“There’s a lot of talk about it, and I think that’s the first thing you see. Where there’s talk, there’s more interest,” Spencer said at the Soufan Center’s Global Security Forum in Doha. “That’s where people who are people on the fringes. [who are] potentially not mentally stable, [and] not even affiliated with them, I think that’s where they see this rallying cry and their opportunity. Now ‘it’s time to buy a gun, run people over with a car,’ do whatever they’re going to do.”
I take exception to that hyperbole. First, most of the people he is referring to already own guns, multiple guns in many cases. Second, running people over with a car is not a typical weapon of choice for domestic terrorists. It has happened, but the normal choice of violence is looting, burning, vandalism, harassment, assault and the like. His statement reminds me of this one by former president Obama in April of 2008:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
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