Washington Post writer Greg Sargent interviews former firearms executive Ryan Busse on the intersection between the AR-15 and right- wing conspiracists:
Busse: Nothing conveys dominance and intimidation like a loaded AR-15. It was designed to be offensive in war. It was designed to take people’s lives.
Sargent: You’re positioning the cultural mania around the AR-15 as an aberration or a malignancy, relative to what surely are millions upon millions of gun owners who have a much healthier attitude toward their hobby.
Busse: It’s how people are using the rifle. It’s what the rifle has become.
I think the authoritarian forces in this country view the AR-15 as a central organizing symbol.
Sargent: You often see advocacy for the AR-15 from the same right wing influencers — Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), etc. — who regularly traffic in versions of the “great replacement theory” or relentlessly fearmonger about leftist terrorism driving the country into civil collapse.
Why is it that those who traffic in apocalyptic fantasies about demographic doom also tend to treat the AR-15 as something with almost mythical symbolic importance?
Busse: The idea of civil war/race war with heavily-armed citizen-patriots as your warriors is hardly under the surface anymore.
I won’t go so far as to say they actually want people to die in a race war. It’s a political tool for them. They think they can use it to motivate — and make people angry and fearful and hateful.
"Motiviate" and intimidate, we'd say. The entire interview is well worth a read.
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