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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen the government actually feared a Bowling Green massacre -- from a heavily-armed neo-Nazi
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08 FEB 2017 AT 10:56 ET
The year was 2012. The place was Bowling Green, Ohio. A federal raid had uncovered what the authorities feared were the makings of a massacre. There were 18 firearms, among them two AR15 assault rifles, an AR10 assault rifle and a Remington Model 700 sniper rifle. There was body armor, too, and the authorities counted some 40,000 rounds of ammunition. An extremist had been arrested, and prosecutors suspected that he had been aiming to carry out a wide assortment of killings.
This defendant, quite simply, was a well-funded, well-armed and focused one-man army of racial and religious hate, prosecutors said in a court filing.
The man arrested and charged was Richard Schmidt, a middle-aged owner of a sports-memorabilia business at a mall in town. Prosecutors would later call him a white supremacist. His planned targets, federal authorities said, had been African-Americans and Jews. Theyd found a list with the names and addresses of those to be assassinated, including the leaders of NAACP chapters in Michigan and Ohio.
But Schmidt wound up being sentenced to less than six years in prison, after a federal judge said prosecutors had failed to adequately establish that he was a political terrorist, and he is scheduled for release in February 2018. The foiling of what the government worried was a credible plan for mass murder gained little national attention.
For some concerned about Americas vulnerability to terrorism, the very real, mostly forgotten case of Richard Schmidt in Bowling Green, Ohio, deserves an important place in any debate about what is real and what is fake, what gets reported on by the news media and what doesnt. Those deeply worried about domestic far-right terrorism believe United States authorities, across many administrations, have regularly underplayed the threat, and that the media has repeatedly underreported it. Perhaps we have become trapped in one view of what constitutes the terrorist threat, and as the case of Schmidt shows, thats a problem.
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http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/when-the-government-actually-feared-a-bowling-green-massacre-from-a-heavily-armed-neo-nazi/
frazzled
(18,402 posts)Especially in light of the T.-administration's plan to limit the DHS in its efforts to combat terrorist acts only to "Islamic radicals."
Indeed, Reuters reported last week that the Department of Homeland Security is planning to retool its Countering Violent Extremism program to focus solely on Islamic radicals. Government sources told the news agency the program would be rebranded as Countering Islamic Extremism or Countering Radical Islamic Extremism, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.