On Friday, the FBI arrested 53-year-old Bradley Bunn in Colorado after finding four pipe bombs and a bunch of gun powder in his home — just hours before he planned to go, armed, to a Reopen America rally. He is being charged with possession of illegal destructive devices.
In the days preceding his arrest, Bunn was posting on social media about his plans to attend the rally armed and aggressively encouraging others to come and bring their assault rifles with them. He reportedly became increasingly agitated and angry, and eventually someone reading his posts tipped off the Feds to the fact that he had a bunch of pipe bombs at his house.
His Facebook profile picture reads "When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty," a slogan which he apparently took very seriously.
According to Bunn's eldest daughter, he is former military and has had some issues since coming back from Iraq.
Bunn's oldest daughter told CBS4 investigator Rick Sallinger that her father served in Iraq in 2003 and had explained to her that he was in a convoy that hit an improvised explosive device. She asked that her name not be used. She added he hadn't been the same since then.
The daughter said Bunn was unhappy about the lack of testing and treatment he received from the military and he was upset about the circumstances in which he left the army. Information about Bunn's treatment and military status could not be immediately confirmed.
His neighbors, predictably, described him as keeping to himself mostly.
Bunn's explanation to the Feds who arrested him was that he planned to use the pipe bombs, which he claims he doesn't even know how he built, in the event of a home invasion. You know, like people normally do with pipe bombs.
"Because I don't know much about this stuff, I don't exactly know what went into the device that I built," Bunn said, according to the complaint. "That's the best that I can tell you."
Bunn told agents that he planned to use the bombs if he were the victim of a "hard entry," or a home invasion, in the middle of the night, the complaint said. Bunn said intruders would "clump" together instead of spread out because of fear.
So he's saying that if someone were going to rob his house in the middle of the night, he was going to just blow up his entire house ... with a self-defense pipe bomb that he claims he doesn't know how he built.
Given that people found out about these pipe bombs only because he was posting about how they should all take assault rifles to a Reopen America rally, this story seems pretty unlikely. The far more likely scenario is that these things were related in some way. Otherwise, why would pipe bombs be brought up?
There are going to be more of this guy and they're not all gonna be caught by the FBI, or by anyone. They're going to end up killing someone, or many someones.
So much of the rightwing rhetoric surrounding not just the pandemic but everything else that's been going on in recent years is designed to encourage and empower people like Bunn to do something drastic. These people are told that it is their right and duty to overthrow the government, that anything they don't like is tyranny, that they are patriots. They're told that the stakes are incredibly high, life or death. Now, for some, that may just get them really jazzed to go out and vote for Donald Trump and say crazy shit on the internet. For others, that's giving them permission to go and do something like set off some pipe bombs.
It's not going to end well.
[ABC News]
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