Endless Thread - Armed and Socialist

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Gun ownership in America has long been associated with the political right. Forty-five percent of Republicans and conservative independents own a firearm, compared to 20 percent of their liberal counterparts, according to a 2023 Pew survey. But in recent years, gun ownership has been changing. More liberals are buying firearms, and left-leaning gun groups emphasizing inclusivity are cropping up across the country. One group is the Socialist Rifle Association. With roots online, the organization started as a place for funny memes and became a collective aiming to arm the working class. As the 2024 election approaches, Endless Thread's Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson scope out a firing range in central Massachusetts with the SRA. ***** Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. The co-hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Our managing producer is Samata Joshi.

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Hey, just wanted to let you know, this episode is about guns, which means you will hear some gunfire. So consider this a heads up to any young ones in your midst, your pets, and take care. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory and I are just down a little country road from suburbia and Massachusetts and preparing to do something brand new. Were you excited? I don't know that that's the word. I wasn't not excited, though, you know?

All right. You know what I mean? I was not, not excited. I was not excited. That's exactly it. I was excited, and then I was partially deaf, and then I was freaked out. Like, and whatever the opposite of Trigger happy is, I was that.

Trigger sad. Yeah. Trigger bad. Yeah. Should we shoot some guns? Yeah. Let's do it. It was scary and thrilling and terrifying and looking back at this moment.

I get it. But I'm also still confused because Amory and I shooting guns wasn't just to shoot, at least not for us. It was to get a window into a rifle association. Maybe not the one you're thinking of. The Socialist Rifle Association. It's an overcast Sunday in May. Ben and I have traveled into the woods of Massachusetts to meet some people we've never met before. and wholesome triggers with producer Dean Russell.

Have you ever been to a shooting range before? No, never been to a shooting range, never shot a gun. I've held a gun. It's a bit of a nervous meetup, because the people we are going to meet and interview and shoot guns with, they are doing a bit of a tightrope act. They're hoping that the shooting range will be friendly to their group and the journalists they've invited to meet them here.

So we've agreed to keep some things a little non-specific on the record. I'm another Joe, a very cryptic name there. We won't be using the government names of our new gun-toting acquaintances. I'm a non-state. I've been with the SRA for about a year now. I'm Dana. They, them. I'm David. I've been shooting since I was about 13 years old. I'm Cat Scratch. I have been with the SRA since like late 2020, early 2021. I joined shortly after I got my LTC.

as in license to carry. Another thing we're going to keep kind of non-specific, the location of this shooting range. Because not long after we showed up, so did the shooting range manager, who on this overcast Sunday, just down the road from suburbia, gave us the stink eye hard, right through his Yosemite Sam mustache. Did he have a mustache? Are you just profiling him by associating him with a cartoon who had two sick shooters? I might be. I might be. I, I have a I think he had a mustache, though, and an aversion to his shooting range getting mentioned on public radio, apparently. He was already not happy that we were there holding very non-lethal shotgun microphones amongst our new acquaintances who are packing serious weaponry. Pen, sword, mightier, you never know.

True. Well, point is, we were all walking on eggshells a little bit. Well, you have my personal word that they've been informed that they're not used location. I mean, we weren't walking on eggshells so much as we were walking on bullet shells, Dean noticed. They were hard to miss. Literally bullet shells everywhere. Like in between the floorboards. They're everywhere. We were here to shoot and to learn how to shoot.

Range is hot. Range is hot right now. So hot. So hot right now, the range. But as previously mentioned, we were here because we wanted to learn about something that is happening in America, ahead of a national election where the specter of civil war has been raised a lot. 23% of Americans believe that they might have to, quote, resort to violence order to save our country. And I don't mean Trumpism. I don't even mean mageism. I mean violence.

There are some really crazy people out there who may look at that and say, then I have to make sure this guy never gets powered. the White House again, what the FBI is calling a second apparent assassination attempt. Nationwide protests against police brutality toward Black Americans have themselves been met with widespread and egregious violence by police. Gun ownership in America has seen some striking changes since the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic. While specific statistics can be difficult to pin down, there's been a reported explosion of gun purchasing among Black and Latinx people.

Black Americans are the fastest growing group of gun owners in America, and that accelerated after 2020. There's also been a reported surge of gun ownership on the political left, and some of those left-leaning, newly minted gun owners are looking for places for groups to come together, online and in-person. I'm Ben Yosemite Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sixth Shooter Sewardson. And you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, Armed, and Socialist. Ben, you've wanted to do this story for a long time.

But I don't actually know when you found the Socialist Rifle Association. Yeah, I sort of, I'm not sure either. I think it started when I saw something cross-posted from one online community to another. The community I was in was about prepping. The thing that got cross-posted was, if I remember correctly, this post saying basically, it's time to start talking to your progressive and lefty friends about arming themselves. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. And eventually we got to the local chapter and got an invite to hang out with them.

Yep. And there are a couple of things you should think about when you think about the SRA. The National Rifle Association, which was founded almost 155 years ago, says it has nearly 5 million members. The Socialist Rifle Association. We are around 7,200 members. This is Brett.

My name is Brett Beater. I am currently the SRA president, a member of the Northern Illinois chapter, a member for five years now. And that's the thing. Five years is half of the lifespan of the organization, which started about a decade ago, according to Ryan, an organizer for the

North Georgia chapter of the SRA. I think it actually started as a Facebook group back in 2013. So it was kind of a joke to begin with. It was the idea of, well, so a lot of gun advocacy organizations, especially in the United States, are very right wing. So what if there was a left wing of that? It was very inclusive. So they came up with the idea of the SRA, which is kind of a play on the NRA, right? Right.

But starting as a joke Facebook group is admittedly the kind of origin. story that might lead to some challenges in getting your 7,000 strong organization to the NRA's 5 million. Give them a break, Emery. They have 145 years to make up the difference. I guess that's true. The origins of this online community are a little murky. Might have started on Facebook, might have started on Reddit, but since 2020, the number of people following the subreddit has effectively tripled and now sits at around 115,000. The description of community reads? Never disarm the working class.

But most of the people we're talking to today don't really hang out on Reddit. And that's not how they came to the SRA either. How did you all, if not Reddit, clearly for many of you, how did you all hear about the SRA first? I saw the listing for the Anicus Book Fair in Cambridge, and the SRA was going to be there. And I was like, you know what, all right, let me go check that out. Google.

Yeah, it was Google. I basically called it. What's the Google search for that? Google search was, I think I typed in, left-wing alternative to National Rifle Association. I think the thing that's interesting is that there's this huge online community of gun owners, gun fans, who are explicitly not on the political right.

They're on the left. And online, that plays out in memes and jokes posted on Facebook groups and subreddits, on Discord chats. And it might be easy to assume that this is all kind of a joke, a way for gun fans to post memes from a lefty perspective. No big deal. Except when people on the internet gather around political ideas, even when they're really jokes, big things can happen. Images of Pepe wearing red mega hats proliferated, and Donald Trump Jr. even posted an image that included a Trumpified version of Pepe to social media. And that is why this is important. It could be gun fans hanging out while talking about supporting the worker and nothing more, or it could be something bigger. We just don't know yet.

So who are these 7,000 people? Starting with Brett. I am an auto mechanic. Hey, that's pretty proletariat. Yeah. And among the people we talked to from the SRA, there was a good number of different walks of life. Dana. I'm an engineer, data scientist.

I'm in my late 40s. Cat scratch. I'm in healthcare. I am 28. Another Joe. I'm in, I guess you'd call it, health care adjacent software, and I'm in my early 40s.

David. I am a blue-collar worker, and I'm also a labor organizer, and I'm in my mid-20s. If there's a political tie-in for most of these people in a two-party system, one might say it's huge issues with Trump and the Republican Party.

And a good amount of skepticism of Democrats, too. There's a fantasy of burn it all down and start again. But the level of destruction that's going to come with that could be, you know, basically an extinction level event. Long story short, just like political associations with firearms have long been a feature among right-leaning groups. It's popping up on the left as well. And a good amount of that can be found in the Socialist Rifle Association.

But again, what is the Socialist Rifle Association? The SRA is an educational 501C4 organization that exists for the purpose of teaching people primarily on the left and marginalized communities how to safely and responsibly own, operate and maintain firearms. Our new acquaintances at the Massachusetts firing range had similar descriptions, kind of. Here's cat scratch. I think our primary goal is to create a welcoming community. where you share values with people that also has the addition of, yeah, if you're interested in firearms, we're here. What they say they are not

is a political organization that endorses political candidates or even asks members to participate in political action like protests. And if you bring up the M word... The SRA is not and will not ever be a, quote-unquote, left-wing militia. Even in Massachusetts, where militias are associated,

with, you know, like our national identity, independence from the British. If you ask the local SRA chapter, if they're a militia... I don't think if you went to the proud boys and asked them the same question, well, you know, do you consider yourself? They'd say that they were a militia. They would not say, oh, we're here to educate right-wingers about firearms usage and provide a safe space for white males to learn about guns where, you know, they're uncomfortable doing so. Still, getting clarity on what the SRA is feels like a moving target.

so to speak. The subreddit at least seems not so much full of political theory and ideas about governance, yet very full of people showing off pictures of their guns. What do you guys think of the AK platform? I just got my first red dot site. Thinking about switching pistols, here's my 9-mill. And as we are standing near the Sandy Hills of clay shooting areas at this range, interviewing another Joe, non-state, Dana, it starts to feel like the socialist part is less in. important than the guns part. We don't have like a super, super specific mission, besides like the safety and education and getting people into firearms.

But broadly, yeah, we're a community. That's it. This started to give us a big old, hmm, because, look, we're not saying the tenets of the proud boys or any extreme right-wing groups feel much more defined. But there is clarity on the vague things they do stand for. and we can rattle them off, right? Build the wall, stop immigrants from taking our jobs, don't tread on my rights.

Return to the oh-so-golden years of the 1950s, when men were men, or something. Speaking of men, who we should say are more likely to be behind the buttstock, you, like others, may have made the connection between headlines about assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump and the specter of left-wing people who carry. We asked Brett, the National SRA President in Illinois, if he checked the roles of the SRA after that first assassination attempt. I did about two days later, obviously. Because news stories can be chaotic in identifying shooters, he says. The shooter's name wasn't on the membership list.

If anything, a big part of what the SRA is seems to be about what it's trying to avoid or stand against. Here's Dana. It's not exactly mutual assured destruction. but it's mutually assured deterrence. Deterance. Yes. Deterance. Yeah, changing it from a very soft target, or at least a perceived soft target,

to a not-so-soft, much more spiky target. What does Joe's spiky target look like in Massachusetts? 20 to 35 people regularly showing up to shoot together, closer to 80 on a Discord server, which the group says has a lot more political discussion, but it is a private server. The meetups in real life? once a month or thereabouts.

Some of them are just for the members. Other meetups are more of a meet-and-greet where people interested in getting a license to carry or just interested in the SRA in general are encouraged to come to the shooting range, say hello, and consider joining up. Oh, yeah, and get that range hot. Did I hit anything?

You hit that dirt. You definitely hit something. No question. Amory shoots some more bullets and definitely hits at the very least the broadened side of a hill in a minute. I did hit the target quite a bit. I did, and you did. You were probably better than me.

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So here we are at an undisclosed shooting range location in Massachusetts with the local chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association. And producer Dean Russell. And some of us are shooting for the first. time. Immediate reaction. I'm glad, I'm grateful that there wasn't much of a kick. I was worried about a kick, but that, it's heavy.

Apparently I lean way back, so by the time I got my posture in order and everything, I was just kind of like, all right, just get it over with. This is a dumb question maybe, but I should blow all my air out. So you want to breathe in, breathe out, pull the trigger. I want to give you a chance to shoot a short-barreled rifle. short-barreled rifle. Okay. Cool.

Which is a National Firearms Act item. Federally regulated. Okay. I had to ask the feds to build the permission to build it. The fact that Dana can tell us all about their rifle, which sort of skirts with permission, the usual gun regulations in Massachusetts, suggests we're in. We have now officially been welcomed into this group. We have been given Socialist Rifle Association of Massachusetts stickers, which feature a large

pine tree, golden grain. of wheat and a lantern topped with three stars, all of it wrapped in a bright red ribbon with the letters M-A-S-R-A. And this welcoming feels pretty good, because we're living in an era when everyone from Trump supporters to pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses are skeptical of the press. When we first got to the shooting range, there was a person from the SRA who was there, but they didn't want to talk to us. Eventually, though, Lim had to jump in. You're okay if I insert myself into this because this comes back to, I've been in the SRA for a bit. And this comes back to one of the questions that you asked earlier, what is the SRA about? What is the SRA for?

And what I'd say is that like, regardless of what we do, regardless of what we intend, the world is getting worse in a lot of ways. And not just in terms of low intensity, civil conflict, in terms of potential futures, but also talking about climate change, about deprivation, about the continuing concentration of capitalism and constant. narrowing of the scope of the state. That world is getting worse in a lot of ways, feeling for our members of the Socialist Rifle Association of Massachusetts really does seem to have started during a particular era. Here's Cat Scratch. The reason I got my LTC was because of, well,

watching videos online of like the protests and the uprising around like George Floyd and seeing people on. on the streets that were armed, like right-wing militias. Kind of scared me. For Dana, it started at what became an infamous white supremacist March in 2022. In Boston, there was a pro-Trump, white pride, straight pride, Milo, Yano, whatever. Yeah, it was there.

You know, I was working that as a street medic. while I was in the process of coming out as trans. And, you know, it's just like, okay, the world is getting very scary for people like me, you know, also Jewish and, you know, the sort of history of the Holocaust and all of that kind of stuff being like, okay, I am, if things get bad, I am not going quietly. Non-state, who has shown up to the shooting range today with some antique rifle, that he let us shoot, has also been inspired by some important historical context. I may be a little different from others, but I have an inherent distrust.

I've had family members who in the 40s, I'm Japanese-American, were put into camps solely because of their ethnicity. In California, it was as far as if you're one-16th Japanese, you're in a camp. So I have an inherent distrust because of that. So there's a lot going on here. But in some ways, it feels like a mere... image of what we understand of the other side. Fears about history repeating itself.

Worries about things getting more and more chaotic and out of control of a wolf at the door. And the need to do something about it, like start packing. So does the phrase, if you can't beat them, join them, resonate with you? No, we are explicitly not joining them. We found Dana to be a really interesting member of the group.

They say they've got some conflicting feelings about guns. I'm a street medic. I, you know, it's, we really should not be making holes. But at the same time, it's, you know, do no harm, take no shit. Which, fair. But once the range got hot, Dana's energy changed from, I have to do this as a trans person who is also Jewish to protect myself from the fascists,

to a person whose frenetic, borderline giddy energy around guns was interesting. And I think Amory and I were struggling with this idea that guns were are the answer for protecting a diverse, tolerant, multicultural society in America, or even just guns being the answer for a safer America. We put this to Catscratch because there is a huge mountain of scientifically solid evidence that the presence of a gun makes things less safe. Bigger picture, I'm one of those people who is afraid of guns and feel. like have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that more guns could ever equal good. I like that you ask this question because my wife feels pretty much the same way. She doesn't love that I own guns. We've come into an understanding where she knows how to use everything that I own because

it's a tool in our house. but my response to her at this point is I would personally be happy to live in a world where firearms is essentially just a sport you come here you rent a gun at a range or you store your firearms at a range and you just it's a hobby but that's not the world that we live in

if everybody else was going to give up their guns I would too happy to do that but it's not. Going back to how you originally found the SRA Ben, I got the sense that a lot of where our SRA members were coming from was vaguely in the Prepper zone, the like, just in case things get real vibes. Yeah, I think that's true.

A lot of the people in the prepper community use the acronym S-H-T-F if stuff hits the fan. But maybe that happening as part of a larger existential threat, which Joe is worried about. I am, but not because of the election. I view climate change as like this stalking horse that is just about to trample us all. People keep seeing it as something that affects someone else. You know, like the sad reality of climate change for a lot of people is you watch someone

else's house get destroyed on your phone until you're filming your house getting destroyed on your phone. And maybe this is part of why, as gun owners, SRA members are not super into. more gun control legislation. Here's non-state. Pandora's box has been opened, at least as far as, you know, United States law is concerned. Lim also had thoughts on this topic. Big thoughts.

I'm an anarchist, so this is an anarchist position. But we can't legislate violence away because gun control advocates are advocating for only the cops to have guns, right? The state is intrinsically an enterprise of violence. So this is not a question of constitutional amendments. This is not a question of better laws or closing loopholes. This is a question of fundamental visions of the world and class struggle. And I think this is about fundamental questions of the world. But it's complicated.

Things I feel like we learned about the people we interviewed from the local chapter. They are preparing to defend their right to exist and the right of other minority groups to exist. They're worried about the far right. getting armed to the teeth. They're worried about the state or the government controlling things. Please refer to Japanese internment camps in the U.S. and the history of Nazism

at home and abroad. Philosophically, they have some pretty mixed feelings about guns making the world better, but they're opposed to more gun control. And maybe more importantly, when you get them on the range... Good booms, small homes, old booms, new boom.

King! That's what we'll have you shooting. They do... kind of love guns, which actually puts them closer to just the other guys on the range that day. Yeah. Dana and myself were the only people we saw there who don't identify as men. When men were men. When men were men. And it was interesting to see that camaraderie, right?

Notwithstanding the mustachioed range managers general dislike of our presence there, I'm telling you, he did have a Yosemite Sam vibe. When we moved from the rifle range to the handgun range, and our host started to pull out some of their guns, another guy down the firing line came over. White guy, 60s, very serious, and very interested in our host's pistols. It was like a new friendship blooming between gear heads. And if it was something other than guns, it might have been sweet?

It might have been. But at least to me, it just feels dicey. To say nothing of what feels like an arms race between political groups happening in this country, it felt to us, or at least to me, I don't know about you, Amory, hard for someone to be a socialist and a gun fan at the same time. Do you have any sort of complicated feelings around supporting the gun industry to the extent that you are by being a gun owner? Yeah, of course.

I mean, we shot a lot of bullets and a lot of different guns. We did. for us. It was free, but it did not feel like an inexpensive hobby. It's one of the things where I don't like it. I also buy gasoline from Shell and

support and BP and everything like that. It's an unfortunate reality that we have to live in. One sentence, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Yeah, that's it. This was a

grounding moment, I will say. Especially because at the beginning of our time with these SRA chapter members, when we first asked them about their main tenants, their answers weren't exactly locked and loaded. As a chapter, we have this thing called the eight points of unity, which lists like pretty much everything everyone has to agree with. Whether it be like we support the working class and their right to like unionize or like fight for, yeah, self-determination or like being for. or like being for abolitionists and against the law enforcement or carceral system. I believe two.

You got two. No, there's eight. Eventually they had to pull out their phones and read from them, and that stuff had a shape to it. We are working class and poor people dedicated to educating our class and the safe use of firearms for personal and community defense. We are a multi-tenancy association of socialists

united by our class for our class. We unite against the capitalist state and its repressive arm the police. We are dedicated to the liberation and freedom of all people, especially the working class in black communities, indigenous communities, and communities of color. We oppose all forms of oppression and exploitation. We help feed, house, and protect other working class

and marginalized peoples. We recognize the extractive processes endemic to capitalism that impact our ecosystem. We are dedicated to arming the working class both literally and figuratively. You didn't have that just off the top of your head? You couldn't rattle that stuff off? Come on.

I get that they couldn't rattle it off. And I get that these ideas are complex. But I think there's still a bright line of difference between them and maybe myself and maybe you, Ben, which is that you and I are not big gun fans. No. I mean, I think I like the idea of being prepared or being willing and able to protect myself,

my community and other communities, against forms of oppression that don't fit with my understanding of what America is. And I think as a Massachusetts resident, I almost like, it's almost feel like I have to say that. Okay, I'm kidding, but at a certain point, all that shooting had me pretty rattled. I'm just not that into it.

So I think the thing that's complicated here is that there is a real question mark about what is driving people on the left ahead of this election to get armed and pop off. Is it a deep belief in philosophical ideas in political and social belief structures, or is it an acceptance of a deep-seated fear that the only way to survive is to get strapped? Or even a joy in getting strapped. I think at the end of the day, we're just trying to be good people, right?

We just happen to, like, to shoot guns. Maybe this is what we have to be okay with in America. the concept that anybody on any side of the political spectrum can have a gun, can organize around their possession of guns and what they think they might have to do with them beyond the shooting range. I don't particularly love this idea, but I don't love the idea of one political side being heavily armed and the other not either.

Yeah, and I guess we should say there is privilege in not feeling like you have to. to take up arms just to feel safe. And I know some folks are going to say, it's naive to think that you can fight fire with anything other than fire. So I really do hear Dana when they say, do no harm, take no shit. I'm just wishfully reversing the order of those, I guess,

and hoping that people on all sides and of all beliefs will choose to use their voices instead of weapons so that there is no fire to fight with fire in the first place. you know. But I am grateful to the SRA members we spoke to for offering us a safe space to think through such a loaded topic, if you will, that really I haven't stopped thinking about since our time with them. There is one thing I do know, though, Ben. What? Every podcast producer should have a shotgun microphone.

And they need to know how to use it. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written by Ben Brock Johnson and co-hosted with me, Amory Severson. It was produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound designed by Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Emily Jankowski, and Summa to Joshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and an undisclosed shooting range in Massachusetts.

If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR. org.