Cult Groups and Guns

Charlie Eklund is back posting at The Other Shoe, although he's using his beta-blog The (Other) Other Shoe for his recent posts. He describes himself as libertarian, though it's clearly with a strong conservative and Republican cast.

Lately, though, he seems to be especially concerned with the freedom of people to have lots and lots of guns.  He made a special post to commemorate the raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) on the Branch Davidian compound.

As I commented at his post, there's no dispute that the raid was badly handled, not least by the ATF agents shooting off their mouths in public prior to the raid. I once heard Molly Ivins describe the clumsiness of the ATF and other involved in the raid. They thought they were in a testosterone contest, she said. But insane David Koresh was in the compound hearing voices from God, and he didn't know he was in a testosterone contest at all.

But for all the legitimate criticisms of the ATF raid, Koresh and his cult were a nasty bunch. Instead of going to the press and/or their attorneys when they got advance word of the impending raid, Koresh and his group prepared to shoot it out with the law. And, in fact, they killed an officer in the initial skirmish, which added a drastic new legal and emotional intensity to the situation.

David Koresh was a child-molesting, cop-killing, religious-fanatic cult leader. For most people, he's not a very appealing poster boy for a cause. The fact that Christian Right leaders like Pat Robertson treated him as a martyr should be very disturbing to anyone who's not willing to let violent cult groups run loose.

And can we seriously fight terrorism inside the United States if we allow a fanatical group like Koresh's to stockpile large stashes of weapons that they explicitly say they expect to use in an apocalyptic war?

I know the NRA zealously churns out endless propaganda on every aspect of the subject. But if the guns-for-everyone crowd has their way, fighting terrorist groups - and that's very much what the Branch Davidians were organizing and arming to become - will be impossible to do effectively.