A line was crossed yesterday. Crossed not by some flamboyant cowboy type, but by a plain looking guy in New Hampshire who decided to go to a town hall with a loaded gun strapped to his hip. A town hall where the President of the United States was scheduled to speak. The guy’s name is William Kostric.

Now, this isn’t going where you think it might go. In fact, this is going to an entirely different place.

It’s tempting to label all these people nut jobs, as many already have. But, of all the things you could do with these people, the last thing you want to do

is give them a label that marginalizes them in the public conscience. These people need to be treated with the seriousness of a heart attack. They need to be put front and center. They need to be treated as exactly what they are: militant insurrectionists who are willing to go to any extreme to get their way. Yet, instead of calling them what they are, we call them nut jobs.

Americans absolutely have to get past this idea that Americans cannot be terrorists. We have to get over the fantasy that people who carry guns to town halls with Senators or loaded guns to town halls featuring the President of the United States are just good old boy American nut jobs. We have to get over the notion that Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh are just aberrations on the American landscape.

Here’s the deal: These people are serious about what they say. They are serious about what they say they will do.

They are dangerous.

Wearing a gun to a public event. Leaving a gun at a public event. These are designed to show others how serious a person or a group is about taking things to an extreme to get what they want. When a person takes a political cause to an extreme, that person is an extremist. When an organization does, the organization is extremist. And when you decide to brandish a firearm to let others know how serious you are, you are doing so to instill fear in the people who see you with that gun.

That is the definition of terrorism and, like it or not, America has a home grown terrorism problem on its hands. A problem that isn’t going to go away without some serious effort. A problem that can no longer be dismissed by calling those who are part of the problem "nut jobs".

© 2009, Mac Williams. All rights reserved.

• No Related Post