Since most militia units are made up of friends who have known each other for years, the movement's loose structure serves to isolate and exclude both overt racists and advocates of violence. "If anyone starts talking nonsense that smacks of sedition or illegal attacks on the government, we kick them out," Bob Clarke told me last February. This is exactly what appears to have happened with Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers. Militia units in Michigan wanted nothing to do with them.
Other militia units are open to the public and don't exclude anyone. But they can discourage racist talk. Says Sheryl Tuttle, a movement supporter who lives in southern Idaho, "I remember once when somebody did make a racist remark in one of our meetings. Someone else got up immediately to call him on it. He never came back to another meeting."
Tuttle and her husband Bill are typical militia supporters. In their mid-40s, they've raised one child and are now grandparents. Sheryl is active in her church's work with children and has served as an informal foster mother for several kids. She left a career in nursing several years ago to work with Bill designing and producing welded metal art pieces, which they sell at craft shows. When she started traveling between shows with sizable sums of money, Sheryl bought a semi-automatic pistol and started carrying it. Twice since then, she and Bill have scared off potential criminals by displaying (but not pointing) their weapons. In one case the threat was a prowler at their home, in the other a tailgater on a steep, deserted mountain road.
Bill, a voracious reader partial to conspiracy theories of history, is a military veteran and the son of a professional Army officer. The Tuttles got interested in the militia movement as a result of their growing involvement in politics and their frustration with government regulations that directly affect their lives and businesses. "Every time we go to a preschool board meeting" at the church, says Sheryl, "we've got another regulation we are supposed to obey. Now they want us to put an elevator in the church where we hold the school."
"Our government was founded on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and they have thrown our Constitution out," Bill said, explaining why he joined the U.S. Militia Association.
"Now we have to spend time and energy defending ourselves, instead of doing something more constructive," Sheryl told me when I asked her about the media blitz demonizing the militia movement. "It's going to scare a lot of people, and it scares me, but am I going to back off? No!"
The Tuttles and most other militia supporters are people who have grown up with guns, served in the military, and use guns as tools for hunting, small predator control, and self-protection. Guns don't frighten them, and they don't understand people who are frightened by guns. Having a gun in the house for self-defense is like buying fire insurance; it's something they believe they must have but hope they never have to use. They also know that when one is armed and dangerous, others, even government bureaucrats, tend to leave a person alone. They bear arms for personal defense, not because they expect to engage in shoot-outs, but because they believe that the display of a firearm will discourage criminal attack.
As one Internet posting put it: "The point of being armed is not to defeat an opposing army. It is...to prevent the agents of the government from dispersing the militia without killing them....An armed militia that acts with constraint can symbolically suggest that the Constitution is being abused. They do not need to ever level a weapon--they merely need to have it on hand to prevent the government from running roughshod over them."
After talking for hours with these people, watching more hours of their videotapes, and reading through reams of their literature and megabytes of electronic debate, my own conclusion is that the militia movement is a cry for attention, recognition, and respect, not a call for bloody revolution. Militia activists argue for the right of self-defense, not for the right to initiate violence or to break the law.
Some in the militia movement believe that a fight is inevitable, even though they insist they will not fire first. Others, probably the majority, hope that by being well-armed and sounding a loud warning, they will ensure that no one will ever dare try to lock them up if they refuse to give up their arms and their freedoms. They organize and arm themselves because they are frightened by what the government may do to them. But once they are armed and organized, they lose their fear, and they can turn their attention to peaceful efforts to roll back government.
"The last election does give us hope," Bob Clarke told me last February. "We are taking a wait-and-see attitude, but we are shifting our focus to political action. We're writing letters, sending faxes, and calling congressmen and assemblymen." Idaho's Samuel Sherwood explained, "Once people have armed and organized themselves, they have three choices: Take aggressive military action with horrendous results. Move to political action. Or decay and fall apart." Clearly, Sherwood prefers the political option.
John Wallner, an ex-Marine tank crewman who heads the San Diego Militia (half of whose 100 members are Jewish), is fighting for freedom in the courts. His organization has filed suit against the federal government challenging the ban on assault weapons. He considers his group first and foremost a public service group. Their most recent project was a fund raiser for the homeless of San Diego.
When I suggested they sounded like armed and dangerous Rotarians, he laughed and agreed with the characterization.
"So why bother with the militia bit?" I asked.
"The best way to keep the right to bear arms is for law-abiding citizens who are serving their community to openly exercise the right," he answered. He wants the right to bear arms because he believes once he loses that right, he will soon lose all the rest.
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