Raise your hands if you know somebody in the gun rights, libertarian, or neoconservative movement that has advocating shooting a cop acting unlawfully. OK, I can’t actually see your hands so that was a stupid thing for me to request but I believe it’s a safe bet to say individuals connected with these groups know at least one person that fits this description.
Yesterday I ended up in a conversation with an individual who not only advocating shooting police officers that act unlawfully but went so far as to say it’s one’s duty to do so. Of course I pointed out that anybody who shot a cop would quickly find the wrath of that entire department, including its sizable arsenal, coming down on them like the hammer of Thor. That’s when the nonsense really started. As it turns out this individual he adamant that he would lay down his life in the name of defending another person’s rights because he was a member of the three percenters (which they stylistically type III% because they seem to think using Roman numerals makes them edgy or something). The three percenters is a movement I had forgotten about (mostly because their most outspoken members promises an American revolution and never even attempted to deliver). But my experience has show that the three precenters movement is made up heavily, if not mostly, of warrior wannabes.
Warrior wannabes are adorable, especially when they get all angsty and start talking revolution. For those of you who don’t know they take their name from the American Revolution in which, they say, only three percent of the colonists were actually involved in overthrowing the British. So they believe that if they get three percent of the current American population to join them they can successfully overthrow the current government. But there’s a big difference between then and now: back then there was actually three percent of the American population that organized and knew how to fight whereas today the three percent, even if they actually made up three percent of the current American population, are disorganized and many have no idea how to actually fight. And that’s what makes the current three percenters’ claims laughable and their most vocal warrior wannabes downright hilarious.
Let’s return to the dude I first mentioned. According to him it is everybody’s duty to shoot cops acting unlawfully. He claims he has no concern about dying defending another person’s rights in this manner. Yet it would be so easy for him to back his bluster with actual action. We currently have a hotbed of activity in Ferguson, Missouri that involves notable instances of police acting unlawfully. Why isn’t he and his ilk down there waging war against the police? Here’s a hint, it’s because they’re all talk.
Warrior wannabes, like Earth itself, can best be described as mostly harmless. They very much want to be harmful and so regurgitate statements that they think will make them sound like total badasses. But they’re not fooling anybody (besides, perhaps, each other) because their claims can be easily verified as bullshit when they sit behind their computer monitors instead of going out and doing what they claim to not only want to do but are duty bound to do.