Moms Rising & PeaceTeam.net & William Saletan / Slate – 2015-12-03 00:54:19
http://action.momsrising.org/sign/pledge_2015/
In the 336 Days of 2015,
There Have Already Been 355 Mass Shootings
Moms Rising
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (December 2, 2015) — Our thoughts are with the San Bernardino mass shooting victims and their families, the many people and caregivers who work at the Inland Regional Center, a facility that serves people with developmental disabilities, and with the first responders, the community, and our nation.
As we grieve, we hear the call of many of our members urging us to act together to stem the tide of gun violence in our country.
ACTION ALERT: Stand with MomsRising to demand Congress acts to advance gun safety and community safety immediately by signing on here now
We will deliver the pledge signatures to every member of Congress so they know that we are paying attention, watching their votes, and counting on them to prioritize families over the gun lobby.
Please share this action link via Facebook, Twitter, and far and wide because the more of us who sign on, the bigger the impact we’ll have together toward ending gun violence.
ACTION ALERT: Stop Domestic Terrorists;
Ban Assault Weapons
PeaceTeam.net
(December 2, 2015) — It’s become an all too familiar international story, radical fundamentalist terrorists with unlimited access to high powered military assault weapons murdering in cold blood as many innocent civilians as they can.
Except that last week it happened again in America too, when a right wing extremist opened fire with an AK-47 at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. And it took a dozen police officers to stop him, including one armed only with his service revolver who was among the dead. If only someone had been there with a gun? Not so easy in the real world.
Ban Assault Weapons Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/ban_assault_weapons.php
We had previously taken a relatively moderate position, calling only for responsible gun owners to register their guns at the state level. But that position was apparently not modest enough, and we have changed our minds.
On top of that, all such military type assault weapons in private hands need to be banned and confiscated right now. If you agree with us, please submit the action page from the link above.
And after you submit the action page, feel free to request one of our new “People With Guns Kill More Than People Without Guns” bumper stickers. You can have one for no charge, not even shipping, just by submitting this form.
People With Guns bumper sticker:
http://www.peaceteam.net/people_with_guns_bumper_sticker.php
What is the justification for private ownership of such mass murder weapons? The lunatic fringe will tell you that they need this kind of firepower to resist government tyranny. Yeah, well guess what, we’re being tyrannized right now, by political extremists who think the slaughter of innocents is an acceptable political tactic, the very definition of terrorism.
We have elections in this country, which even with their defects, and clear evidence of electronic voting manipulation and fraud, are free and fair ENOUGH to make political change happen if people will just get off their asses and get out and actually vote.
The idea that we need protection AGAINST such a government, when we can fundamentally have any government to protect us we want, is so far beyond lunacy it is complete explanation of why these crazies are shooting at us in the first place.
The weapons manufacturers, and their dedicated lobbying arm, the NRA, have one political agenda and one only, selling more and more and more guns. Their answer is to have someone with a big gun every 10 yards from coast to coast, right down to small children. And of course, they’d all have to be assault rifles, making it easier than ever for complete whack jobs to become their own Rambo, a militia of one.
Our founding fathers would never have tolerated such unregulated carnage, not for a single colonial minute.
The gun fanatics, in deliberate and pathological ignorance of history, love to play the Nazi card. If only the German citizens were armed, they cry. The historical fact is that before Hitler, Germany HAD strict gun control, which was RELAXED by Hitler to arm his unregulated brown shirt militias.
What is especially despicable is the reaction of some politicians to this latest in an absurdly long list of such tragedies. What Carly Fiorina, who is as personally responsible as any for inflaming this latest mass killer, had to say is truly jaw-dropping. She demagogued that it was a “typical left-wing tactic” to “immediately demonize the messenger because they don’t agree with the message.”
And who exactly is the messenger here, Carly . . . the murderer?? And what exactly is the “message,” that political power comes from the barrel of an assault rifle? Sound pretty Maoist to us. What Ted Cruz had to say was so detached from reality, and based on such wild speculation, it had to be immediately “clarified” by his handlers.
It is no secret that some in America want to turn our country into a caliphate. Except that what they crave is a Christian sectarian caliphate, ruled by canon, as opposed to Sharia, law. We’ve got a lot of damn nerve telling people in the Middle East they can’t have religious fundamentalist governments, when that is their very objective here at home. And apparently if they can’t proselytize their way to that objective, they will shoot their way to it, just like in Iraq and Syria.
Yes, friends, the religious fundamentalist terrorists are already among us. They are here now. And they are some of our own citizens.
And the first step to reclaiming our own personal safety, in our homes, and in schools, and in our places of worship, and in our entertainment venues, is to confiscate ALL assault rifles, and keep confiscating them until there are NONE left.
The Terrorists Among Us
Forget Syria. The most dangerous religious extremists
are migrants from North and South Carolina
William Saletan / Slate
(November 30, 2015) — Another terrorist attack. Another grim tally of the dead and wounded. Another killer full of hate, from a land that breeds such men. Like millions of migrants before him, the perpetrator crossed the border unchallenged. And like others, he struck our country without warning.
Our politicians say they’ll stop these killers. They talk about building walls and vetting refugees. If we were serious, we would do it. We would seal our borders against North Carolina.
North Carolina? It sounds absurd. When we think about immigration and terrorism, we think of Syria. But that’s not where our casualties are coming from. On Friday, a gunman killed three people and wounded nine more at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. The suspect is white American Robert Lewis Dear. When police apprehended Dear, he uttered one telltale phrase: “no more baby parts.”
People who have known or met Dear say he wasn’t a regular churchgoer. But they also report that he believed devoutly in the Bible and that he claimed to have read it “cover to cover.” In an online forum, Dear apparently spoke of Jesus and the “end times.” He painted or posted crosses on at least three of his homes.
Dear moved to Colorado last year from North Carolina, where he had been living. For two decades, the Tar Heel State has been a hotbed of religious extremism, fueled by clerics who preach holy war. The result is a stream of interstate terrorism.
It began with Eric Rudolph, a Holocaust denier who grew up in the Christian Identity movement. In 1996, Rudolph traveled from North Carolina to Atlanta, where he detonated a bomb at the Olympics, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others.
A year later, Rudolph bombed a lesbian bar in Atlanta, wounding five people. In 1998, he bombed a reproductive health clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killing a security guard and injuring a nurse. The “Army of God,” which hosts Rudolph’s writings, claimed credit for his attacks.
In 2001, Steve Anderson, another Christian Identity follower, was pulled over for a broken tail light on his way home from a white supremacist meeting in North Carolina. He pumped 20 bullets into the officer’s car and fled. Police found weapons, ammunition, and explosives in his truck and home. A year later, he was captured in the western part of the state.
In 2010, Justin Moose, an extremist from Concord, North Carolina, was arrested for plotting to blow up a Planned Parenthood clinic. Moose, who claimed to represent the Army of God, also opposed the construction of a mosque near ground zero in New York. He called himself the “Christian counterpart of Osama Bin Laden.” Eventually, Moose pleaded guilty to disseminating information on how to make and use explosive devices.
In 2014, Frazier Glenn Miller, a career anti-Semite and former grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, killed three people at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home in Kansas. Decades ago, long before ISIS conceived of an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Miller devised a similar plan in the United States: an “all-white nation within the bounds of North and South Carolina.”
Among dozens of avowedly Christian, anti-Semitic, and right-wing terrorists cataloged by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, you’ll find many from these two states:
Charles Robert Barefoot Jr. , a North Carolina Klan leader who was convicted in 2012 on charges involving firearms, explosives, and violent conspiracy. Kody Brittingham, a Marine at Camp Lejeune who confessed to plotting the assassination of President Obama.
Paul Chastain, a South Carolina militiaman who tried to acquire plastic explosives and threatened to kill federal officials.
Steve Bixby, a violent activist from an anti-Semitic household, who gunned down two police officers in Abbeville, South Carolina.
Daniel Schertz, a Klansman arrested in Greenville, South Carolina, and later convicted, on weapons charges involving racist bomb plots.
And then there’s Dylann Roof.
After allegedly murdering nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church this summer, Roof drove more than three hours north, to Shelby, North Carolina. Nobody stopped him at the state border. The boundary between North and South Carolina, like the boundary between Syria and Iraq, is a joke.
Today, Republican presidential candidates are climbing over one another in a race to block the entry of Syrian refugees. They’re doing this even though, among the nearly 800,000 refugees we’ve accepted since 9/11, not one has been convicted of — or has even been arrested for — plotting a terror attack in this country. (A few have been arrested for links to terrorism elsewhere.)
Why do refugees have such a clean record? Because they have to go through an elaborate process: screening by UN evaluators, “biometric and biographic checks,” consultations with US counterterrorism agencies, and an in-person interview with the Department of Homeland Security. On average, the process takes about a year and a half — or, in the case of Syrian refugees, about two years.
Terrorists from North Carolina encounter no such scrutiny. They just climb into their cars, cross the border, and proceed to Georgia, Kansas, or Colorado. They’re protected by Article IV of the Constitution, which, as interpreted by the US Supreme Court, guarantees citizens “the right of free ingress into other States.”
That’s why, among the 27 fatal terror attacks inflicted in this country since 9/11, 20 were committed by domestic right-wing extremists. (The other seven attacks were committed by domestic jihadists, not by foreign terrorist organizations.) Of the 77 people killed in these 27 incidents, two-thirds died at the hands of anti-abortion fanatics, “Christian Identity” zealots, white anti-Semites, or other right-wing militants.
This week’s carnage in Colorado brings the death toll from North Carolinian terrorists, including Eric Rudolph, to eight. That’s just one shy of the nine people murdered in Charleston. Throw in the work of a few lesser miscreants, and you’re looking at roughly 20 casualties inflicted by Carolina extremists.
That doesn’t make the Christian states of North and South Carolina anywhere near as dangerous as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But it does make you wonder why, as we close our doors to refugees who have done us no harm, we pay so little attention to our enemies within.
Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
