Extremism on the rise

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About a week ago (cue the Bobby Shmurda dance), my favorite news program, HBO’s Vice, did a story on extremist right-wing groups, which often refer to themselves as “patriot groups.” Since then I have begun to think about how unpatriotic these groups truly are.

A recent study funded by the Department of Homeland Security found that two of the top three terrorist threats in America were not Islamic extremist groups, but right-wing extremist groups.

Essentially, these groups are comprised of groups of citizens who are so dissociated that their only solution is to stockpile ammunition and practice apocalyptic procedures.

Often the basis of these “patriot groups” is that President Barack Obama is a tyrant who is trying to take away the Second Amendment.

Are these people living in reality? Do they realize that gun production has in fact soared under Obama? Do they realize that handgun production alone rose 128 percent during Obama’s first term, or that the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the country’s most prominent gun control organization, gave Obama a failing grade on enacting gun control?

Apparently these groups didn’t get the message, as the number of “patriot groups” exploded during the period of 2008 to 2012, from 149 to 1,360. And let’s not pretend that race isn’t playing an issue here, as the number of extremist right-wing groups just happened to start surging during the first term of a black president.

The last time we saw a surge in right-wing extremism was in the mid 1990s, fueled by legislation like the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 ban on assault rifles under President Bill Clinton. But this was not as significant as what we’re experiencing now, oddly enough as more people have been approved for gun purchases under Obama than under Clinton and George W. Bush.

But the most troublesome aspect of these right-wing groups is that they refer to themselves as patriots. Someone please explain to me what is patriotic about planning to use violence against a government that is clearly not infringing on Second Amendment rights the way they are portrayed to be?

NRA poster boy and rocker Ted Nugent has previously told Obama to “suck on (the barrel of) his machine gun,” and referred to him as a subhuman mongrel. It seems like these extremists will call Obama just about everything except the n-word, although it’s clear that’s what they’re thinking.

Regardless of what words they use or how many guns they stockpile, these people don’t deserve to call themselves patriots, and they are no different than any other extremist group that uses violence to send their political message.

Cheyene Miller is the assistant news editor of the Kentucky Kernel.

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