FEBRUARY 19, 2016


GUNS, GUNS, GUNS


GUNS IN FLORIDA AIRPORTS -- SHOCKING BUT NOT SURPRISING – THREE ARTICLES



http://bearingarms.com/airport-open-carry-stunt-leads-predictable-gun-ban-legislation/

Airport Open Carry Stunt Leads to Predictable Gun Ban Legislation
Posted by Bob Owens on June 17, 2015 at 12:52 pm

We told you about AR-15 open carrier Jim Cooley’s stunt earlier this month.

Jim Cooley walked into the world’s busiest airport with an AR-15 fitted with a drum magazine slung across his chest last week, and has the temerity to feign offense when law enforcement reasonably took an interest in him:

A metro Atlanta man says he was harassed for exercising his second amendment rights while at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport last week.

Jim Cooley says that while he and his wife took his daughter to the airport after a vacation, he openly carried his AR-15 rifle – which is his right under Georgia state law.

And while city officials have in the past expressed dismay over the fact that citizens are permitted to carry weapons in the open and public areas of the airport, it is, indeed, perfectly legal for citizens to walk through the airport with their weapons displayed in view, provided they do not move into the TSA-controlled secure areas of the airport property.

Cooley says he was approached by several Atlanta Police officers asking about his firearm, which he said he was carrying for safety, while at the airport.

At no point does Cooley claim that the officers attempted to deny him entry to the airport, or attempt to detain or arrest him. All he alleges is that officers asked him about his decision to walk into an airport with a rifle with a drum magazine.

In the sane world, we call that a “reasonable response” to abnormal behavior, not harassment.

As a direct result of Cooley’s stunt, Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson has now proposed a federal law to ban both open and concealed carry in airports.

A House Democrat is introducing legislation to ban guns in airport areas that are located before security checkpoints.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) said the measure, which has been dubbed the Airport Security Act of 2015, would prevent anyone other than police officers from carrying guns in areas of airports that are located before security checkpoints, even if they have a license to carry concealed weapons.

“Airports are the gateway to commerce throughout the world and the front door to the communities they connect for millions of passengers who visit the United States each year,” Johnson said in a statement. “It defies logic that we would allow anyone other than law enforcement officials to carry a loaded gun within an airport. This bill is simple common sense.”

Thankfully, is is very unlikely that Johnson will amass enough support to make this bill viable.

Sadly, we’re now having to devote energies on defense to explain why Johnson’s proposed bill really isn’t “common sense.” It’s a prospect made all the more difficult because your average citizen isn’t going to be able to grasp why a mentally healthy person might want or need to walk into an airport with AR-15 with a drum magazine inserted to see someone off at the airport, unless that airport is in Afghanistan.

When gun rights activists and pro-gun lawmakers have to deal with distracting, grandstanding behavior like Cooley’s, it takes away time we could better spend attempting to pass other pro-gun laws, or dismantle gun control laws already on the books.

Jim Cooley’s fifteen-minute stunt did nothing to help the gun rights movement, and gave gun control supporters ammunition that they will reuse again and again for years to come to portray gun owners as extreme, paranoid, and out of touch with the American mainstream.

That’s not helping us, and never will.

Tags: airport, Anti-Gun Laws, Atlanta, Hank Johnson, Jim Cooley, open carry
Bob Owens

Author: Bob Owens
Bob Owens is the Editor of BearingArms.com. He is an alumnus of Gunsite Academy, is an instructor with Project Appleseed, and is the author of the short e-book, So You Want to Own a Gun. He can be found on Twitter at bob_owens.




http://www.fox35orlando.com/news/politics/92829274-story

Bill would allow guns in airport terminals
By Jim Turner, The News Service Of Florida
POSTED:FEB 16 2016 08:01PM EST
UPDATED:FEB 16 2016 08:02PM EST

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (NSF) - A proposal that would allow people to bring guns into airport terminals, but not through federal security screening, has taken off in the Senate amid turbulence from aviation officials.

The measure (SB 1500), narrowly approved along party lines in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, would allow people with concealed-weapons licenses to continue carrying sidearms in the areas of airports that are before passengers go through the security-screening process.

It is unknown how far the measure will fly this legislative session, as it has two additional committee appearances scheduled in the Senate, and the House version (HB 4051) has not been heard in committees.

Sen. Wilton Simpson, a Trilby Republican who is sponsoring the proposal, said it is intended to let people maintain their personal safety while dropping off or picking up travelers.

"When you see that there are lots of terroristic threats around airports and security around airports, and it seems to me that when you have 100 million visitors come through the state of Florida at some level, this is one of those areas we need to address," Simpson said after the meeting.

But Sen. Jeff Clemens, a Lake Worth Democrat who joined Jacksonville Democrat Audrey Gibson in opposing the bill, said the proposal could make it easier for people to access weapons in an airport.

Michael Stewart, director of the Jacksonville Aviation Authority who represented the Florida Airports Council, said law-enforcement agencies that patrol airports are also concerned about introducing more guns into potentially stress-filled situations.

"Obviously the good person there has been trained, but when someone else sees someone with a weapon … the introduction of a weapon could be a problem," Stewart said.

Under the proposal, people intending to travel with firearms would still have to pack the unloaded guns into baggage and declare the pieces when checking in.

The Transportation Security Administration prohibits people from possessing weapons when going through security screening to enter what is known as the sterile area of the airport. Violators may be fined up to $11,000 per violation.

Airport terminals, along with the sterile areas, are among listed limitations in state law about where people can carry concealed weapons. Other examples are police stations, jails, courthouses, courthouses, polling places, government meetings and schools.

The House has approved a bill (HB 163) that would allow people with concealed-weapons licenses to openly carry guns. Part of that bill also would allow state lawmakers to carry sidearms during legislative meetings.

A separate measure (HB 4031), which has not advanced in the House, would allow people with concealed-weapons licenses to bring their handguns into meetings of the Legislature, city councils and school boards.




http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/magazine/01Appleseed-t.html?_r=0

Magazine -- Firing Line
By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ
JULY 29, 2010

Photograph -- TARGET ACQUISITION Participants at a two-day Appleseed course in Carmi, Ill., last month. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
RELATED COVERAGE -- slideshow The Appleseed Project: A Call to Arms JULY 29, 2010
video History at 500 YardsJULY 29, 2010


One June morning last year, Jack Dailey drove from his home in North Carolina’s Piedmont country, through verdant, hilly farmland to a rifle range near the town of Ramseur. Eleven men and a woman had mustered there for a weeklong boot camp run by the Appleseed Project, a group Dailey started that is dedicated to teaching every American how to fire a bullet through a man-size target out to 500 yards. So far Appleseed has taught 25,000 people to shoot; 7,000 more will learn by the end of this year. Its instructors teach this skill not for the purpose of hunting or sport. They see marksmanship as fundamental to Americans’ ability to defend their liberty, whether against foreigners or the agents of a (hypothetical) tyrannical government. Appleseed frames this activity as being somewhere between a historical re-enactment and a viable last resort. I came to find out how serious they were.

Dailey, Appleseed’s founder and rhetorician in chief, is a tall man with silver hair. He wore black sneakers, a red polo shirt tucked into jeans and a red baseball cap. Sixty-six years old, he could have been a grandfather spending a leisurely morning on a public golf course if not for his unyielding expression and his voice, which is well equipped for the stirring up of men.

In the previous day’s lecture, Dailey discussed taxes — the situation of the American taxpayer, he said, compared unfavorably with the lives of slaves in ancient Egypt. Today he got down to the matter at hand: defense against overweening government. “Look at the choice those guys made,” he said, referring to the colonial-era militia. “I’ll post you 65 yards from the road. In a few hours there’s gonna be hundreds of redcoats marching down that road. Your liberty depends on you stopping ’em.”

Two lead musket balls were passed around the clubhouse, through the hands of a camouflaged Navy midshipman, two sheriff’s deputies, a farm-owning factory worker, a college professor, a pilot, a retiree and a high-school sophomore. Those who shot an “expert” score on Dailey’s qualification test would become “riflemen,” as designated by olive-green patches. For now, most of these novice shooters were referred to as “cooks.”

“When you fire that first shot, those redcoats are gonna be mad,” Dailey said. “They’re gonna come at you with those 16-inch bayonets. There’ll be three or four of ’em before you load your second shot.” He paused. Thoughts of bayonets seemed to linger in the silent room. “Not much percentage in that choice. We know now that they won. But for them? No guarantees.”

The Appleseed Project began with commentaries Dailey writes, under the byline of “Fred,” that run beside advertisements for his surplus-rifle-stock business in the magazine Shotgun News. In 2005, he organized his first Appleseed shoots in Wyoming and Texas. The combination of military-style rifle training, star-spangled rhetoric and low cost ($70 for two days; free for women, minors and military personnel) proved catching. Word of the program spread through gun culture and survivalist Web sites. The tax filings of the Revolutionary War Veterans Association, the nonprofit group that oversees Appleseed, show that the group now has $334,000 in cash. The Appleseed Web site lists as many as 100 shoots a month on the outskirts of towns like Eureka, Kan., Pine Bluffs, Wyo., and Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

At the North Carolina shoot, the cooks came from Georgia, Florida, Illinois and Ohio, bearing .22-caliber Rugers and Marlins outfitted with custom sights — what Appleseed calls Liberty Training Rifles. Though they were diverse in age and class, their uniformly white skin, down-home talk and traditional values suggested a common attachment to an America that had lost its long-held claim to the cultural center. While Dailey has said Appleseed should be apolitical, the talk at this Appleseed boot camp and at several others I attended across the country over the course of a year contained pieces of a conversation that has unfolded behind the motley carnivals of the Tea Party movement: a serious deliberation on the right about the nature of the American founding and the limits of incivility. Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for Senate in Nevada who is campaigning against Harry Reid, has spoken of the possibility of “Second Amendment remedies” for Congressional action. “The nation is arming,” she told The Reno Gazette-Journal in May. “What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of their government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways. That’s why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?” Rick Barber, a Republican candidate for Congress in Alabama, has broadcast an ad in which an actor dressed as George Washington declares, “Gather your armies.”

Are statements like these rhetorical flourishes or calls to arms? Determining whether this revolutionary talk constitutes a threat comes down to finding the fine line between expressing anger and inciting the angry to action, a distinction that is clear as a matter of law but less so in cultural practice. In April, on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, former President Bill Clinton sought to move this cultural line, comparing today’s antigovernment sentiment with that of the mid-’90s. Clinton argued that those who demonize the federal government could be courting another tragedy. There is, however, a rejoinder to this from the right. “The sense in the year 2010 that there’s something threatening about civilian marksmanship is a function of 1990s political correctness and guilt by association,” Nick Dranias, director of the Center for Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute, said. “These groups are trying to take guns out of the shadows and display them proudly, in public, not as a bunch of weirdos crawling around the forest at night.”

Inside the Appleseed Project, the question of where an armed citizenry should draw this line remains open. Later that week, as he sipped a Coke at a nearby McDonald’s, Dailey flirted with an answer. “If you ever have to reach for your guns, you’ve lost before you started,” he said, and then doubled back. “Now, there are probably some narrow, hypothetical exceptions to that. Like if somebody in the government said, ‘We’re taking over the country.’ You might find there’d be a spontaneous. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what it would be. And to be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn’t want to see it.”

The first night’s campfire sounded less like sedition and more like men telling stories of times they looked death in the eye. Ron Vandiver, the boot camp’s head instructor, made death’s acquaintance while trying to repair a swaying radio tower on a stormy afternoon. Vandiver is the kind of man that Dailey likes to characterize as a “regular American,” words intended as the highest praise. A stout 42-year-old with a gadget-laden belt, he looked like a dad I might see at Home Depot. His eyes watered up when he spoke of an ancestor who fought in the Continental Army. He asked how far back each of us could feel our national history as opposed to just reading about it. “The war between the states,” one man said. “World War II,” another said. “That’s a shame,” Vandiver said. “We’re here to extend your historical horizon of empathy.”

The main zones for projecting the past onto the present were the “redcoats,” paper targets stapled to wooden poles at 25 meters. Four red silhouettes represented kills at 100, 200, 300 and 400 yards. On the third day the cooks moved to the 500-yard range, where they fired AR-15’s, M1As, and M1 Garands. In the middle of the firing line lay David and Darrell Garvey, two brothers with sun-reddened skin and graying beards. Before the housing crash, the Garveys grossed as much as $1 million a year installing floors in vacation homes. Now they were unemployed. They loaded their magazines and pulled the charging handles. “Ready on the right!” Vandiver bellowed. “Ready on the left! All ready on the firing line. . . . Fire!”

Darrell Garvey pressed his eye to the scope, trying to keep a red dot fixed on the blurry figure in the distance. He stilled his breathing and slowly squeezed the trigger. “Cease fire!” Vandiver shouted. “Unload and clear!” Darrell disarmed his rifle. He walked up the slope to his target and huffed in exasperation. A few shots hadn’t even hit the paper.

Darrell turned to Vandiver. “If, God forbid, the worst happens and this all becomes reality, would you recommend shooting out at 500 or waiting ’til they came closer in?”

“I’m too old and fat to run fast,” Vandiver answered. “So I like to give myself as big a head start as possible. On a two-way shooting range, I’m inclined to hit them out at 500.”

“Fred’s Plan to Save America,” an early photocopied manifesto, sets forth a doctrine of deterrence. Shooting is “training for the Day,” Dailey wrote. “The Day that will never come, if enough of us are ready for it.” Appleseed occasionally attracts those who believe this Day is already here. Dailey calls such fringe beliefs “the dark side.” One man at an Appleseed boot camp in Nevada announced his plan to assassinate county officials and ignite a guerrilla war. “It kinda floored me when he blurted that out,” Dailey recalls. “We fight this militia stuff all the time. If there’s the slightest truth to what he said, he was a dead man. Which means there’s probably no truth at all.” In Ramseur, Dailey’s rousing talk was followed by an introduction to the “soft war” fought with “ballots, not bullets.” Dailey did not say how the ballots should be cast, but I did meet many senior Apple­seed instructors with affinities for The Limbaugh Letter and Tea Party rallies (all of whom nonetheless obeyed the prohibition on partisan discussions during the program itself).

Last fall, a report by the Anti-Defamation League called Appleseed part of a trend in which romanticized notions of armed resistance have “percolated beyond extremist groups and movements into the mainstream.” It stopped short of saying Appleseed was itself an extremist group, though Mark Pitcavage, the A.D.L.’s director of investigative research, characterized Appleseed as a potential gateway to militias. “I’m concerned not in the sense that I think the Appleseed Project is dangerous,” he told me. “But it does have a goal of indoctrination.”

But the sociologist James William Gibson, whose book “Warrior Dreams” analyzed civilian paramilitary culture since the mid-’70s, says Appleseed and the broader movement around it are unlikely to pose a danger to civil society. “When a culture is in crisis, the first response is often to go back to the creation myth and start over again,” he told me. “The narrative is ‘we’re going to redo the narrative of the United States by returning to origins, to marksmanship.’ People are focusing on the idea that America’s problems can be resolved into something that can be shot. It doesn’t exactly encourage systematic reflection, but it’s a long ways from a civil war.”

The National Rifle Association declined to address the question of where Appleseed fits into the gun culture. “We are familiar with who they are and what they do,” a spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, told me. “But given that we don’t have firsthand experience, we are reticent to say anything beyond that.” Maynard Reid Jr., the sheriff of Randolph County in North Carolina, which includes the Ramseur range, told me he hadn’t heard of the Appleseed Project, though he sometimes rents the range from Dailey for sniper training. “Jack Dailey is a straightforward guy,” he told me. “He don’t try to sugarcoat things. He’s a good man, as far as I know.”

Appleseed’s claim to mainstream legitimacy is bolstered by the group’s ties to active-duty members of the military. In March, an instructor who works as a researcher at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico arranged for Appleseed to conduct five days of training with a brigade from the Second Engineer Battalion. Appleseed also gave free on-base training to a unit from the South Carolina National Guard. I shot at Appleseed boot camps alongside Marines looking to hone their skills before deployment. They came to Appleseed out of uniform, on their own accord. The final two days of the Ramseur boot camp were led by 26-year-old John Hawes, who won a Silver Star in Afghanistan and recently taught marksmanship to soldiers at Fort Jackson. “The Army’s gotten away from the basics,” he told me.

On one of the final afternoons of boot camp, Gordon Wade, a math professor at Bowling Green State University, was cooking outside his tent. Dailey lumbered up and told Wade he had the makings of a good instructor. Wade said he wasn’t sure how many of his academic peers he could bring into the Appleseed fold. “They might think it’s some kind of militia,” he said.

The men stood in silence. Wade stirred his dinner. “A man should have a rifle,” he said. “Not just a .22. A man should have an AR-15 the same way he should have one good suit. Now, I can’t really think of a scenario where I’m going to use my AR-15 as an AR-15. I can’t quite articulate it. It sounds like I want to go out fighting zombies” — slang for the unprepared — “or feds. I don’t want to. But if it ever comes to that, God forbid, I want to be able to. But no, no. . . .” He shook his head. “That isn’t it either. It’s just something that I think I should have. Fred, why should I have an AR-15?”

Dailey stood with his arms crossed. He said: “Because they want to tell us what to do. And we don’t want them to tell us what to do.”

Dailey keeps his rifle stocks in an old Coca-Cola warehouse filled to the rafters with the remainders of war — empty bandoleers, rifle slings, rifle butt plates, rifle brushes, rifle grease. Thousands of wooden stocks stripped of their actions lay in jumbled piles. Dailey fired his first gun at age 6, a .22 aimed at a tree stump. He pulled the trigger; his father held the stock. His first rifle was a Japanese Model 99, a present from his mother for his 19th birthday. The physical fact of the gun led him to consider what action it might have seen. “The joy of owning these things is tough to explain,” he says. “Either you feel it or you don’t.” In the Army R.O.T.C. at North Carolina State University, he learned to fire and strip an M1 Garand. Academic deferments kept him out of Vietnam. In 1969, he took a bus to Washington to march against the war. “I thought this was a serious thing,” he says. “Everyone else was there to party.” He gave up his activist stirrings for law school, married, graduated and began rehabbing apartment buildings in Chicago. He did well enough to retire at 42, but the experience eroded his idealism. “A landlord is like a cop or a bartender,” he says. “You get to see people as they really are.” His politics moved toward “the iron rule of life: everyone wants to be first in line to eat and last in line to die.” The economic malaise of the late 1970s seemed to confirm this pessimism. He sought comfort in survivalist magazines and stockpiled rifles and canned food. In the mid-1980s, he sold off his properties and moved with his wife back to North Carolina.

Dailey’s frustration with the government peaked during the 1990s after the fatal conflicts at Ruby Ridge and Waco. “Uncle Sam told 76 Americans to come out of their own house, lay down their arms and spread-eagle on the ground,” he says of Waco. “Does that sound to you like the sovereignty of the individual?” At that time, growing restive, he bought more than half a million pounds of rifle stocks at an army-surplus auction. He named his new venture “Fred’s,” after his dog, and wrote indictments of the Clintons and the “New World Order” that reached 94,000 readers. As the radical right gathered steam in the ’90s, Dailey’s anger fixated on the United Nations, which he saw as a metagovernment bent on covertly undermining American sovereignty. He organized a “U.N. Day” shoot at a local gun club, painting targets United Nations blue and firing holes through a steel U.N. helmet. In 2002, Dailey wrote “Battlin’ the U.N.,” a near-future story of six riflemen who ambush a U.N. convoy rolling through Iowa. Using the accompanying targets, Dailey’s readers could practice shooting Boris, the villainous U.N. commander.

Dailey calls all this “my young and stupid years.” The Appleseed Project appeals to a broad constituency, one whose edges blur into the N.R.A. at one end and into violent militias like the Hutaree, nine of whose members were indicted in March for conspiracy to murder, at the other end. Notices of Appleseed shoots appear regularly on militia Web sites. Dailey argues that outreach like this attracts radical anger and then moderates it. Many Appleseeders have stories like that of Rod Jackson, a former bouncer whom I met at a shoot in Fresno, Calif. After leaving the Navy, Jackson spent years as a homeless alcoholic but now works by day as a telecommunications technician and by night at a gun range. He has long been preparing for an event he read about online — Teotwawki, which stands for “the end of the world as we know it.” He stored up enough food to feed his family for 30 days and planned to relocate to a remote valley. “I was going to hide myself in a hole,” he said. “Then Fred made this comment that people who build caves are cowards. That stung.”

As his involvement with Appleseed deepened, Jackson found his focus shifting to what he could accomplish within the present system. “A lot of folks in the gun community talk about stepping up and fighting,” he said. “That’s skipping over the easy stuff for the hard stuff. The point is that we don’t need to fight now. We have another option.” That option, he said, was contacting elected representatives.

In a cramped room adjoining the warehouse, Dailey monitors the message board and plows through queries from instructors. In a recent post he acknowledged that though he once “flirted with the dark side,” there was no place for the rhetoric of deterrence within Appleseed. Statements like “we’ll soon be in a future when the shooting starts,” he wrote, are not compatible with Appleseed’s mission.

During my travels through Appleseed country, I spoke with nearly 100 cooks and riflemen and corresponded with dozens more. None seemed as close to the dark side as James Faire of Monroe, Wash., a man obsessed with reducing the space between readiness and action to the thinnest possible line. After years of practice Faire has whittled that space down to the fraction of a second that it takes him to open the snap holster on his belt, draw and level the Kimber 1911 he carries whenever outside the house, apply pressure to the hair trigger and fire a hollow-point .460-caliber round into his target, all while backpedaling at a 45-degree angle. “This is called moving off the X,” he told me. “By the time you draw on them and say, ‘Drop the weapon,’ you’re already dead.”

Faire has practiced this maneuver thousands of times. He says he came close to using it last year while trying to clear a downed tree from the road leading to his five-acre homestead in Monroe. A sheriff’s deputy drove up, lights flashing, with his own ideas about how best to clear the tree. Words were exchanged. The hands of both men drifted down toward their holsters. The way Faire tells it, the peace of Snohomish County momentarily teetered. Then the deputy got back in his car and drove away.

Deputies, Faire says, are criminals operating “under the color of law.” He refuses to vote, and the signature on his driver’s license appears with the disclaimer “all rights reserved.” Some of Faire’s views resemble those of the sovereign-citizen movement, extremists who deny the legitimacy of federal law. Faire heard about Appleseed through a Web site he administers called A Well Regulated Militia. Last year he began hosting monthly Appleseed shoots on his land, which appeared on Appleseed’s print and online schedules. In 2008, a government informant reportedly observed Andrew Steven Gray shooting an AR-15-style rifle and a pistol on Faire’s range. Gray, a 33-year-old convicted felon, is legally barred from owning any firearms. In Gray’s storage locker, according to a government complaint, federal agents found a cache of 21 guns, four silencers, two bulletproof vests and 9,000 rounds of ammunition. At his home nearby, says the complaint, were several hundred marijuana plants. Last month Gray was sentenced to four years in prison on gun and drug charges.

The complaint against Gray states that Faire’s range is known as the Militia Training Center, which “routinely holds training for individuals involved with the militia movement.” When I brought all this up to Dailey, he said Faire was “wrapping himself in the flag of Appleseed” to manage his troubles with the county, which closed his range for code violations. I asked Faire whether Dailey had given him any flack. “Privately, they’ve been very supportive,” he said. Though Faire says he obeyed Appleseed’s prohibition against talking politics during his shoots, he can still be seen explaining Appleseed’s basics on YouTube and accusing President Obama of “telling people to shut up and not talk.”

Shortly after the arrests in March of nine people thought to be members of the Hutaree militia, I e-mailed Faire and asked whether he had any contact with the group. He replied that he trained with one of the accused Hutaree in 2005, “although he showed mental instability and further association was discouraged.” Faire says the charges were “made up of whole cloth. They had the motive and means and opportunity to resist their arrest but did not. If they were guilty, they would have resisted.”

On an overcast winter day in Monroe, Faire and I sat beside a wood stove in a classroom a few steps away from his house. Targets of kaffiyeh-clad figures armed with rocket-propelled grenades leaned against the wall. I sipped coffee as Faire split wood and unfurled his politics. “The government has quite literally become tyrannical,” he said. “It is fulfilling the principles outlined in ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ ” His seemed to have a deep urge to see himself as a revolutionary, and it was hard to imagine him at a loss for a framework that would let him do so.

“It’s completely out of control,” he continued, “from city to state to federal to international law. All predicate their existence on plundering the individual and his rights. The only thing to do now is to organize citizens into a militia to abolish this government. They’re the supreme law of the land, the only ones who have the moral and legal authority to do it.” His voice was calm. It was as if he knew these things were true to both of us.

Faire, who is 50, has a neat mustache and moves with a martial steadiness. He often grips his belt with his right hand during conversation. It holds the holster of his 1911, the muzzle of which peeks out from beneath the waist of his black tactical jacket. The police, he said, often mistake him for an off-duty officer. He gave me a tour of his land, pointing out a ruined minivan used for sniper practice. Somewhere in the surrounding hills he once buried waterproof tubes containing clothes, provisions and six M1 Garands; he later dug them up and sold them to pay for his legal battle with the county over the code violations.

After lunch in the nearby city of Gold Bar, we returned to Monroe for a meeting at a diner with two friends that Faire met while working on the Ron Paul presidential campaign. One talked of establishing a camp where like-minded dissidents might be trained in the use of arms. The man asked for Faire’s help. Faire seemed reluctant to commit. The man said, “I told my wife 30 years ago, ‘I’m tired of being an insignificant man living in a broken culture.’ ” And yet here he was three decades later, still looking for his first recruit. Did he really want to be dangerous?

When American men talk like this, they are usually giving voice to fantasy. Only in fantasy, after all, are governments overthrown by men trained to do nothing more than shoot long-distance targets in a controlled environment. Some of these men seek out unlikely battlefields, where they can be warriors of the future, warriors of the imagination or reluctant warriors in waiting who are passing their time on the Internet. The power of a gun to take a life is not so much a threat as a talisman connecting these fantasies to the real world.

“When I hold a rifle in my hands, I can feel the choice that I’m making,” one Appleseeder, a computer programmer from Southern California, told me. “I know what I can do with this gun, but I also know I’m not going to do that. I have become death. When you have that power and that choice, you know what choice you’re going to make. When someone can be death over a quarter mile, that’s a tremendous responsibility.”

The exceptions to the rule of the responsible gun owner generate headlines and casualties. The largest threat that Appleseed poses is the possibility that some future gunmen will find their way from some dark-side message board to an Appleseed boot camp. “There’s always going to be someone who thinks the revolution is sooner rather than later,” Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center says. “Now they’re learning to be snipers. You would hope Appleseed would do some screening.”

When I asked Dailey about this, he said, “If we recruited 500 people from one of these crazy boards and 499 of them wound up agreeing with us, then what would you say?”

“I would want to know about the one who didn’t agree,” I said. “You’ve taught him how to kill with a rifle out to 500 yards.”

“Well, the only precaution for that is not to teach the skills at all. Why even let them have the hardware, in that case?” He proposed an analogy. “What if the inmates in the asylum were stabbing each other with knives? Do you give them plastic spoons? Or do you cure the insanity?”

“But part of what you’re doing is sharpening the knives.”

“If we can cure the insanity, I think it’s a fair trade.”

On my last day in North Carolina, Dailey and I visited a Revolutionary War battlefield an hour’s drive from the warehouse. We walked through the wooded site as joggers and couples passed us on the trail. We came to a stop at two cannon replicas beside what had once been colonial lines. Dailey paraphrased what he called “the gay quote,” John Adams’s sentiment that he would study war, so his sons could study business and agriculture, so their sons could study the arts. “What a bad plan!” Dailey said. “The bad people of the world are still going to be there in three generations. So your grandson better know something about war. You can’t just have the third generation sitting around, ballet dancing, playing pianos and talking dilettante talk.”

I asked whether Appleseed was really about the decline of the American man. Dailey vehemently disagreed. To prove me wrong he stopped two young women, introduced himself and began to pitch the program. Wearing sandals and modish sunglasses, they appeared to be the sort of prospective Appleseeders who could buttress the program against the dark side.

“Pop quiz,” Dailey said. “When was the American Revolution won?”

“Yorktown is considered the final victory,” one of the women, Melissa Hogg, said. She majored in history at the University of Virginia, she said, specializing in the Revolutionary War.

“Would you believe what a founder said?” Dailey asked. “It was won before the first shot was fired, in the hearts and minds of the American people.”

“Of course,” Hogg said. “It’s a matter of ideology.”

Dailey seemed to bristle at this, hearing in Hogg’s words a disbelief in the specialness of American hearts and minds — and the suggestion that the motives behind the American Revolution were no better or worse than those of any other. Nevertheless, he gave the women Appleseed’s Web address.

As we made our way back to the parking lot, he shook his head. “You see what we’re up against?” he asked. “Imagine 300 million of those.”

a call to arms Online video of an Appleseed Project target practice in Iowa at nytimes.com/magazine.




APPLESEED -- “Though they were diverse in age and class, their uniformly white skin, down-home talk and traditional values suggested a common attachment to an America that had lost its long-held claim to the cultural center. While Dailey has said Appleseed should be apolitical, the talk at this Appleseed boot camp and at several others I attended across the country over the course of a year contained pieces of a conversation that has unfolded behind the motley carnivals of the Tea Party movement: a serious deliberation on the right about the nature of the American founding and the limits of incivility. Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for Senate in Nevada who is campaigning against Harry Reid, has spoken of the possibility of “Second Amendment remedies” for Congressional action. “The nation is arming,” she told The Reno Gazette-Journal in May. “What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of their government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways. That’s why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?” Rick Barber, a Republican candidate for Congress in Alabama, has broadcast an ad in which an actor dressed as George Washington declares, “Gather your armies.”

I went to the Net to look up Appleseed because it sounded as though it might relate to the semi-mythological character we all learned about in school -- Johnnie Appleseed, who went about in the wilderness planting apple seeds. He was not a soldier or a gunman, but a kind of itinerant loner. The only logical connection I see is the Revolutionary time period itself - a simpler and more idyllic America, with "honest farmers" standing up to the arrogant British Redcoats.

What is shocking to me is that there is a specific political connection today between our modern right wing thinkers and the Militias, Sovereign Citizens, and let's not forget the KKK, linked in their minds to the political ideas of a new Revolution. Those guys in Oregon, the Bundys, are of that same group. I can imagine men wandering about our airports carrying huge and very destructive guns, thinking that they are "protecting" our society from the UN, the American Government, and Communists. I approve of a Federal law to ban guns on airport property, except when they are safely held within a checked bag that is in the cargo hold. If anyone doesn't believe such people to be dangerous, read some of their thought processes above.