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GUN VIOLENCE
WASHINGTON POST SERIES (MARCH 2023)
The radicals’ rifle ... Armed groups on the right
and left exploit the AR-15 as both tool and symbol
WASHINGTON POST SERIES (MARCH 2023)
The radicals’ rifle ... Armed groups on the right
and left exploit the AR-15 as both tool and symbol
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The radicals’ rifle
Armed groups on the right and left exploit the AR-15 as both tool and symbol
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-armed-extremist-militia-groups/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I have not experienced US gun violence directly, but I am fairly good at understanding data and paying attention to news about current events. And current events in the USA are more often than not dominated by some mass shooting somewhere in the country.
This Washington Post series documents some of the disturbing reality about gun violence and the aftermath. It may disappear from the 'news' very quickly but for those impacted the trauma lasts a long time if not for ever.
Peter Burgess
Armed groups on the right and left exploit the AR-15 as both tool and symbol
Story written by Hannah Allam ... Photography by Jim Urquhart
Published on March 27 at 6:13 a.m.
DURHAM, N.C. — The five friends had spent the morning stalking through the trees and crossing a creek in military formation.
Now, after a quick lunch, it was time to shoot.
The first one up borrowed a trainer’s rifle, peered through the scope at the target 35 yards away and pulled the trigger. “Hit!” an instructor called.
It was the first time that D, a nonbinary community organizer, had fired an AR-15.
The weight of the moment hit them later, once the adrenaline faded, as D described feeling simultaneously empowered by a new self-defense skill and burdened by a fear that made it seem reasonable, even prudent, to buy a semiautomatic rifle.
“I never wanted to be here,” said D, voice trembling and eyes brimming with tears, speaking on the condition that only their first initial be used due to security concerns. “Because someone’s going to shoot up a drag show?”
Until last year, D contributed to far-left activism by serving as a street medic in the thick of racial justice demonstrations. The decision to take up arms came gradually, D said, in tandem with a rise in right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people. By June, D owned a handgun, and in early fall they began training with other leftists and saving up for a rifle.
Now, D’s reluctant embrace of the AR-15 adds one more foot soldier to the volatile mix of armed movements that have proliferated over the past decade, a predominantly right-wing mobilization whose violence has fueled far-left “community defense” organizing in response.
Confrontations have erupted in Texas, Oregon and elsewhere in recent months as leftists with long guns protect LGBTQ gatherings from armed right-wing agitators who baselessly smear trans people and drag-show artists as “groomers” and pedophiles. Such scenes look ominous to extremism analysts who warn of an elevated risk of political violence from vigilantes who wield the AR-15 as both tool and symbol.
Militants say they favor the AR-15 for all the same reasons mainstream enthusiasts do — it’s easy to handle, affordable and customizable — but they also exploit the fear surrounding the weapon.
“It’s just a tool, an inanimate object, but it is polarizing, and it’ll make people treat you differently,” said Cody, 26, a member of an anti-government militia group near Norfolk, who spoke on the condition that his full name be withheld for security reasons. “It will make people treat you differently if you are armed with an AR-15.”
Cody, 26, a member of an anti-government militia group in southeastern Virginia, cleans
an AR-15 rifle in his home in September. 'It will make people treat you differently if you
are armed with an AR-15,' said Cody, shown here displaying his collection.
The AR-15’s image as an instrument of domestic terror has been crystallized in recent years by its use in a string of hate-filled mass shootings. AR-15-wielding extremists targeted elderly congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Jewish attack in U.S. history; Jewish families on the last day of Passover in Poway, Calif., in 2019; and, last year, Black customers at a supermarket in Buffalo, to name a few.
Other far-right factions throughout the country have shown up with AR-15s to intimidate voters and local officials, harass Muslims outside of mosques, and stand as self-appointed guards at pro-Donald Trump rallies. Anti-government militias also have brandished AR-15s in armed standoffs with federal agents, such as the one in 2014 led by rancher Cliven Bundy in Bunkerville, Nev. “Boogaloo” extremists, part of a right-leaning movement calling for violent revolution, have made the AR-15 a core part of their look, sometimes adorning their weapons with coded symbols.
“It is one of several ways they are articulating that what they are doing is warfare,” said Kathleen Belew, a historian at Northwestern University and author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” “The AR-15 remains the emblematic cultural weapon.”
Two armed groups — one on the far right, one on the far left — agreed to allow a Washington Post reporter and photographer to document training sessions on two weekends last fall, on the condition that identifying details be withheld. The gatherings were a rare look at how militants on opposing extremes of American society are arming in anticipation of unrest, and overlap in the belief that civilians with rifles — and specifically, AR-15s — provide an important check on federal powers.
There is no parallel, however, when it comes to the use of violence by the extreme right and left. FBI and Homeland Security officials repeatedly have called far-right extremists the most urgent domestic terrorism concern; the White House strategy document on domestic terrorism specifies that white supremacists and violent militia groups “are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.”
By comparison, attacks by militant leftists are almost never deadly, according to attack records, and typically involve “melee violence” at protests rather than the premeditated mass shootings or standoffs carried out by the far right. Far-left violence in the past decade, according to a report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, “pales in comparison” with other categories of extremism, though the report warns that “ongoing trends in American society could lead to increased frequency and lethality.”“It’s just a tool, an inanimate object, but it is polarizing,
and it’ll make people treat you differently.”
Cody, a member of an anti-government militia group
Experts say there is no firm count of armed extremist groups in the United States on the left or the right.
These groups “repeatedly form, splinter into separate units and dissolve, as members’ interests wax and wane,” writes militia researcher Amy Cooter of Middlebury University’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism.
More concerning, analysts say, is that the violent rhetoric of once-fringe movements has now seeped into the Republican mainstream, with extremists exploiting white-grievance politics and anti-LGBTQ bigotry at all levels of political office. In 2022, according to an Anti-Defamation League report, more than 100 candidates who expressed extremist views ran in local, state legislative and congressional races, including at least a dozen with documented connections to far-right militant groups.
An armed leftist group stands guard against right-wing activists who were protesting
outside an all-ages drag show in January at BuzzBrew’s Kitchen in Dallas.
(Photos by Mark Felix for The Washington Post)
After federal prosecutions of extremist groups involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack, several far-right factions dissolved or went underground, saying they were unsure of how far the crackdown would extend. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group, says at least 56 far-right, militia-style groups were active in 2022, a decrease from 83 in 2021, and 159 in 2020.
Militant leftists, a tiny fraction of armed movements that have been documented nationwide, likewise are impossible to count because of the fluidity of groups and the secrecy involved in the organizing, analysts say. Even among other racial justice activists, armed antifascists have been viewed skeptically for years; groups sometimes were asked to leave by Black Lives Matter protesters who insisted on gun-free events.
The picture has changed since, with wider tolerance from other leftists and liberals whose faith in state protection has eroded after law enforcement failed to prevent the Capitol attack or stop the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Tex. For months during the unrest of 2020, Americans watched racial justice demonstrations in the Pacific Northwest in which the police either intervened with violence or left protesters feeling vulnerable to attack by right-wing provocateurs.
“We deserve to be able to defend ourselves, and whether that is against
the state or against other folks that would come at us, it’s defense.”
“Paper,” activist and far-left AR-15 owner
“We deserve to be able to defend ourselves, and whether that is against the state or against other folks that would come at us, it’s defense,” said a 33-year-old anarchist organizer who spoke on the condition that they be quoted using only their gun-club nickname, “Paper.” The activist, who identifies as queer, owns two AR-15s and offers firearms training for marginalized communities, including the cohort with D in North Carolina.
D said that at this stage in life — a 40-something parent with a professional job — they never expected to be in the woods learning how to cross a creek in a simulated ambush.
“I view these tools and this training for situations when it is life and limb,” D said. “And I don’t view that as remote.”
A few weeks after that prediction, on a Saturday night just before Thanksgiving, a gunman with an AR-15 opened fire inside an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding 18 others.
The bloodshed only reinforced D’s decision to get an AR-15, though they were reluctant to just go out and buy one. Instead, D said, they eased into the idea by building their own rifle, ordering the components in stages starting in late fall.
“I’m picking up the lower receiver from my gun dealer later this week,” they texted.
The next month, on the same evening as a drag performance that far-right groups had tried to stop, a mysterious attack on electrical substations in Moore County, N.C., knocked out power for tens of thousands of people. Though investigators have yet to make arrests or describe a motive, social media posts speculating that the drag event was the target went viral.
D was a longtime fan of one of the performers; they’d hung out in the same drag scene around Durham. This attack was close to home, just a couple of hours from where D lives.
Within days of the Moore County incident, D texted a photo of a shiny black rifle lying on a table.
The AR-15 was almost ready.
A deterrent to ‘tyranny’
Cody hikes through the woods carrying an AR-15 rifle during a
militia training on private land in Virginia in September.
One sunny day this past fall, members of an anti-government militia group leaned their guns against tree trunks and huddled in the same wooded patch of southeastern Virginia where revolutionaries fought British forces more than two centuries ago.
“This is where the Founding Fathers were,” one member, 28-year-old Harrison, told the others. “I don’t know if y’all can feel it, but I do.”
The men view militia training as an extension of that legacy, preparation to defend the republic from radical leftists and “tyrannical” federal authorities. They see their AR-15s as modern-day muskets, though the rifles shoot 30 times faster, from distances up to 10 times farther.
“It gives you your voice,” Harrison said. “It’s the surest guard to freedom that I can think of.”
Beyond zero tolerance for gun control and deep suspicion of the federal government, there’s little ideological cohesion among the members. The six men who met for training that day — five White, one of Puerto Rican descent, ranging in age from their 20s to 40s — expressed libertarian stances mixed with influences from Christian nationalism and the boogaloo movement’s call for violent revolution.
Three military veterans were among the group. One, a former soldier, engraved his AR-15 with a favorite piece of scripture: “Blessed be God, my Rock who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” The other two are former Marines, one of whom said he was discharged a year ago after refusing to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Harrison, left, and Cody train with AR-15-style rifles. Like many AR-15 owners,
members personalize the guns to reflect their politics and values. They also train on
other weapons, comparing here how small an AR-15 round looks next to ammunition
for a larger caliber hunting rifle.
The gun is a point of bonding. All but one owns an AR-15; most have at least two.
“Even if it sits in your closet,” Harrison said, “the government still knows there’s someone out there with a rifle, and if they go too far, that person may be there.”
The men took turns recording one another running the course, leaves crunching under boots and gunfire interrupting birdsong. Harrison said a neighbor complained recently that the area was beginning to sound “like Afghanistan.” The men laughed.
They believe that something dangerous is bubbling within American society, that a conflagration is coming, even if the battle lines aren’t quite clear yet. That’s what brings them back to the woods with their rifles. Just in case, they said.
“I don’t wish to have a war against my government, but if it comes,
hopefully I got the right group of people around me.”
Hoss, a member of an anti-government militia group
Cody sported a yellow T-shirt paying homage to Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who successfully argued that he acted in self-defense when he killed two people with an AR-15 during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020. In right-wing circles, Rittenhouse’s acquittal was celebrated as a Second Amendment victory. The Rittenhouse case, Cody said, convinced people who were unsure about buying an AR-15 for self-defense “what you can use that rifle for under stress.”
AR-15 rifles lean against a tree trunk. Cody signals his support for Kyle Rittenhouse,
the teenager who successfully argued that he acted in self-defense when he killed
two people with an AR-15 during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020.
Members of the group first met in online gun forums and coalesced around Second Amendment activism. They no longer use a formal name, they said, partly because of the post-Jan. 6 federal prosecution of militia groups and partly because they don’t fit a single ideology. Cody said he sought out the group after leaving Oath Keepers and Three Percenter formations that he considered “too racist.”
They describe themselves as a “constitutionalist militia,” their term for what terrorism analysts consider an anti-government armed group promoting Second Amendment extremism. The group’s argument — which runs counter to decades of court rulings — is that ordinary citizens should have access to the same weapons as the government.
The men balk at being lumped in with white supremacists under the “far-right extremists” label, noting that they’ve marched alongside armed black nationalists in Richmond. Manny, who expressed pride in his Puerto Rican heritage, said he wouldn’t have joined a racist group: “Gun rights are civil rights.”
Manny trains with an anti-government militia group in Virginia. Manny holds his
customized AR-15. The group views their training as preparation to defend the
republic from radical leftists and “tyrannical” federal authorities.
Members said their vetting of recruits includes intense questioning to weed out “St. Dylann crap,” a reference to racist fans of the neo-Nazi mass shooter who attacked a historically Black church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. They say they also reject applicants who seem eager for violence, a way to filter for undercover informants or mentally unstable people.
“I don’t wish to have a war against my government, but if it comes, hopefully I got the right group of people around me,” said a member who goes by Hoss.
“Be honest with yourselves; we’d be out,” one of the former Marines said.
“But there’s 300 million firearms in the United States,” Hoss countered.
“That’s if the country can manage to come together,” the former Marine said. “There’s a lot of division right now.”
“That’s why you find your group before s--- falls apart,” Harrison said.
An asymmetrical fight
Armed leftist activists use airsoft rifles before firing real AR-15s at a training exercise outside Durham, N.C.
The five far-left activists in North Carolina who met for shooting practice did not match the conservative media’s depictions of antifa as masked, black-clad youths burning down American cities.
They were White, middle-aged, college-educated professionals. Three of them identify as queer, and some said they have spouses or children of color whose safety is a primary reason they were in the woods learning Army Ranger techniques for moving in formation.
“We don’t know where the country is going,” said Paper, the firearms instructor. “Jan. 6 was crazy. We came that close to things going in a different direction, and who knows how things would’ve spiraled out from that, which is why we do the training.”
They started in the morning with replica guns as they crept through the foliage on simulated patrols, training on how to react if they came under fire. Scenarios they talked about — rescuing pinned-down comrades at a protest, escorting patrons to a drag brunch — were ripped from recent headlines. After a midday break, they began target practice with real AR-15s and handguns, their own or borrowed from the trainers.
Along with Paper, a co-organizer of the session was Dwayne Dixon, who teaches in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina. Dixon was the only participant comfortable with being fully identified — his activism has long been public, drawing repeated right-wing attempts to get him fired.
Dwayne Dixon leads a training exercise. The group uses blocks to plan a movement during training. A leftist AR-15 owner keeps supplies in a bag printed with a Hello Kitty-themed take on an old anti-police slogan used by militants. D, a nonbinary community organizer, handles an AR-15.
Dixon, 50, said his radical politics emerged from reading about the Holocaust and apartheid-era South Africa as an adolescent. By adulthood, his belief in armed civilian resistance was cemented, but the idea of owning an AR-15 came much later, in 2013 during a trip to visit anarchist friends in Philadelphia. He recalled being stunned by their weapons.
“Who would’ve thought these dudes — punk kids from South Jersey and Philly — would end up owning ARs? It was kind of like a mind bend,” Dixon said. “This has moved into ‘You might get attacked by the government.’”
Later that year, Dixon decided it was time to buy his own rifle, inspired by his deep mistrust of the government and police coupled with a rise in far-right violence. He said he didn’t publicly carry an AR-15 until four years later, in 2017, when he was in Charlottesville during the deadly Unite the Right rally.
Dixon and Paper, the anarchist organizer, said they had been among roughly 20 antifascists with long guns who showed up at the request of a local anarchist group. Racists with tiki torches had just rampaged through town and were poised to come back for a second day. Dixon recalled their group struggling to sleep that night, clear-eyed about the risks of an armed encounter: “We thought we were going to get killed.”
They rose early and stood guard outside a local park where an anti-racist demonstration was to be held. Soon, a column of white supremacists marched toward the park, heading toward Quaker volunteers who were there early to prepare food, Dixon recalled.
Adrenaline was “so high,” Dixon said, as the activists with rifles waited for the white supremacists to spot them. When they did, he said, there was visible shock, then a retreat.
“They stopped and turned around and went back,” Dixon said. “They clearly got more than they expected by seeing armed leftists.”
Any sense of relief was short-lived.
That afternoon, a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd of racial justice protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding 19 other people. The horror, captured in photos of bodies tossed in the air, catalyzed far-left organizing throughout the nation — with armed backup becoming a presence at some public events.
After Unite the Right, armed leftists say, a surge of recruits signed up to fight against the “fascism” unleashed in the Trump era. Groups pooled money for weapons and grew more disciplined in training. Dixon was invited to speak at Harvard about Charlottesville; he used the stipend for body armor.
“Heather Heyer’s murder solidifies the stakes. This really is about life and death,” Dixon said. “There are people here who are ideologically motivated to kill. It’s not abstract anymore; it’s very real.”
Though still only a sliver of antifascist activism, armed leftist groups are becoming increasingly visible, especially on social media, where some borrow and subvert the right-wing militia aesthetic, showing off their tricked-out rifles and bullet-riddled targets. When they face off against far-right groups in public, sometimes the only visible differences are the patches on their clothes and gear — rainbow flags and “FCK NAZIS” vs. Gadsden flags and “Antifa Hunter.”
Anne shoots an AR-15 during a training exercise. A camouflage antifascist flag patch on the pack of an armed leftist during a training exercise. Dwayne Dixon bought his first AR-15 about a decade ago after seeing anarchist friends in Philadelphia with the rifles.
A John Brown group carried AR-15s on armed patrols of a self-declared police-free zone that Seattle activists briefly held during the protests of 2020. The year before, an early member of that group, carrying a home-built AR-15, died in a fiery standoff with authorities at an immigration facility where he was protesting Trump-era family separation policies.
The growing popularity of guns in segments of the far left has drawn criticism from some liberals, who cite gun violence statistics and argue that more armed vigilantes will only make matters worse — particularly for people of color who are often the victims.
But with those communities facing targeted attacks, the nonviolent movement’s language is being drowned out by a call and response at protests: “Who protects us? We protect us!” And militant leftists say the stakes are now too high for complaints that the embrace of AR-15s will cost the moral high ground.
“It took us awhile to get appropriately militant on this issue,” a Connecticut-based John Brown group tweeted in December. “Folks wrung their hands over ‘optics’ and we came to realize they didn’t want community defense, they wanted us to die first. We don’t always open carry, but we no longer go out just to be martyred.”
Paper and Dixon, who met in early 2017 at a community defense meeting, built one of the country’s earliest John Brown formations. They said they were intentional about not copying the right-wing militia model. No command hierarchy, no Second Amendment worship, no fetishizing of the AR-15.
The North Carolina activists said they picked the AR platform simply because it’s cheaper and “there’s a million YouTube videos” to teach new shooters the ins and outs of the rifle. Paper’s first was a Ruger AR-556 that they said cost around $450.
“People have a real capacity to make physical, material change in the world that’s really disruptive. And they don’t need an AR to do it.” Dwayne Dixon, a militant leftist who owns several AR-15 rifles
For a time, the group was part of a national network of leftist organizers before dissolving and reconstituting with a focus on local, low-profile work. These days, their circle has no formal name or regular meetings.
They were leery of allowing observation of the training, worried it would look like an “armed insurgency” and reinforce the idea of two equal extremist threats. In their world, they said, the rifle is a last resort, not a rallying point.
“The AR is not at the apex of people’s capacities,” Dixon said, citing civil rights demonstrations of 2020 and earlier, Native-led protests against an oil pipeline in the Midwest. “People have a real capacity to make physical, material change in the world that’s really disruptive. And they don’t need an AR to do it.”
Anne, a 35-year-old academic and activist, said she started out as an ordinary liberal protester calling for the removal of Confederate statues in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South. By speaking out publicly, Anne landed in the crosshairs of white supremacists and, later, members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence.
The men relentlessly harassed her with threats of rape and death, according to screenshots and messages she provided. They yelled out her home address when they saw her at rallies and have posted photos of her car and apartment, forcing her to move two times in the past three years. In 2021, she bought her own AR-15, not long after posing on Twitter with a friend’s rifle as a warning to her stalkers.
“Nazis get very arrogant and think that because they have AR-15s, they can do anything or kill anyone who disagrees with them,” she said. “When I posted that photo, they can tell that I’m serious about defending myself and they should think twice before trying to murder me.”
“I was in favor of banning guns for a long time and still think the world would be better without them. But now I’m more practical.” Anne, a far-left AR-15 owner
Real threats prompted her to buy an AR-15, Anne stressed, not the far right’s hypothetical scenarios of gun confiscations or a communist takeover. Two of her harassers, according to the materials she provided, are Proud Boys who have since pleaded guilty for their roles in the Capitol attack.
Until they stormed the Capitol, Anne said, the Proud Boys targeted her and other leftists with impunity. She recalled spending hours taking screenshots of the threats so that there would be a record in case they attacked her and she was forced to use her rifle.
'I was in favor of banning guns for a long time and still think the world would be better without them,' Anne said. 'But now I’m more practical.'
About this story
- Reporting and Story by Hannah Allam ... Hannah Allam covers extremism and domestic terrorism as part of the National Security team.
- Photography by Jim Urquhart.
- Design and development by Anna Lefkowitz, Aadit Tambe and Rekha Tenjarla. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez.
- Editing by Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.
- Additional support from Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Jai-Leen and Bryan Flaherty.
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