The disturbing thread of white nationalism woven into the NRAs rhetoric
One of the most chilling moments during the past weekend of violence in Charlottesville came after much of the protest had ended and state officials were trying to take stock of what just happened. In an interview with the New York Times, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) defended the sometimes anemic response of state and local police, claiming that the officers were simply outgunned.
A line of assault rifle-carrying militia members, some of them sporting Confederate flags over their military fatigues, “had better equipment than our State Police had,” McAuliffe said. “It’s easy to criticize, but I can tell you this, 80 percent of the people here had semiautomatic weapons,” he said, adding that if “you saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army.”
The German scholar Max Weber once defined a state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Under this definition, Virginia’s status as a state briefly seemed to break down over the weekend.
https://thinkprogress.org/nra-white-nationalism-61dc3fc49fe4/amp/
