An 80-year-old Michigan man who joked in public about a very powerful device he hoped to actually use to shoot the President of the United States has discovered that such rhetoric carries real-world consequences.
According to WND, retired professor Wesley Arnold made the remarks during a Warren, Michigan, city council meeting, prompting a swift response from federal authorities. Arnold told officials, I ordered a high-powered ATL 36X arriving shortly, which I hope to actually use to shoot the president of the United States. Im not kidding, adding, This is a very high, powerful item. Its great for a headshot at a distance
Within days, the Secret Service visited Arnold and confiscated a handgun he owned, underscoring that even comments framed as sarcasm or wordplay are taken seriously when they involve threats against the commander in chief.
The controversy stemmed from Arnolds implication that the ATL 36X was a weapon, when in reality the term is associated with camera equipment and appears in searches for several photographic products. A Detroit Fox affiliate reported, The elderly man says he was talking about photos of the president but used a poor choice of words, a characterization that highlights the growing tension between claims of jokes and the legal boundaries surrounding threats.
Arnold has since insisted to reporters that the entire episode was a misunderstanding and that he never intended actual harm.
No, Im a harmless old man and I believe in freedom of speech he said, invoking First Amendment protections even as law enforcement treated his remarks as potentially dangerous.
When a Detroit Fox reporter pressed him on whether his speech was a little bit threatening, Arnold conceded that it turned out that way.
He further explained, Im in the habit of saying you shoot a headshot, or you shoot a picture rather than you take a picture, attempting to recast his language as nothing more than photographic jargon.
Fox 2 clarified the point directly, asking, So when you said shoot, you meant by a camera, not a gun? Of course, Arnold replied, though it remained unclear to many observers why he chose a city council meeting as the venue to discuss a camera lens in such provocative terms.
Later, Arnold tried again to distance himself from any suggestion of violence, stating, I have no intent of shooting any public official except with a telephoto lens. Yet his comments landed in a political climate where President Donald Trump has faced not only a series of actual assassination attempts, but also a relentless barrage of threats and dehumanizing rhetoric from the left.
Democrats and other leftists have routinely smeared President Trump as a Hitler, a label that, historically, has been used to justify extreme actions against political opponents rather than encourage civil debate.
Against that backdrop, even an old mans attempt at snark about a headshot at a distance cannot be brushed aside as harmless banter, especially when it feeds into a culture that increasingly normalizes violent imagery against conservative leaders.
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