(Article originally published here on May 19, 2015)
Chicago
A year ago, white supremacist and Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller was charged with killing three outside two Jewish community centers in Kansas City. Weeks later, Jerad and Amanda Miller fatally shot two Las Vegas policemen attaching a swastika to one officer's lifeless body.
White supremacists and hate groups are some of the nation's biggest gun advocates. Like the NRA itself, which calls a registry and universal background checks the first step to a government takeover, they preach insurrection and stockpiling weapons against impending government tyranny. Timothy McVeigh, for example, espoused the NRA's confiscation fantasy and bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168, because it housed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) offices.
In LETHAL LOGIC: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy author Dennis A. Henigan reprints shockingly antigovernment ads that were run by the "patriotic" NRA. In fact, the NRA's "law-enforcers-are-oppressors" rhetoric became so incendiary in the 1990s, former President George Bush actually resigned the gun organization. "I was outraged when, even in the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy, Mr. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of N.R.A., defended his attack on federal agents as 'jack-booted thugs,'" he wrote to the NRA. "To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as 'wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms' wanting to 'attack law abiding citizens' is a vicious slander on good people."
Here in Chicago, where NGVAC is located, gun lovers on hate sprees are chillingly common. Six month ago, Chicago suburban police arrested John White for criminal damage to a Lombard synagogue. Police found White "driving recklessly all over the synagogue property, both on and off the pavement" reported the Chicago Sun-Times and seven of the synagogue's windows had been smashed. When police searched White's home they found "thousands of rounds of ammunition, a shotgun, rifle and four handguns." Nice.
In 1999, white supremacist Benjamin Nathaniel Smith went on a racist shooting rampage killing Northwestern University Mens Basketball Coach Ricky Byrdsong and Won-Joon Yoon, a computer science doctoral student. He also wounded nine Orthodox Jews and an African-American minister, literally driving around looking for minorities to shoot and kill.
Despite an order of protection filed by an ex-girlfriend, Smith was issued a gun owners ID card and a legal gun owner at one time. The hate spree spawned a yearly event called the Ricky Byrdsong Memorial Race Against Hate.
And who can forget Wade Michael Page's 2012 rampage in Wisconsin in which he fatally shot six people and wounded four at a Sikh temple because of their ethnicity? Page was a white supremacist who played in neo-Nazi bands.
Hate rhetoric and white supremacy go to the very top of the NRA. Longtime NRA Board Member Ted Nugent has called President Obama a "sub-human mongrel"--a remark almost identical to the Kansas City Klan shooter's claim that the white race is "drowning literally in seas of colored mongrels." Why is Nugent an NRA board member? Why has he been one for 20 years?