David Riden, a Donald Trump delegate who will represent Tennessee at the GOP convention,
told Mother Jones that U.S. leaders who abuse the Constitution should be "killed by American citizens with weapons."
Riden, a retired nuclear engineer, told the magazine that the Second Amendment was put in place to protect U.S. citizens against tyranny. Assuming the federal government will eventually "follow the path of all other governments," he said that at that point, action should be taken.
"The Constitution should remain, but the people that are abusing it should be, the polite word is, eliminated. The harsh word is killed. And they're killed by American citizens with weapons," Riden told Mother Jones. "And if people have tanks, assault weapons, if they have bombs — they need to have the weaponry necessary to be able to overthrow the federal government."
Riden took part in the "Continental Congress of 2009," where he and others chartered a series of articles calling for replacing the Department of Homeland Security with citizen militias and abolishing all gun laws.
His views go even further now, he said, and he shared those views with Trump's campaign when he applied to be a delegate.
Now he has ties to the Patriot Movement, one of sundry "sovereign citizen" groups that have multiplied during Obama's two terms, Mother Jones reported.
The Patriot Movement is spurred by several theories, one of which is that Mexico is planning to "reconquer" the American Southwest,
according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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