Guns To The Right of Us, Guns To The... by tristero

“These are some trying times, so I do believe more black men and women are arming up,” Maitreya Ahsekh, chairman of the Houston chapter of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, told me. His group, named after the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, started in 2014. In 2016, members faced off against armed anti-Muslim demonstrators outside a Nation of Islam mosque in South Dallas. (One of the group’s founders was later arrested in an F.B.I. campaign against “black identity extremists.” He was imprisoned for five months before the charges against him were dismissed.) 

In addition to Ahsekh’s group and the Socialist Rifle Association, there are the gun-toting anti-fascists of Redneck Revolt, an organization founded in Kansas in 2009 that now has chapters all over the country, and the queer and trans gun group Trigger Warning, started last year. Left-wing gun culture has already grown enough to produce defectors; in March The New Republic published an essay titled, “Confessions of a Former Left-Wing Gun Nut.” 

“Everybody’s afraid. Everybody’s scared. They don’t know what to do,” said Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the One People’s Project, an antifa organization. “They’re looking at this crowd that brags about how they have all the guns and they’re going to start a second civil war and all this nonsense.” Jenkins carried a gun when he went to face off against white-nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Va., last year. He understands why most on the left still support gun restrictions, but said, “The bigger concern for me is not being protected when a threat comes your way.”