(updated)
As I told you a couple of weeks ago, when John Noveske, a much-admired gunmaker, and Keith Ratliff, a popular gun reviewer, died within a day of each other last month, a lot of folks on the Internet were speculating that the two of them had been killed by the Vast Kenyan Fascist Gun-Grabbing Conspiracy. Now some people think Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered on a Texas gun range over the weekend, was the third victim.
Click this to enlarge -- it's all over the Net (here, here, here, here, here, here):
Remind me again: What's the value to Evil Obama in killing these guys? Are their deaths going to increase support for gun control? Not among gunners (the gun community is just becoming more and more paranoid, paranoia being one of the many unpleasant emotional states than can be eased, if you're a gunner, by purchasing more guns) and not among the rest of us (most of us had never heard of Noveske and Ratliff; maybe some of us knew about Kyle). Are these major players in the gun world? No, they aren't -- and nobody from a major manufacturer or lobbying organization has suffered a scratch.
But long before Sandy Hook, right-wing haters compiled lists of "suspicious" deaths allegedly traceable to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; the dead are almost all small fry or tangential figures. (Murdering Ron Brown: why exactly would one bother?)
In any case, there'll be more of this. And, at least in the case of Ratliff and Kyle -- Noveske died in a car accident -- the gunners are doing what they do with every gun death: denying that gun culture could have possibly had anything to do with the fact the fact that someone was, y'know, shot to death.
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UPDATE, TUESDAY: Wow, this just gets better. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports:
Various tea party activists, libertarian websites and other conspiracy-minded Obama haters are claiming that Russian security forces have discovered that Obama is about to unleash "death squads" across America to assassinate defenders of the Second Amendment. According to Liberty.com, one of the sites perpetuating this latest story, Russian intelligence has outlined the whole nefarious plot in a memo for President Vladimir Putin, detailing the Obama's administration's dispatch of "VIPER teams...which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."Dead gun activists and the Russkies and drones! It's all connected, maaaan! And things get serious on February 22! (Even though they actually started to get serious last month! Or in December, when Obama faked the Sandy Hook massacre!)
Liberty.com (run by a Florida tea party leader), which echoes the theory promoted by similar sites, maintains that these teams -- 800 of them, to be precise -- are set to "disperse throughout his country in preparation for what Russian intelligence analysts are predicting to be a series of high-profile killings of dissident Americans set to begin as soon as February 22nd." Obama has apparently been emboldened to launch such an operation by the recent federal court ruling upholding his right to kill American citizens with drone strikes without explaining why.
And, yes, drones belong in there becauise, as I said in another post, many right-wingers think the Obama drone program is specifically aimed at them.
