument. Do you think that he would be able to kill 14 people within a period of 60 minutes? Let me rephrase the question, do you think with a knife or a blunt instrument he could kill 14 people, period. The answer is NO, because it would be just too exhausting from a physical point of view. But if his weapon is an AK47 or an Uzi, it is easy and most likely he won’t even work up a sweat. This simple illustration show basically how stupid the arguments from the gun lobby actually are.
Every gun taken off the street and ACTUALLY DESTROYED will save at least ONE PERSON’S life. We have an epidemic of gun violence in America and if we don’t start to seriously work on this problem, it’s only going to get worse. Consider this. What do you think would happen to all those heavy weapons that are currently flowing to the Mexican drug dealers on the border if the cross border drug smuggling down there was suddenly stopped? The market for those weapons would flip back to the United States and all of those arms would flood back across the border onto America’s city streets.
You know what takes even less energy than an Uzi? Fire bombs. Ya gonna ban gasoline, glass bottles and rags?
And while you’re at it, let’s round off all the sharp edges on everything in the world.
August 2008 – The Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman, Bill Gwatney, was shot and killed in the party headquarters. I don’t remember ever hearing about a motive.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/13/arkansas.shooting/index.html