Left Rudder

As I’ve noted a number of times, gunloons seem to attract more than their fair share of racists, bigots and kooks.

Surely the fact folks like Larry Pratt, Randy Weaver and various white supremacist ‘militia’-types all seem to find support in gunloon circles is evidence. Having engaged gunloons for some time, I fully understand that many gunloons are racists, bigots, and kooks.

And some gunloons are aware of this and would wish to play down or mask their associations with these dubious groups and characters. But, like Homer Simpson to a donut, it seems gunloons can’t resist.

Recently, a commenter in another forum brought up Julia Gorin. Gorin, a failed rightwing comedienne and actress (anybody see Ax ‘Em?) wrote an op/ed for some rightwing rag that attacked gun control advocates as girly men or worse. It was pretty typical rightwing gunloon drivel.

But Gorin also has another sideline; she often advocated in favor of Serbs like Slobodan Milosevic, the Butcher of the Balkans:

At the time of his death, Milosevic faced 66 charges, including those of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He was called the “Butcher of the Balkans” because of the ethnic cleansing campaign, in which Bosnian Serbs systematically killed Bosnian Muslims.

Where do the gunloons find these folks?

David Kopel has long established his kook status in gunloonery. In 1994, dishonest Dave wrote an op/ed which cited, favorably, Samuel Francis. Who is Samuel Francis?

The 1990s saw Francis radicalized to the point where he is today the chief editor for a leading white supremacist hate group, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC)*. That tie was initiated in 1993, when Francis published his first column in the CCC’s tabloid, Citizens Informer, complaining that the media ignored whites murdered by blacks while police brutality victim Rodney King, characterized as a black criminal, was celebrated.

The next year, Francis made his first appearance at a conference of American Renaissance*, a magazine devoted to eugenics (the “science” of breeding better human beings) and allegedly race-based characteristics (such as IQ levels, sexual aggressiveness and propensity to criminality). In June 1994, Francis praised the CCC in a Times column for “planting seeds that may eventually bear greater fruit” than the Republican Party (the “Stupid Party,” in Francis’ phrase).

Amusingly, Dishonest Dave also refers to J.Neil Schuman as a “firearms expert.”