Over just the last few weeks, three unarmed African-American men have been killed by police. After the Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, President Obama urged all Americans to "remember this young man through reflection and understanding" and to "comfort each other and talk with one another in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds."
But some Americans have had enough of the "lawless, tyrannical police," and are taking matters into their own hands.
Among the first to speak up was William Kostric, who repeated Thomas Jefferson's credo that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots." Kostric has plenty of company. Rep. Michele Bachmann agreed, declaring "I want people in Missouri armed and dangerous on this issue." Glenn Beck warned that "violence will come" and with it, "rivers of blood." As Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association (NRA) explained how he would keep rogue cops in line:

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

A chorus of voices has echoed LaPierre's call for the good guys in the African-American community to take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them. Gun Appreciation Day founder Larry Ward lamented:

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history."

Tea Party enthusiast and one-time Congressional candidate Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher concurred with Ward's diagnosis. "Well, blacks weren't allowed to own guns in the south, that's a historical fact as well," he argued about the fates of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, "So, it would seem that the argument would apply there as well." Radio host Rush Limbaugh put the needless tragedy in Ferguson in its full historical context:

"If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? If John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?"

Meanwhile in Nevada, rancher and freedom fighter Cliven Bundy urged his supporters to back the Show Me State protesters in Ferguson. Bundy, who identifies himself as "a citizen of Nevada and not a citizen of the territory of the United States," had some advice for the demonstrators facing off against the police in Missouri. "Let me tell you one more thing about the Negro," he said. "They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton." And carry guns. One of Bundy's well-armed allies, already on the ground in Ferguson, was "overheard boasting that he had two agent[s] in his gun sight and could 'take them down.'" For his part, Bundy warned that African-Americans will have to make a stand against the militarized police force in Missouri:

"If we don't solve this problem this way, we will face these same guns in a civil war.' "

Top Republicans in Nevada agreed. GOP Senator Dean Heller said of the demonstrators, "What others may call domestic terrorists, I call patriots." Sharron Angle, who almost joined Heller in the Senate, hoped the seeming epidemic of unjustified police violence towards African-American men could be halted before there is more bloodshed:

"I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the problems in Ferguson."

Spoken like a true patriot.