When I was just five years old, before I had even started kindergarten, I received a tiny rifle for Christmas, a .22-caliber bolt-action rod called a Chipmunk, built for and marketed to small children. By the time I was twelve I owned a small arsenal of five guns, and proudly possessed a lifetime hunting and fishing license for the state of Oklahoma. But it wasn’t long before I discovered punk rock, and with it a hatred of all things redneck, including those formerly precious guns. Into my dad’s gun safe they went. I’d sworn off guns forever—or so I thought.

By my late twenties, I had gone full circle on guns. My politics had moved so far to the left that I saw gun ownership through a similar lens as the far-right extremists leftists love to denounce. I wasn’t worried about burglaries. I was worried about the tyrannous state sending troops door-to-door after it declared martial law.

At the height of my radical politics, in 2010, I visited ultra-left and anarchist “comrades” in Great Britain. There I met a Polish antifa activist who was in the country to take a break from daily street harassment and violence in his hometown in eastern Poland, which he said was overrun with violent neo-Nazis. Over pints at a local left-wing haunt, he recounted story after story of fistfights with Nazis, knife-fights with Nazis, the time he and his buddies were stuck inside their home while Nazis were lobbing Molotovs at their bolted front door.

The left should arm itself, he said, not so much against an overstepping government but in preparation for the government’s collapse and a fascist takeover. Right-wing Polish militants and their brethren in compounds in Idaho and Montana—these were the real threats to the “good guys.”

The idea appealed to me. The Polish antifa was a foot soldier, a militant, a martyr for a noble cause. And there were plenty of historical precedents in the States. The Black Panther Party was armed to the teeth, of course, as was the American Indian Movement. The 1960s was full of left-wing groups arming themselves in self-defense. Those groups had been either wiped out or marginalized, but that was another time and we were another generation. I knew some activists up in Kansas who fiercely advocated for armed self-defense. And they had guns. Lots of them. AR-15s, AK-47s, SKSs, and more. They engaged in tactical trainings. They rented booths at guns shows and tried to convert people to their side. The idea was sexy, empowering. I wanted in.