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Sixteen years later, in 2018, I found myself sitting in the same yard where that illegal pistol lies rusting, talking to my sixty-seven-year-old mother about whether she should buy a handgun herself. The immediate catalyst for this conversation was the rumor of a right-wing infiltrator in her branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the subsequent harassment of several DSA members at one of their meetings. This had rattled my mother, but her fear wasn’t entirely new: most of the men I’d known growing up in our woody corner of the county had owned at least a handgun or two, occasionally for hunting, but more often for reasons of “personal security.”

More recently, however, they had been expressing an increasingly acute worry over the possibility of an outbreak of civil violence. A series of bitter presidential election cycles, in a key swing-voting region of Ohio where close races had become less a reflection of political moderation than one of two finely balanced sides fighting over the soul of a civilization, had made the mostly white longtime residents of the area edgy, suspicious, or paranoid, depending on how much talk radio they listened to. It alarmed me to think of my mom, of all people, feeling a sudden need to keep a handgun in the glove box of her Prius. She told me that one of her neighbors had come by, one afternoon after Donald Trump’s election, correctly assuming that she didn’t keep any guns in the house. “If something happens and things get crazy,” he told her, “I want you to know I’ll help protect you, because even if we disagree, you’re still our neighbor.”

In the time since I’d bought the pistol from Marcus, I had grown into a proper gun owner, but never into a “gun guy”—the shorthand that guys who like guns tend to apply to themselves. This was somewhat to my own surprise. When I was in college and enamored with the idea of backwoods living, I had assumed that as soon as I had enough money and a place of my own, I’d start collecting guns. I’d even kept a mental list of the guns I’d someday want: my everyday carry for self-protection, a “bug-out gun” for surviving civilizational collapse, an AR-15 for waging revolution. But by the time I reached my late twenties, and had enough stability and money to begin acquiring them, I found that I didn’t actually like guns very much—I didn’t find them to be attractive physical objects, and I didn’t care for recreational activities that involved loud noises, entry fees, or long periods of idly standing around.

I also discovered that I hated gun culture. I had spent most of my adult life reporting on paramilitary groups and had spent a lot of time learning about guns and talking to gun guys, but I found many of them to be pretty repellent. They could be pedantic and numbingly nerdy about the particulars of a weapon, small-minded or cruelly callous about the blood that guns spill, and evasive about the reason people actually own guns—which, putting aside the dwindling percentage of Americans who use their guns to hunt, is so that private citizens have the option to commit acts of violence.

Even so, and as much as I hate to see the damage wreaked by guns in this country, there is still a part of me that’s glad to have grown up in a society that entrusts gun ownership to its people. When I bought my first legal gun—a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun—I had been living in a string of rural areas where political divisions, widespread poverty, and drug epidemics conspired to make the potential for some kind of violence feel ever present. I had never been a good shot, and suddenly I had a lot of time and open space, and no excuse for not practicing.

I used the shotgun only once with earnest purpose, while off-roading in the woods outside Nevada City, California, when a pair of what I took to be meth cookers emerged from a camper secreted in the trees and shot at me with a pistol. I managed to chase them off by hiding behind a mound of dirt and shooting birdshot over their heads. Admittedly, they were firing uphill and were probably trying to scare me away rather than hurt me, and the birdshot certainly wouldn’t have done them any serious harm, even if I’d been aiming to hit. But the incident made me thankful that I’d been armed, and—in a way that makes me uncomfortable to admit—I found it thrilling, even a bit fun.

Still, I told my mom, with some vehemence, that I didn’t think it was wise for her to buy a gun. My basic argument was that by carrying a handgun to protect herself at every political meeting, or every time she walked the dog, she’d be embracing the sick personal-defense ideology of gun guys and the National Rifle Association, according to which every citizen becomes an isolated, armed actor, prepared to use deadly force against anyone threatening their sense of personal security. My mother had never been especially concerned about her own physical safety, and I doubted that she would ever be able to convince herself that someone posed such a danger to her that they needed to be shot. My feeling was that a can of bear spray—effective at sixty feet, and much less likely to result in an attacker or a bystander lying in a pool of blood at my mother’s feet—was a more reasonable option. “Okay,” she said. “But in that case, why should anyone have one?”

This was a question I had long wrestled with. For years I had been torn between a commitment to being clear-eyed and honest about the damage guns do and a belief that the right to own them ought to be preserved. I suspect that many Americans struggle to balance these two thoughts, especially now that our national conversation about guns is driven by cable news and Twitter, zones where the issue tends to be reduced to “pro-gun” and “anti-gun” sentiment. But I clung to the hope that it might be possible to build a politics that tends toward a more caring and collectively minded society while also being sensitive to some of the currents of anti-authoritarianism that run through our national life and often find expression in an attachment to gun rights.

So I went online to search for left-wing gun groups—in part because I was just curious to see whether any existed, and in part because I was hoping to find a gun culture that I might actually want to be involved in. I was looking for groups that weren’t at the mercy of big corporations and lobbyists, and that were removed from the dark, every-man-for-himself talk that dominates so much of the mainstream American gun scene. To my mind, the Second Amendment was a means to ensure that a form of concrete power was devolved to regular citizens, not a dictate that we were all doomed to live in a society of pervasive suspicion and knee-jerk violence. I didn’t want to see guns outlawed (and didn’t think that was likely to happen anyway), and I wanted to try to help build a better vision of what gun ownership could look like.

It turned out I wasn’t alone: I soon discovered the Socialist Rifle Association, a group that had officially formed only fifteen months earlier. The SRA already boasted chapters from Alaska to Alabama, as well as a Central Committee and a paid president. It was attempting to offer an alternative to the “mainstream, toxic, right-wing, and non-inclusive gun culture” by organizing disaster relief, by providing first-aid and wilderness-survival training, and, above all, by offering a community for people who felt uncomfortable in the heavily right-wing world of American firearms. And it had quickly enlisted more than 2,500 dues-paying members, including, now, me.

If I had been slightly better versed in online leftist politics, I might have known that the “Socialist RA” subreddit had started way back in 2015. Like so much that happens among young leftists today, it began as a sort of internet joke: a group of Reddit users started generating memes about a radical counterpart to the NRA that did not yet exist. But in the spring of 2018, a year in which even proudly moderate Americans began to think the country was sliding into political chaos, and at least fifty murders would be linked to right-wing extremism, three regular contributors formed an LLC and turned the forum into a bona fide organization. Things started to take off when the rapper Killer Mike name-checked the SRA on MSNBC. “I think you should join,” he told Joy Reid. “Turn your backs to the NRA.” That November, the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg spent some time with the North Georgia chapter and published a surprisingly sympathetic op-ed titled “Rise of the Armed Left,” in which she interviewed an enormous, bearded, and richly tattooed SRA member nicknamed Oso, along with Brad, the bespectacled and wiry president of the North Georgia chapter. “As a squishy liberal,” she wrote,

I generally find the idea of adding more guns to our febrile politics frightening and dangerous. But sometimes a small desperate part of me thinks that if our country is going to be awash in firearms, maybe it behooves the left to learn how to use them.

The SRA had quickly grown from a ragged band of online posters to a slightly less ragged team of earnest real-life organizers with a national profile. Following Hurricane Florence in 2018, the group drew significant attention on social media when they organized a relief truck, which Oso drove down to the Georgia coast. People joined by the hundreds, and chapters sprung up in places that might have seemed unlikely seedbeds for leftist organizations. In a way, this was part of the point—to reach people who otherwise tended to think of leftists as tweedy Brooklynites or state-loving authoritarians: “It’s been one of the icebreakers when I have a big disagreement with somebody . . . and they have these preconceived notions of what a leftist is,” an anonymous SRA member in Anchorage told Alaska Public Media in November 2018, “to start talking about guns and gun ownership and gun rights.”

The first meeting I attended was held in a small community arts center in southern California’s Inland Empire, and led by a twenty-eight-year-old trans woman named Faye, a soft-spoken construction-materials supplier in a long skirt and denim jacket who described herself as an anarcho-communist. One of the founding organizers of the SRA, she now serves as the group’s national vice president. The other members present had come from as far as Santa Barbara and the Coachella Valley—a distance of some two hundred miles—and earned paychecks delivering packages for UPS, tending the register at Bass Pro Shops, driving for Uber, or working other precarious, underpaid jobs. When I arrived, some fifteen of them were crammed around a jumble of tables, without any obvious indication as to the group’s identity, so as not to alarm any visitors dropping in to see some local art on a Saturday afternoon. The meeting itself consisted mostly of debates about chapter bylaws and, because this was southern California, discussions of how to deal with traffic and travel times for the more far-flung members. We talked about setting up a table at a local gun show, coordinating wildfire relief, and whether anyone was interested in getting SRA-subsidized training as a firearms instructor. Then we headed off to a range to shoot skeet.

It was just what I’d imagined any American gun-club meeting would be, except people were wearing eat the rich shirts and Industrial Workers of the World buttons, and their animating anger and fears were related to resurgent fascism, immigrants being herded into camps, and seeing every part of daily life governed by market forces and tech companies rather than marauding black rioters, George Soros, and the dangers of radical environmentalists. But the idea, as I was coming to understand it, was precisely to avoid becoming a lefty mirror of a paranoid right-wing militia—to instead use our shared interest in guns as a starting point for engaging in a more hopeful politics. It just happened that most of us thought that doing so at this particular moment might make us want to know something about using a gun.

Faye reminded everyone to be careful to avoid wearing SRA T-shirts at protests, particularly those where the likelihood of violence was high. The SRA is only the largest of a number of new armed leftist groups. Others include the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club—an organization known for providing security at demonstrations throughout the Pacific Northwest—and Redneck Revolt, which showed up armed to protest the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Some of these groups are openly insurrectionist and willing to use guns the way right-wing militias have been using them for years—in armed street politics. This means that they are more limited in their membership than the SRA, which advertises itself to anyone who is “working class, progressive, anarchist, socialist, communist, eco-warrior, animal liberator, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, PoC, LGBTQ+”—basically anyone who isn’t a law enforcement officer (the organization’s rules ban cops). The SRA’s official motto is “We Keep Us Safe,” but members have a sort of joking incantation that gets repeated far more often: “We’re not a cult,” it goes, “and we’re not a militia.”

Not that anyone who saw us at the range that day would have mistaken us for a militia: we were a shaggy bunch, and most were younger than me, in their early twenties. Somewhat to my embarrassment, I realized that many of my fellow members in tight jeans who spent their days posting on Reddit were more comfortable using and talking about firearms than I was. We lined up in the late-afternoon heat, and I watched as Faye effortlessly hit clay after clay, alongside Hispanic kids from the desert, community college students from the Inland Empire, and a former police officer from Santa Barbara who’d had a leftist awakening and was on his way to a perfect 25 for 25.

I was genuinely excited about the SRA, but there seemed to be concern that I might be an FBI plant, or at the very least a fancy poser. Being over thirty and working as a journalist, I came off as a bit of a faded, privileged hipster among this crowd of deeply angry young wage slaves. When it was my turn to shoot, I kept bumbling, reloading my shotgun before I was supposed to, at one point even dropping an unspent shell that, for safety purposes, had to be located in the grass before we went on, holding everything up for a mortifying amount of time. I had brought my old short-barreled pump-action shotgun, which isn’t a good choice for shooting trap, and I missed my first ten clays, leading to a nervous jitteriness that can be extremely dangerous when you’re discharging a weapon. But I finally figured out how to get off a quick shot and finished by squarely vaporizing fifteen straight clays. I left with a warm and pleasant feeling—on my way out, I took a stack of pamphlets to distribute to people I thought might be interested. “We Keep Us Safe” was written across the top of each one. “We have friggin’ trifold pamphlets?” a young woman asked as I stuffed them in my briefcase. “This is getting so real.”

Last July, the SRA—whose membership now totals about three thousand—held its first-ever national convention, in a suburban hotel on the outskirts of Denver. It was all a bit hush-hush. When I set my bags down and asked the young attendant at the desk where the event was located, she grinned at me and made air quotes with her fingers. “Oh, the ‘firearms meeting’? It’s down the hall and to the left.”

The conference room looked as if it had been set up for a regional gathering of bank branch managers—rows of tables covered in cheap black tablecloths had been set up in front of a stage, and a coffee station was laid out to the side. The tables for panelists onstage, however, were bedecked in banners displaying the SRA’s winkingly Soviet-style logo: three rifle cartridges under a red star, encircled by stalks of wheat. Oso, the big guy whom Michelle Goldberg had interviewed for the Times, stood at the door, checking the guest list.

I wasn’t actually sure whether I’d be allowed in. Left-wing groups are always the subject of intense FBI scrutiny and disruption, and with the SRA being an armed left-wing group—and with the possibility of “alt-right” plants—there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of a nosy newcomer. But Oso gave me no trouble. He found my name on the list, and I headed inside, where I ran into Faye, who was helping her fiancé deal with a livestreaming setup. She seemed surprised to see me, as though she’d forgotten I might come. But I was still a member of her chapter, and the SRA is nothing if not welcoming. “These aren’t just your fellow classmates in a firearms course anymore,” a former Coast Guard sailor named Rob told the crowd during one Q and A session with the Central Committee, after someone had asked what to do if a member stopped showing up to meetings or online chats. “These are your comrades. So just cut out whatever arm’s-length bullshit you’re used to and reach out and make a connection.”

The next morning, I found Faye and the rest of the Central Committee seated onstage around Alex, a tall and reserved twenty-two-year-old trans woman and former factory machinist who serves as the SRA’s president, a role for which she is paid $12 an hour out of the organization’s treasury. Alex was explaining that the SRA had applied for membership in the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the country’s largest trade association for gun groups. “We know the NSSF is a fairly reactionary organization,” she said. But for the SRA, joining the NSSF was part of a larger goal of establishing itself as a responsible and mature player among American gun groups, one that involved getting the group insured, keeping its finances transparent, and joining mainstream gun-advocacy organizations—a push the SRA membership overwhelmingly supported. So far, it hadn’t exactly worked out.

The NSSF initially admitted the SRA, said Alex, but about a week before the convention, an incensed forum thread had appeared on a website called AR15.com, which, like almost all gun sites, tends to be dominated by the political right. Commenters encouraged one another to contact the NSSF to complain about the fact that it had allowed a left-wing gun group to join. “That’s just fucking great,” one wrote. “Is NSSF going to help them get grant money to dig all the execution pits?” There were hundreds of other comments, many of them from users with Hitler portraits or other openly fascist iconography in their profiles. “Can the Klan League of Marksmen join?” “Target acquisition.” “Has anyone asked them what they’re doing making friends with people who want to kill them?”

Some commenters reported that they had canceled their NSSF memberships. One, claiming to know the address and phone number of an SRA Central Committee member, provided the member’s initials and called the operators of the gun ranges where he gave shooting lessons, doxing him as a dangerous leftist. Less than a week after the SRA’s admission—four days before the start of the convention—the president of the NSSF sent Alex a letter informing her that it was being kicked out. “The NSSF embraces free-market capitalism . . . manufacturing firearms for both law-abiding civilian and law enforcement needs, and support for the Second Amendment,” the letter read. “The NSSF is aware . . . that your organization does not share these same values.”

There was a murmur of laughter as Alex described the blacklisting. “But we do support firearms manufacture, since you can’t buy a gun if it can’t be manufactured,” she said. “And we don’t say anything specific about cops besides basically in our bylaws saying, ‘Don’t be a cop.’ We’re a threat to them because we challenge the right wing’s monopoly on gun culture.”

As if to confirm Alex’s point, the United States Concealed Carry Association approved the SRA for affiliation a few weeks later, only to revoke it after another protracted social-media dustup. The USCCA eventually released a wordy statement condemning the SRA for “discriminatory beliefs” against law enforcement and the rich, and confirming that the USCCA “stands opposed to socialism.”