In late June, Gov. Chris Sununu signed into law a measure prohibiting any Granite State official from enforcing federal firearms laws, unless the firearms violation is committed in conjunction with a separate criminal act. The effect of the ban is unclear, but Sununu brushed aside any concerns. “New Hampshire has a proud tradition of responsible firearms stewardship,” he said, “and I’ve long said that I’m not looking to make any changes to our laws.”
This struck us at the time as a remarkably sanguine — some would say smug — expression of New Hampshire exceptionalism, coming as it did in the wake of mass shootings at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, both committed with AR-15-style rifles.
Since then it has become ever clearer that these rifles are a mortal threat not only to public safety but also to the life of American democracy.
A recent investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform produced much illuminating information on the marketing of these weapons by leading manufacturers. Among the practices the committee described are gun makers emphasizing the military lineage of AR-15-style rifles in selling to the civilian market (the main difference being that the military version has fully automatic firing capability, the civilian one, only semi-automatic); using imagery from first-person-shooter video games to advertise their products; and linking ownership of their weapons with masculinity (“Consider your mancard reissued,” reads one ad by Bushmaster, which made the rifles used in the Sandy Hook school shooting and the recent attack in Buffalo.)
As troubling as these techniques are, they pale in comparison with the finding that the industry has long been marketing overtly and covertly to white supremacist and other extremist organizations. For example, the committee found that a 2017 catalog from Daniel Defense, a leading manufacturer, features an image of a shooter bearing a Valknot tattoo, a Norse symbol associated with white nationalists that was also tattooed onto the chest of the so-called “QAnon Shaman” who participated in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
And speaking of that terrible day, the House committee investigating the insurrection has laid out a compelling case that far from being a spontaneous riot, the attack was part of a well-orchestrated, multi-pronged effort by Donald Trump and a small circle of associates to overturn the presidential election and keep him in office — in short, to effect a right-wing coup.
In the course of presenting its evidence, the committee has documented how Trump knew that his supporters were armed that day while he was goading them to march on the Capitol. Toward the end of the panel’s last hearing of the summer, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, warned that the “militant, intolerant ideologies” unleashed by Trump remain a threat. “They’re all still out there, ready to go,” he said.
Ready to connect the dots? Hundreds of thousands AR-15-style rifles have been sold in the past decade. It is reasonable to infer that many are now in the hands of adherents of emboldened white nationalist groups whose militancy is only increasing.
The political threat posed by extremists heavily armed with weapons designed to kill large numbers of people as quickly as possible is not imaginary. In fact, it is quite possible to imagine that the next time Trump has occasion to summon them, his call will be answered by a lethal, organized force that the duly constituted authorities will have difficulty coping with, if they are able to at all. One only has to review the Uvalde school shooting to recognize that hundreds of law enforcement officers were stymied by one lone shooter armed with a Daniel Defense AR-15-style rifle.
Perhaps these circumstances provide insight into a question that has puzzled us and many other people for a long time: “Why are these weapons of war sold to civilians at all?”
The answer may well be that right-wing extremists are preparing for actual civil war to establish a separate nation-state by and for the white race and arming themselves accordingly, and that some gun manufacturers are only too happy to help them while raking in astonishing profits. Maybe that scenario would strike Sununu as far-fetched; let’s hope his complacency is well-founded.