You can bet they have an ear everywhere.
Back in the 1980s we used to go out to a gravel pit and shoot guns for the fun of it. Someone jokingly called us “Ruy’s Raiders” and the name stuck.
Then a few months later, the FBI raided a house near our town and arrested a man and later several other anti-government radicals.
On TV, they announced the arrests and were looking for another named Ruy Raider! Talk about the hackles going up on everyone’s neck! We did very little shooting after that.
None of us were anti-government.
They could easily have created a phony case against you—claimed you were the leader of a super-secret extremist group—produced dozens of witnesses—and generated media coverage that would convince a jury to convict you of whatever crime they claimed....
Nobody believes it will happen to them—until it does....
They could easily have created a phony case against you—claimed you were the leader of a super-secret extremist group—produced dozens of witnesses—and generated media coverage that would convince a jury to convict you of whatever crime they claimed....
Nobody believes it will happen to them—until it does....
One one occasion some guy came by the gun show table wanting to talk about full auto and how easy it was just to drop in a part and how great it would be to have something like that. RED FLAG! So I told him that I knew what the inside of an M-16 lower looked like since I had cleaned one for my uncle and said that you can't just drop something in and change an ar-15 to an m-16, but you would need a milling machine. And then I told him that if you buy a milling machine and go ahead and convert it to an m16 what do you have? and he was practically panting at this point - so I answered my own question and told him you have a federal fireams violation that will cost you money and very likely jail time I don't recommend doing it. Not getting the response he wanted he left and went on to the NRA table where I presume he tried to get someone to talk about how they converted one.
On another occasion we had a guy talking about needing to "take some direct action" , so I told him to come to an inner group meeting (which was actually an envelope stuffing party where we had about 4500 fliers to put in envelopes to go to some backsliding republican's district.) He showed up all ready to get someone to commit to committing a criminal act, but we got about 4 hours of envelope stuffing out of him He didn't come back.