“Open Carry” Stunts Are Precursor Acts for Gun Massacres Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

“Open Carry” Stunts Are Precursor Acts for Gun Massacres

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 5h

Yesterday I mentioned the 20 year old man who terrorized that Walmart in Missouri and was arrested for making “terroristic threats.” His name is Dmitriy Andreychenko. He told policethe point of his stunt was to see whether Walmart “honored the 2nd Amendment.”

As I mentioned in that post, we’ve been covering these stunts forever at TPM. We should recognize these actions as precursor acts to mass shootings.

Indeed, yesterday the FBI announced the arrestof 23 year old Conor Climo for plotting to stage a mass shooting or bomb attack at either a synagogue or gay night club in Las Vegas. Three years ago he was in the news in Las Vegas as one of these self-styled open carry activists who’d decided he would patrol local neighborhoods uninvited with an AR-15 and various other military paraphrenalia. Here’s a local news report from September 2016. Police said he what he was doing was legal so long as he didn’t go within a certain distance of schools or certain government buildings.

This isn’t just one example. It’s fairly obvious that anyone who carries off one of these stunts is worth monitoring for future mass casualty attacks. Despite the claims about acclimating people to the ‘normalness’ of being around random civilians with military style weapons and the language of “rights”, the obvious the motivation behind these stunts is to feel power as evidenced by the ability to scare and terrorize people. That is to say, to experience the fear or terror or sense of powerlessness others feel when someone they don’t know or have any reason to trust is strutting around with an AR-15. The language and politics of extreme gun rights activists is consistently highly similar to those of far-right or white nationalist groups. They are of a piece both psychologically and ideologically.

These are precursor acts much as serially killers often star by pulling the wings off flies or killing local pets. The great majority of people who do one won’t ever move on to the other. But it’s a gateway, a sort of testing of boundaries and hunger to sow fear in others, that leads in that direction.

After all, they’ve already bought the hardware.

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