![]() ![]() Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Gettyīoth Democrats and Republicans are rapidly losing faith in the integrity of U.S. West Ohio Minutemen, an armed militia, stand guard near Public Square during the second day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 19, 2016. "The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for," says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election-attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.Īmerica's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. ![]() In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. What Nieznany represents is something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of more-or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by social media and well-armed. Law enforcement has long tracked and often infiltrated these groups. Groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which took part in the January 6th riot at the Capitol and may have played organizational roles, have grown in membership. The phenomenon goes well beyond the growth of militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan rose to power after the Civil War. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down-by force if necessary-a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November and more than 4 million overall. ![]()
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