http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/nra-board-members-in-the_b_847895.htmlIn February, I blogged here at the Huffington Post and commented on National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre's recent call for the implementation of a militia movement untethered to government authority. In his speech before the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, LaPierre claimed that American police forces can no longer protect us and fantasized about "
citizens coming together, in the face of lawlessness, to protect their neighborhoods."
Recent events in Alaska demonstrate that the NRA's connection to violent anti-government militias is more than just conceptual. In fact, two longstanding NRA board members are closely tied to a group of extremists who were just put in jail after plotting insurrectionary killings.
On March 10, 2011, five members of the Second Amendment Task Force/Alaska Peacemakers Militia were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping. The group, led by Francis "Schaeffer" Cox, 27, had stockpiled firearms and munitions and was planning to kill Alaska State Troopers and a federal judge. Cox had previously stated that "our government is sliding into tyranny, a police state" and boasted to law enforcement authorities that he had them "outmanned and outgunned." Cox's sordid past of sedition and domestic abuse was chronicled well in a recent article by David Holthouse.
Following these arrests, a YouTube video was uncovered by the staff of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence that shows NRA board member and U.S. Rep. Don Young (R-edit:moran AK-At Large) signing an insurrectionist "Letter of Declaration" drafted by Schaeffer Cox. Young signed the document with Cox looking on while attending an "open carry" event in Fairbanks on April 13, 2009.
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