‘Sheriff Mack’ wielding new weapon: a message
I’m not surprise to see he’s another Skousen acolyte.
For years, Richard Mack wrote books and gave speeches, arguing for gun rights, sovereign states and “constitutional sheriffs.”
At first, not many people listened to Mack, a two-term Graham County sheriff who lives in Safford. Many wrote him off as a radical.
But that’s changing. The tea party’s nationwide emergence and Arizona’s drift to the right are bringing Mack’s ideas from the political edge into the eddies of the mainstream.
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As a Provo officer in about 1984, Mack attended a class for police officers on the U.S. Constitution, led by W. Cleon Skousen, a right-wing Mormon intellectual and former FBI agent. Skousen was a fervent anti-communist who wrote about religious and political topics and serves now as an inspiration for figures such as state Senate President Russell Pearce and talk-show host Glenn Beck.
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Since 2000, Mack worked for Gun Owners of America and sold cars, but he has in a sense followed in Skousen’s footsteps. Skousen made a career of speaking and writing about threats to America - mainly communism. Mack sees the threat as the federal government usurping local power and individual freedoms.
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A used car salesman with a message. Pretty scary, actually.