Militias ready for ‘gun-grabbing’ Clinton presidency
“PUT the guns down!”
The order crackled over a loudspeaker from two sheriff ’s deputies crouched behind the doors of police cruisers, semi-automatic rifles at their sides.
Several middle-aged militiamen were toting loaded AR-15 rifles and 9 mm pistols at a makeshift checkpoint – two lawn chairs and a narrow board – on a dirt driveway in central Georgia. The men, members of the Georgia Security Force III% militia, grumbled but laid their weapons down on the red clay earth.
The brief standoff ended with an amicable chat, and the men retrieved their weapons the moment the lawmen drove away. But the episode further stoked the militiamen’s abiding fears that their cherished Second Amendment rights were under assault.
The Georgia Security Force is one of scores of extremist militias nationwide that have rallied around the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, heartened by his harsh attacks on immigrants, Muslims and Syrian refugees. But no single issue motivates militiamen more than guns – and the enduring belief Hillary Clinton, despite her insistence that she is not anti-gun, is plotting to take them away.
The Georgia militiamen mobilised in the woods here last weekend to fire weapons and train for the day when, they believe, they will be forced to defend what they call “our way of life”. Two dozen armed men and women conducted live-fire search-anddestroy drills, pumping out enough rounds to saw through and topple a loblolly pine.
“We thought it was bad under eight years of Obama, but the gun-grabbing is going to get a whole lot worse if Hillary gets elected,” said Chris Hill, 42, a blond-bearded paralegal who goes by the code name Blood Agent and commands the militia. He wore combat fatigues and packed a .40-calibre Smith & Wesson pistol on his hip.
When Trump says he wants to make America great again, a message that has appealed to a broad segment of the electorate, Hill and his roughly 50 local militiamen are particularly enthralled. They long for an America they believe has been stolen from them by liberals, immigrants and “the PC crowd”. Their America is one where Christianity is taught in schools, abortion is illegal and immigrants hail from Europe, not faraway Muslim lands.
These weekend warriors form the obdurate bedrock of Trump Nation: white, rural and working class. They vote, and they are heavily armed, right down to the .22-calibre derringer fired by Nadine Wheeler, 63, a retiree who calls her tiny gun “the best in feminine protection.”
During two days of conversations, grievances poured forth from the group as effortlessly as bullets from a gun barrel. On armed excursions through sun-dappled forests, they spoke of a vague but looming tyranny – an amalgam of sinister forces to be held at bay only with a firearm and the willingness to use it.
They are machinists and retirees, roofers and factory line workers, all steeped in the culture of the rural South. They say Trump, a Manhattan billionaire and real estate tycoon, speaks for them.
“Within the extreme right, many of Trump’s most passionate backers come from the militia movement,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. “The militia movement is overwhelmingly behind Trump’s candidacy.”
For militias, Trump’s anti-establishment views “play right into their paranoid style of politics”, said Ryan Lenz, editor of the Hatewatch blog at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Georgia Security Force is noteworthy among militias for its acute Islamophobia, Pitcavage said. Its members are so-called 3 percenters, who believe that only 3 percent of colonists fought in the Revolutionary War.
That is “a historical myth”, said Pitcavage, a historian, but useful for those who believe a few people with guns can defeat tyranny.
At least 330 such 3 percenter groups have formed in all 50 states, by Pitcavage’s count. There were 276 active militias in 2015, Lenz said. The number includes some 3 percenter groups.
Trump has retweeted posts from white nationalists and Nazi sym- pathisers, but Hill and his followers insist that they are not racists, only staunch citizens and patriots with an admittedly apocalyptic outlook. They consider Trump a bulwark against the candidate they call “Shillary” Clinton.
Teresa Bueter, 41, worked for 26 years behind a grill at a Waffle House while raising three children. Now she is an active member of the Georgia Security Force, decked out in military fatigues. She owns a .32-calibre pistol and a German-made sniper rifle.
Bueter said Syrian refugees entering the country “scare the crap out of me.” With her guns and the militia’s weekend paramilitary drills, she said, she is prepared to fight for the values she has instilled in her children and three grandchildren.
“Donald Trump would fit right in with our little group,” she said. “He wants America the way we want it, back like it used to be.”
Various militiamen shared the same conspiracy theories, almost word for word: Muslim refugees have established terrorist training camps on US soil. The liberal billionaire George Soros has rigged voting machines for Democrats.
Hill, a Marine veteran, holds FTX sessions, or field training exercises, roughly once a month. Otherwise the members communicate via regular posts on Facebook. Prospective members are approved by a “review board” of current members who vet them on their compatibility with the militia’s beliefs. This session was held on 6 hectares owned by Devin Bowen, a machinist who was having a miserable day even before the deputies forced him to drop his pistol.
Hill led two dozen members through a boot-camp-style obstacle course carved out of the woods. They clambered over a wall of logs and fired at imaginary enemies as they “cleared” rooms made of plywood and sheets of black plastic. One militiaman wore a shirt with a message that read, “When Tyranny Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty.”
It was all part of the militia’s efforts to be armed, ready for looming threats, especially if Clinton is elected, Hill said. He mentioned his two children. “The security and safety of my kids motivates what I do,” he said.
Hill, who calls his group a “defensive militia,” predicted unrest and violence from extremists on both sides no matter who wins the presidential election. If Clinton wins, he said, millions of gun owners will march on Washington at the first attempt to restrict gun ownership.
“If the people decide they can no longer suffer the inequities,” he said, “I’d be with the people and I’d take my guns up to Washington DC.”