Armed picnics and snipers at Family Dollar: Life in a town with a government-approved militia

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : Though Gardner and Abbott previously claimed to reporters that they were the leaders of the Bedford Militia, Falls, the militia's current commanding officer, says that's not true and instead claims the group's first commanding officer, Kurt Feigel, was booted from that position after he told a reporter that the Second Amendment "is not about hunting.
48% : Bob Good, a Republican serving his first term in the US House representing the region, was on stage getting fired up, discussing his efforts on Capitol Hill to defend the Constitution, by which he meant the Second Amendment.
45% : As Shane Bauer wrote for Mother Jones when he went undercover to report on a militia patrolling the southern border in 2016, "While today's militia movement is made up of grassroots groups with the self-proclaimed mission of protecting the country against a tyrannical federal government, the militias enshrined in the Constitution were heavily regulated, top-down organizations."
45% : "Our message that we're trying to get across is that we're very much for the defense, we're very much for the Second Amendment, but at the core we're here to support the community," he adds.
42% : Vigilante groups may be defined as organizations formed to create and enforce laws of their own making in the supposed absence of adequate law enforcement," Hofstrader writes.
38% : Just as many other militias took to the streets opposite Black Lives Matter protests, so did the Bedford Militia, in an armed standoff that led to a riot in Lynchburg that the community is still reeling from.

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