Virginians who fret about being forcibly implanted with microchips were likely disappointed this week.

A state bill that passed the House would have made it illegal for employers or insurance companies to require that the human tracking devices be embedded in people. Violators would have faced a $500 fine. The bill died in a Senate subcommittee on Feb. 23.

The bill’s sponsor, Mark L. Cole (R-Fredericksburg), said he was motivated by privacy concerns, along with fears that the microchips could become the dreaded mark predicted in the Book of Revelation, according to The Washington Post. “My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” he told the Post. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.” ( continue to full post… )

Public support for gun control has been steadily declining, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a ruling that strengthens an individual’s right to own firearms and President Obama has said nothing to suggest he will take on gun-rights enthusiasts.

No matter.

Gun rights advocates, including some in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement for whom the specter of gun restrictions is a recurring theme, are planning to march in Washington, D.C., and some individual states on April 19.

Speakers scheduled for the “Second Amendment March” in D.C. include

• Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, a conspiracy-minded, antigovernment organization composed mostly of active-duty police and military officers and veterans;
• Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who travels the country preaching about the evils of the federal government;
• Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, who advocated the formation of citizen militias in the United States in the early 1990s and addressed a three-day meeting of neo-Nazis and Christian Identity adherents in Colorado in 1992; and,
• Nicki Stallard, a transsexual gun rights activist who is active in Pink Pistols, a gay gun rights organization.

Gun rights supporters assumed the worst even before Obama was elected. The National Rifle Association initiated a membership drive dubbed, “Prepare for the Storm in 2008.” In the months before and immediately after Obama’s election, firearms and ammunition sales soared in anticipation of new gun restrictions. Those fears were reinforced a month after Obama took office, when Attorney General Eric Holder said the administration would try to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration.

But the administration quickly backpedaled. Not only has the president made no effort to restrict gun ownership, he even signed legislation allowing guns in national parks and on Amtrak trains. (These provisions were amendments to larger, unrelated pieces of legislation that he supported.) The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which endorsed Obama in 2008, recently gave him a grade of “F” on every issue on which it scored him. ( continue to full post… )

Meet Mr. End Time Watchman, a gun-waving, violence-threatening, conspiracy-theorizing gent in a white cowboy hat who makes videos in his garage. In this video, he lacks the voice to convey menace the way Clint Eastwood did as Dirty Harry, but he gives it his best: “Are you feeling lucky, New World Order?” he asks, waving an immense handgun. “I’m gonna shove this .50-caliber up your nose.”

So be warned, all of you who are part of the New World Order. When you come to take his guns away, he’s waiting for you. His rant lasts for more than five minutes in this particular video, and at the end there are links to some of his other masterpieces. They’re at once funny and scary, with some emphasis on the latter, because the sentiments he expresses are those making the rounds in right-wing extremist circles these days.

And as the Southern Poverty Law Center reported recently, there are clear signs of a revival of the virulently anti-government “Patriot” movement of the 1990s — paramilitary militias, tax defiers, “sovereign citizens” and the like — united in their determination to oppose President Obama and the socialistic troops of the “New World Order.”

Mr. End Time Watchman is one of their spokesmen.