Gun campaigners fuel lockdown fury
Three right-wing gun activist brothers are stoking US anger against coronavirus restrictions, encouraging hundreds of thousands to defy lockdowns in protests backed by President Trump.
Ben, Christopher and Aaron Dorr have created ‘‘Against Excessive Quarantine’’ groups on Facebook targeting restrictions in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Their groups have added 200,000 members in a week and are growing.
Ben Dorr is the political director of Minnesota Gun Rights, which describes itself as a ‘‘no-compromise gun rights organisation’’ and accuses the National Rifle Association, the US’s foremost gun lobby group, of being too willing to compromise.
The brothers are part of a small but growing section of the public who are rebelling against lockdown measures imposed in some states.
Demonstrators, some of them armed, have converged outside government buildings in Ohio, Maryland, Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Colorado and Washington state, though not all were co-ordinated with the brothers’ groups.
While the protests have been fairly small – about 2500 people demonstrated in Olympia, Washington’s state capital, on Monday – they have captured the support of the president, who has been engaged in a public row with state governors about lifting restrictions.
Despite his enthusiasm for the antilockdown protests, Trump began his daily coronavirus briefing yesterday urging Americans to maintain ‘‘strict vigilance’’ in observing social distancing. Trump, who wants lockdowns to end in two weeks, backed down from claims last week that he had ‘‘total authority’’ to order states to reopen.
On Saturday he used Twitter to demand that Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia be ‘‘liberated’’.
Pressed on Monday about whether he supported the protests, which violate his own social distancing guidelines, Trump said: ‘‘If people feel that way, you’re allowed to protest. Some governors have gone too far, some of the things that happened are maybe not so appropriate.’’
However, evidence of public frustration with state governors and their lockdown policies is scant. In a Quinnipiac poll conducted earlier this month, almost 70 per cent of Republicans said they would be in favour of a nationwide stay-at-home order.
In Michigan, a poll released yesterday by the Detroit Regional Chamber found that 57 per cent of people approved of how the Democratic governor was handling the crisis.
Trump announced yesterday that Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, would be visiting the White House ‘‘with some of his people’’ today to discuss the path forward.
But he criticised other governors, saying that Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, who has raised questions about testing capacity, ‘‘didn’t understand too much about what was going on’’.
Yesterday 3000 residents in New York underwent antibody testing in an effort to work out how many of the state’s residents were infected. The total number of coronavirus cases in the US yesterday stood at 771,214, with 41,356 deaths – the highest of any country
.