How Much Political Violence Can We Absorb?

A few years ago, I spent a day with the Michigan Militia at a campground where they were holding their monthly meeting and shoot. This is the group that Timothy McVeigh hung out with before he went down to Oklahoma City and blew up the Murrah Federal Building in 1995.

What impressed me most of all was the pizzas — quantity and quality. The cheese with extra mushrooms and onions was — non pareille!

I was thinking about that experience yesterday while I joined a seminar on ‘The deadly intersection of white supremacy and firearms,’ hosted and planned by the gun research group at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Much of the contributions by various researchers involved issues directly related to the behavior of armed militia groups like the Michigan Militia, a topic of almost obsessive interest following the involvement of various militia groups in the January 6th insurrection.

What did I learn about the intersection between white supremacy and guns over the past couple of years? To be blunt — not a goddamn thing. That militia members who run around in their camo outfits waving their assault rifles are on the far, far right when it comes to their political beliefs? Gee, that’s a discovery. That most gun owners are conservative and will exclaim the importance of the 2nd Amendment…