44 Percent of Republicans Think Armed Revolution May be Necessary

From AlterNet:

Forty-four percent of Republicans agree that armed revolution may be necessary to protect American liberties, according to a gun control poll conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University.

Eighteen percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents agree that Americans may need to take up arms against their government, the study’s authors found.

And

Right-wing rocker Ted Nugent made headlines in January when he suggested that the newly re-elected Obama is “attempting to re-implement the tyranny of King George that we escaped from in 1776 … And if you want another Concord Bridge, I got some buddies.” Farleigh Dickinson’s poll suggests that Nugent isn’t the only one hysterically paranoid over the Obama administration.  

More here.

Okay, I'll admit to at least one time that I wondered aloud about when it would be the right time for revolution.  I mean, I did it here, on this blog, at some point during the darkest days of the Bush administration's full court press on civil rights in the post 9/11 period.  Some of that stuff was pretty creepy, torture, warrantless wiretapping, unending war.  But we certainly never got to the point that I thought it might be time to get our violent revolution on.  Ultimately, Bush became discredited, and a Democrat took the Oval Office.  Actually, Obama's record on civil rights isn't what I'd call stellar, but he's not filling me with visions of Gestapo and sugar plums, either, the way that Bush did.  In the end, however, I don't think I would ever be able to support a violent revolution: a violent revolution necessarily means a violent new regime.  It's much better to engage in massive passive resistance--unless, of course, your passive resistance is met with machine guns and torture; then it's time to rethink things.

But none of that seems to be on the horizon.

So what is it these Republicans fear so much that makes them dream of a right-wing people's revolution?  This study is very much in the context of the gun regulation debate, and revolution is a topic that comes up again and again when conservatives defend their right to own any and all weapons, no matter what.  To be honest, I don't really know what's got them so freaked out.  I used to be a conservative, and for years thought I knew what made them tick.  But I don't know that I can really say that anymore.  This all reminds me of the conspiracy theory I heard about the song "We Are the World" that I heard at Southern Baptist youth camp back in 1985.  I was pretty conservative in those days, but asserting that the charity song aimed at fighting hunger in Ethiopia was really about persecuting Christians sounded totally nutty to me.  So the notion that Obama wants to turn us into a Muslim nation, or that he wants to confiscate all guns, or that he's a socialist who wants to force us all to work on collective farms, or that the UN is going to take over, and that they use black helicopters to monitor our movements, all this is even nuttier to me in my current liberal incarnation than the "We Are the World" plot was back in the day.  That is, it makes sense to me that Republicans want to overthrow the government some day if it crosses some undetermined line in the sand, but only because I think these people are crazy, not because they have a point.

On the other hand, when "government is the problem," I suppose that means you want to destroy the government.  Would someone remind me of what the difference is between an anarchist and a Republican?  I'm starting to lose the sense of it.

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Forty-four percent of Republicans agree that armed revolution may be necessary to protect American liberties, according to a gun control poll conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University (p