Some 20,000 National Guard Troops, “many of them armed,” according to WPHL News, are now occupying the nation’s capital in preparation for the Jan. 20 inauguration of a new president and vice president.
Another thousand National Guardsmen have been called up for duty in Sacramento, Calif., “amid threats of right wing violence,” according to the Times of San Diego.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee called up the National Guard for a maximum of 750 troops to support the Washington State Patrol for Capitol security after a mob of demonstrators marched on the governor’s residence adjacent to the Capitol building. They’ll be on duty, guarding a fenced perimeter, at least through Jan. 20, according to a source in Olympia.
The Washington Examiner is reporting “statehouses across the country have upped security measures, fenced off capitol complexes, and called in reinforcements.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Social media is buzzing with observations that the United States is beginning to look like a banana republic with uniformed troops keeping citizens away from the politicians and government officials who are supposed to serve and represent them, not the other way around.
Delta and other airlines are prohibiting anyone flying to the Washington, D.C. area over the next several days from having firearms in their checked luggage.
According to Reuters and other news agencies, “Federal prosecutors offered an ominous new assessment of last week’s siege of the U.S. Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Thursday, saying in a court filing that rioters intended ‘to capture and assassinate elected officials.’”
However, USA Today is reporting federal authorities are “walking back” that assertion.
“Federal authorities said Friday that there is “no direct evidence of kill and capture teams” among the Capitol rioters, walking back claims outlined in court documents that attackers sought to apprehend and “assassinate elected officials,” the newspaper is now reporting.
One of the most visible of those demonstrators, identified as Jacob Chansley—the shirtless man wearing buffalo horns and a head dress, with his face painted in several images from the Capitol riot Jan. 6—is reportedly a “conspiracy theorist” and is now in custody. The FBI has been making several arrests since the violent demonstration.
All of this is taking on ominous tones. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are coming into office with what the Second Amendment Foundation calls an “extremist” gun control agenda. Throughout this week and into the next, SAF is running a 60-second advertisement on nearly a dozen networks recruiting member into what it calls the “2nd Amendment First Responder” program. It ran 40 times the first week, and is scheduled to run 79 times the second week due to audience reception.
“That’s 119 times our ‘2nd Amendment First Responder’ advertisement will hit the national airwaves over the course of 14 days,” SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb noted. “We’re reaching from coast to coast and deep into America’s Heartland in an effort to bring tens of thousands of grassroots gun rights activists to the front lines of a battle to protect our Second Amendment from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
“Biden and Harris have been alarmingly clear about their gun control and confiscation plans,” he said. “Biden wants to regulate and tax popular firearms and their magazines under the National Firearms Act, or mandate they be turned in through a so-called ‘gun buyback’ program that amounts to compensated confiscation. Our campaign is alerting the nation about the extremist Biden-Harris agenda.
“Their radical wish list includes one-gun-a-month restrictions, a semi-auto ban, magazine limits, mandatory licensing in order to purchase a firearm, prohibitive gun taxes, and invasive background checks and indeterminate waiting periods, just to exercise a right that is supposed to be protected from such demagoguery by the Second Amendment,” Gottlieb observed. “Biden and Harris want to turn a fundamental right into a regulated privilege, and our ‘2nd Amendment First Responder’ campaign fights that scheme.”
The image of armed troops surrounding the federal and state capitol buildings, and discouraging public access to the presidential inauguration is alarming.
Now some people are wondering if America must get used to this scenario.
They remind one another this is the United States, not a police state.
