Law-Abiding Gunloons
Ed Brown (r.) shown with NRA hero and white supremacist, Randy Weaver (l.)
PLAINFIELD, N.H. — The fugitive couple had been waiting on their porch for nearly eight months for law enforcement officials to make their move. “The word is ‘poised,’ ” Ed Brown said recently, handgun wedged in his jeans, AK-47 assault rifle behind the door, as he stared at a yard of cut grass and bags of explosives hanging from trees. His wife, Elaine, kept her pistol inside a pouch with her reading glasses.
A retired exterminator and a dentist in their 60s, the Browns don’t believe the federal government has authority to tax income. In January, after a decade of not paying tax on nearly $1.9 million in earnings, they were convicted of tax-related criminal charges, and four months later, they were sentenced in absentia to 63 months in prison.
He’s armed, he’s poised, he’s ready…
But late Thursday night, U.S. marshals posing as supporters entered the Browns’ property and arrested them on their porch without incident. “They invited us in, and we escorted them out,” U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier told the Associated Press.
At a news conference, Monier said officials found booby traps in the woods on the 100-plus-acre property and weapons, ammunition and homemade bombs inside and outside the house. He said more charges are likely.
It was hardly surprising for the Browns to have considered the agents to be supporters. Through daily radio broadcasts and Internet postings, the couple had become a cause celebre for tax protesters, a disparate movement that claims federal taxes are fraudulent. “Show me the law and I’ll pay the tax,” Ed Brown, who was involved in a “patriot” militia in the 1990s, said in an interview several days before his arrest. “Don’t show me the law and I’m not going to give you a dime. What part of that don’t you understand?” Wearily, he wife added: “The only way to leave here is free, or dead.”
The Browns repeatedly compared their situation to the confrontations at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and Waco, Tex., a year later. Those events, which ended in bloodshed, prompted the Justice Department to adapt its approach to prolonged sieges of this type, emphasizing patience. Recently, the couple held a news conference with Randy Weaver, whose wife and son were fatally shot in the Ruby Ridge siege.
What a travesty of justice, the gunloons will howl.
Cut off from the rest of the world, the Browns said they expected help to come. The couple’s ordeal would likely be over by the spring, said Ed Brown, when a “warrior class” will rise up against the “Zionist Freemasons” who, he said, have infiltrated the echelons of power and control the world.
During his conspiratorial soliloquies, Ed Brown would occasionally lose his temper and raise the specter of all-out war. He warned that if he if and his wife were killed, retribution would be enacted against journalists, judges and law enforcement officials on a secret list. Monier said that that by making such threats the couple “turned this into more than just a tax case.”
Another posterboy for the NRA.
