Did Ted Nugent Really Threaten the President?

Rocker Ted Nugent was at the National Rifle Association convention — that’s an important detail — this past Sunday when he said:

“If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

“Think” Progress is in hair-on-fire mode, even forwarding Nugent’s comment over to the Secret Service as a threat to the president. The Secret Service says it is looking into Nugent’s comment and will take “appropriate action.” After Cartagena, what that means is up to some interpretation.

Here’s Nugent’s comment in context.

It’s obvious from the clip that Nugent was making a comment about what Obama would do in his second term. Nugent is a well known gun rights activist. He was at the NRA convention, where gun rights are on everybody’s mind. A fair reading of his comment is that he expects Obama to come after guns if he wins a second term, and that as an outspoken gun rights activist, Nugent expects the president to come after his own guns. Nugent, one would presume, wouldn’t turn his guns over and would therefore end up in jail for defying the government, or dead a la Ruby Ridge if he doesn’t surrender to arrest.

That jail or dead part may be a bit on the paranoid side, but seeing Obama as a threat to the Second Amendment isn’t. Obama is a threat to the Second Amendment. The president has promised the Brady bunch that he’s working on gun control “under the radar.” His ATF ran Fast and Furious, running guns to Mexico with bloody consequences for two Americans and hundreds of Mexicans, while top administration officials denounced American gun rights as the cause of much of Mexico’s gun violence. The president has gone around Congress on immigration, and has used the power of the federal bureaucracy to go after industries that he doesn’t like. He is no friend of the right to bear arms. Obama openly dislikes the Constitution as a charter of “negative rights.” Nugent leads up to the jail or dead comment hammering on the left’s disrespect for the Constitution and the rights it was written to protect.

I hate to be Captain Obvious here, but “Think” Progress has once again failed to think.

Update: Now CNN is following “Think” Progress with this misleading headline: “Nugent threatens death if Obama wins in November.” The only literal death Nugent is “threatening” is his own. The bit that CNN highlights, about “riding into battle” and chopping off heads, is way over the top but clearly metaphorical.