Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502270005
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Pulaski resident James Mullins was worried about what he saw as government's crackdown on gun owners' rights. So he did what other hard-core gun supporters across the country have been doing in the past three years: He formed his own militia.
The Blue Ridge Hunt Club, with its innocuous name and fledgling membership, would seem to many, as Mullins' mother later testified, like men who wanted to "play Boy Scouts."
To the government, the club was a front for a paramilitary training group intent on battle with federal authorities.
True, Mullins admits. But he says he would have attacked government officers only if they struck first.
No hunting went on in the Blue Ridge Hunt Club, he said, but neither did any violence.
"It was more or less a fellowship thing, with military overtones, militia overtones," Mullins said from the Roanoke City Jail, where he has been held since his arrest seven months ago. He was denied bond after a judge ruled that he was a danger for writing a letter threatening government witnesses.
The hunt club's mission was to effect political change, Mullins said. The target practices and firing of illegal weapons were just side activities "to cut the boredom down."
The club met just three times last summer, but that was enough to get five members indicted on a total of 36 counts of federal firearms charges.
Trials for four of the members were scheduled to begin Monday, but three of them likely will plead guilty instead, and the trial for the fourth will be continued. All four are charged with conspiracy to commit firearms violations as well as individual weapons charges.
Mullins, 41, said he plans to plead guilty to seven of the 16 counts against him. "I knew the consequences. I went ahead and took my chances," he said. "So I'll take the punishment, even though I disagree with the laws."
Mullins was the club's president and founder and Nelson Thompson its vice president and "primary firearms instructor." The idea for the club and many of the positions it took came from Thompson, according to other members, who admit they willingly agreed.
All along, Thompson was wearing a wire and recording for federal agents what was being said at the meetings. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also gave Thompson and a convicted felon more than $1,600 to buy guns illegally from Mullins and another member, Paul Peterson.
No one was arrested simply for being a member of the club, but some of their activities during meetings got them in trouble. After members' arrests, police said they found a stockpile of weapons, including machine guns and practice grenade fuses.
"Hunt clubs" were often code names used by the Ku Klux Klan, according to the Klanwatch Project of Alabama, which has started a "militia task force" because of concern about their connections with white supremacists. But Mullins said he didn't want anything to do with hate groups; the name, he said, was voted on by the membership.
"If I'd have chosen it, I would have called it the Blue Ridge Militia," member William Stump II said. "The purpose was to raise a militia. A militia is the only delegated law enforcement officers to the Congress. We were trying to comply with the Constitution."
The hunt club had planned to put itself "at the disposal of sheriffs and the governor," he said.
The men who made up the Blue Ridge Hunt Club claim no ties to others in the loosely organized national militia movement, which sprung up after the deaths of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. The standoff between the Davidians and federal agents, which ended with the deaths of at least 78 people, was proof to many in the movement that the federal government is willing to kill people who bear arms.
Mullins and Stump say they viewed their hunt club as a militia, making it the only known militia in Virginia. In Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and at least 15 other states, militia members number in the thousands. They're armed, trained and ready to kill government officers who threaten their lives and lifestyles.
Like elsewhere, the group in Pulaski decided to form a militia after watching the battle in Waco.
Another catalyst militia members nationwide cite is the 1992 shootout at Randy Weaver's home in Idaho. The alleged white supremacist refused to surrender to U.S. marshals, who surrounded his house and killed his wife and 14-year-old son during an 11-day siege. Weaver was being sought for failing to appear in court on a weapons charge.
"All these militia groups out there that are organizing right now, they're the only legal law enforcement," Stump says. "Having a gun is not enough. You have to have a militia. It's the only security."
Lewis LaRue, a Washington and Lee University law professor, disagrees. He says all private militias have been held to be illegal.
"The militia is always a state-organized, publicly organized body," he said.
It's a free country, he said, and everyone's entitled to interpret the Constitution their own way.
"Acting on your interpretation, now, is another problem."
The militias believe that the Brady bill and President Clinton's crime bill banning certain types of assault weapons also are aimed at disarming the American people.
"The passage of gun-control legislation has fanned the flames of anti-government sentiment and led to the explosion of private militia groups around the country," Klanwatch director Danny Welch said.
Mullins said he was a weapons expert in the Air Force and has been fascinated by guns for a long time. He knew how to make a silencer and fashion a rifle into a machine gun long before the hunt club began, he said. He is charged with illegally possessing both.
After the Weaver and Waco killings, he said, "I felt it was time to use these skills. You can't fight a war without the weapons of war."
The militia movement is held together by generally shared beliefs against gun control, public education, big business and government regulation that, members believe, is taking away individual freedoms. Members of the movement talk of "the New World Order" as a threat to Americans.
Mullins understands why people might see him as dangerous or radical.
"Maybe in some respects, some people might view me as that," he said. "I consider myself more a traditionalist."
Watchdog groups are concerned that these militias also are becoming havens for racists and radical anti-abortionists. Militias are "tailor-made for white supremacists," said Joe Roy of the Klanwatch Project in Alabama.
There appear to be few formal ties between militia organizations that have, according to different sources, sprung up in 18 to 30 states. Most are connected through shared propaganda and speakers. The Internet contains computer bulletin boards full of militia discussion groups.
Some members of the hunt club, which numbered maybe 15, began talking in late 1993 about forming a group because of "all the problems going on with the laws," Mullins said.
"It was just a group of citizens concerned with things going on around us," he said.
But the government also found documents advocating terrorism and guerrilla warfare to fight gun control, written by Mullins.
Mullins acknowledges responsibility for writings found on a computer disc that indicate the club planned to destroy telephone relay centers, bridges and fuel storage tanks and to raid the National Guard Armory in Pulaski to steal weapons.
But those actions would have come only in the event that the government attacked American citizens first, Mullins insists. The hunt club's writings also include this, according to government transcripts: "We will not act until the government does something to justify our actions. They must strike the first blow!"
There were no dates or concrete plans to take those steps, says Brenda Olinger, Mullins' sister. "This was, 'What if it ever comes down to this?'"
Although not a member of the hunt club, Olinger shares her brother's political views. She says her brother should not have had unregistered silencers or a machine gun, but believes he was set up by Thompson and the government.
"These are not six terrorists out here running wild," she said. "They were working toward political change. Also, at the same time, they wanted to be prepared only, only in case there's civil uprising - and I'm not saying there's going to be in my lifetime."
Adds Stump: "All we were doing was training for self-defense if armed men came into Pulaski and committed murder. But you don't believe that's ever going to happen, so what are you worried about?"
The only kind of gun control he believes in is "good marksmanship."
Stump says he's not an active part of the nationwide militia movement ready to take up arms against the government, if need be. Instead, he describes himself as a constitutionalist.
"I'm part of a movement to restore legal government to the commonwealth of Virginia. That means holding Congress to their agreement to provide for the regulation of the militia."
by CNB