Back in March I wrote about white nationalist Kyle Bristow’s support of Attorney General Bill Schuette’s effort to maintain Michigan’s bigoted ban on same-sex marriage. Bristow filed an amicus brief in support of Schuette’s appeal of a federal court ruling declaring the ban unconstitutional on behalf of an extremist group called the “Traditionalist Youth Network LLC”. At I wrote at the time, he is a “28-year old…newly-minted lawyer here in Michigan. But he has a history. Oh boy, does he ever have a history.”
Bristow’s history led to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to label his group a “hate group”.
The Traditionalist Youth Network recently filed another amicus brief with Bristow as the lead attorney, this one to support the right of Americans to own military grade weaponry. The amicus brief is in regards to a federal court case in Maryland. From their brief:
[I]f the Second Amendment was interpreted as it should be, then individual American citizens reserve the right to possess automatic rifles and submachine guns, hand grenades, shoulder-fired rocket and grenade launchers, antipersonnel mines, trench mortars, anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, and all the precursors to these weapons that would contribute to the proficiency of their use of the contemporary weapons of military grade. This would be true until the next generation of military-grade weapons are developed and become widely adopted for use by the United States military then American citizens would be able to keep and bear those weapons.
The conclusion of their brief offers a glimpse into the rationale for their position:
For the reasons set forth supra, this Court should reverse the judgment of the district court or else our people will be unable to realize the purpose of the militia or to defend themselves from the more dangerous elements of the populace. See The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America, New Century Foundation, 2005, available at http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.html. When the Second Amendment’s text and prefatory clause are taken into consideration, it can only be concluded that the Amendment prescribes a right for American citizens to keep and bear weapons of contemporary military grade.
That bit in bold tells the story. If you click through to the article, you’ll see that it’s an argument that US courts are not unfair to minorities when it comes to incarceration for violent crime. To use that as an argument for allowing private citizens to own the sorts of military grade equipment mentioned by Bristow in his brief tells us that he and his group are terrified that black and brown people are going to kill them. They clearly feel that the only way they can protect themselves from these nonwhite criminals is to be armed with “automatic rifles and submachine guns, hand grenades, shoulder-fired rocket and grenade launchers, antipersonnel mines, trench mortars, anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, and all the precursors to these weapons.”
These racist bigots are a scary group of people. You can read the SPCL’s page on Bristow HERE
Eclectameme by Anne C. Savage and LOLGOP
