They went and did it. They are now legitimate targets.
A University of California, Santa Cruz biologist whose home was firebombed over the weekend feared for his family’s future Sunday while a spokesman for a radical animal-rights group said the attacks were the consequences for performing research on animals.
The volatile rhetoric left UC-Santa Cruz on edge Sunday, a day after a pair of firebombings on two university biomedical researchers had authorities looking for clues and tightening security around researchers.
FBI officials were expected to join the search today, in what authorities have called an act of “domestic terrorism.”
Just before 6 a.m. Saturday, molecular biologist David Feldheim’s home was firebombed, forcing him, his wife and their two young children to flee down a fire escape. About the same time, a Volvo station wagon belonging to a different, unidentified researcher was destroyed by another firebomb. Police described the explosives as a “Molotov cocktail on steroids,” and said the attack on the Feldheims’ house was being investigated as an attempted homicide because the family was at home.
“Obviously, I am upset and worried for my family’s safety in the future,” Feldheim wrote in an e-mail to the Santa Cruz Sentinel on Sunday. “This incident came close to doing some real harm.”
Feldheim said he had installed a security system and motion lights at his home in response to a previous threat, and police were checking whether the cameras could help identify the attackers.
They can no longer claim that they target only unoccupied structures and have now put themselves on the list of deadly threats.
The managers of the UC system were warned that these attacks would escalate until an occupied structure was attacked and/or someone was killed. But they treated the previous attacks as just a few over-exuberant “activists” who meant no harm.
No more. If they show up on the front lawn of another staffer, that staffer now has the right to use deadly force to repel the threat.
I was wondering how long it would be. Too bad most of these scientists probably don’t have the stones to own a gun and the will to use it.
I don’t know. About half of the scientists that I work with are avid 2nd amendment people (but less than a quarter of the MicroBio’s that I know, so you may have a point there).
That’s the irony, many of the Bio and MicroBio scientists I’ve known have been caring, compassionate, and very non-violent. They are people who will work hard and bend over backward to make certain the animals in their care are treated well and do not suffer needlessly. For them to be targeted for violence because of the supposed violence and mis-treatement they cause just goes to show that the terrorists have no concept of who they target.
Or maybe they do, and they know that these people are the least likely to toss around buckshot first and ask for introductions later. How often do you find these animal rights terrorists harassing ranchers so directly?
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