NOTE: I have updated this post and the title to correct the misuse of the term “assault rifle”. Though semi-automatic AR-15 rifles are commonly called assault rifles, the strict definition of an assault rifle says that it must be “selective fire” meaning that it has “at least one semi-automatic and one automatic mode”. The rifles in the photos below are semi-automatic only. They do, however, have magazines that hold 10-30 rounds or more of ammunition.
Yesterday, I wrote about Todd Courser and showed a photo he had posted on Facebook of one of his kids with an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle. That photo was not the only one he’s posted of his kids with these weapons, however. Here are a few others (click the photos to go to the original Facebook posting):
Courser posted these three photos to both his personal Facebook page where they are visible to the public as well as his “fan page”. For those of you who are squicked out by my posting photos of his sons, I would suggest that Courser is proud that he put this weapon into his young sons’ hands and the he wants people to see the photos. Otherwise why would he post them to not one, but TWO Facebook pages?
As my son pointed out to me on Facebook, this is the same weapon used by Adam Lanza in the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre. It was also used by 15-year old Jared Padgett in a shooting in Oregon and by Aaron Alexis in the D.C. Navy Yard shooting.
When Courser posted the fourth photo I showed in yesterday’s piece, he had this highly disturbing comment with it:
Doing a little modern musket training. Elijah said, “its beautiful! I’m in luv!” I was inspired yesterday. Funny thing is the gun is just one vital tool to train up my four children as the weapons for liberty that will impact the future both for freedom, but also for Christ. The 2nd Amendment is but one important part of our history that every citizen needs to be acquainted with and no one should be afraid of. Trained children equipped in every aspect of the cause of freedom are the bulwark against tyranny.
I don’t begrudge anyone their Second Amendment rights. However, I also have my own First Amendment right to express my disgust at this sort of display. For an incoming state legislator to talk about assault semi-automatic AR-15 rifles as “modern muskets” and “weapons for liberty” is frightening. “Training up” children to use these weapons as a “bulwark against tyranny” suggests that Courser is advocating a violent overthrow of the very government he is now a crucial part of.
If you follow Courser’s Facebook diatribes about our government, it’s clear that his threshold for “tyranny” is very low and he has a long history of describing things such as the Affordable Care Act and expanding the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act as “liberty-killing” things that strip us of our freedoms. When describing the training he is receiving as an incoming legislator, he wrote, “I have to tell you it has all made me think about children who are subjected to radical leftist ideology and have not even the slightest notion of how they are being shaped against liberty and freedom and away from God.” Yet, Courser himself appears to be espousing the radical view that our children need to be trained with military-style weaponry so that they can use them against our own government.
It’s one thing to petition your government to lower taxes or to pursue any of the other items on the tea party agenda. That’s democracy and it’s precious. It’s entirely another thing, however, to be advocating for the use of violence against our government to achieve your goals. When Courser talks about training up his four children to use guns “as the weapons for liberty that will impact the future both for freedom, but also for Christ”, he has crossed a line.
In my book, it’s un-American.
Adding…Jamison Foser of Media Matters makes this spot-on observation:
Imagine the reaction if this guy was Muslim & called AR-15 a “weapon…for Allah,” @Eclectablog http://t.co/h2WhV4mtcv pic.twitter.com/AATz4qgGLF
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) December 18, 2014
Adding more… By the way, you know who else trains young kids to shoot military-style weapons? ISIS:
Their guns are as big as they are — which is not saying much.On the streets of Syria and Iraq, ISIS militants are building a small army — literally. The use and recruitment of child soldiers is a war crime. It’s also a practice which ISIS has boasted of in photos and videos splashed across the Internet with titles such as the “Cubs of the Islamic State.”
Instead of archery and merit badges of Cub Scouts, these boys learn how to clean, disassemble and shoot machine guns. While their peers in the U.S. build campfires, ISIS’ diminutive devotees go from Quranic recitation drills to the front line of battle.
“They teach them how to use AK-47s,” one Iraqi security official told NBC News on condition of anonymity.
