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Gun culture’s Burning Man: Sights, sounds & automatic weapon reports from Knob Creek shoot
Salon ^ | November 6, 2013 | Alexander Zaitchik

Posted on 11/08/2013 11:54:08 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

It’s an odd feeling to get the upsell on instruction manuals related to domestic terrorism. The nice lady from the Illinois hamlet of Smithton would never describe her wares that way, but that’s what they are. The booklets were stacked in neat rows that wrapped around her four tables in the exhibitor’s hall at October’s Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot, a biannual event just south of Louisville that looks and sounds a lot like a reenactment of the first days of the Siege of Stalingrad. Since 1979, the Shoot has drawn growing numbers of full-auto aficionados to the wooded hills of West Point, Ky. for holidays of high explosives, artillery and machine gun fire. Each April and October, bombs shake the earth and blacken the sky. Streams of bullets smack steel and rubber targets until they burst aflame. The rumble from the range is audible even at the far end of the event’s 900-table vendors hall, where I found myself one fine autumn morning perusing technical guides to building kitchen-table bombs and retro-engineering semi-automatic rifles into military-style machine guns.

Most of the many thousands of blueprints for sale at the Shoot – old Army manuals for M16 maintenance, recipes for homemade bullets of every conceivable caliber — can be described as ideologically neutral. The same cannot be said for those sold by the lady from Smithton (who refused to give her name, but let’s call her Blanche). Her stapled pamphlets each contained cryptic forewords about government mind-control and the need to “advance our culture.” For sale among them were spiral-bound copies of white-power manifestos and neo-fascist fantasy fiction, including a samizdat edition of The Turner Diaries....

(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...


TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: banglist; kentucky

1 posted on 11/08/2013 11:54:08 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Knob Creek is real live fire fun!


2 posted on 11/09/2013 12:09:42 AM PST by exnavy (Fish or cut bait ...Got ammo, Godspeed!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
It ain't McCarthyism when the left does it.


3 posted on 11/09/2013 12:15:41 AM PST by nathanbedford ("Attack, repeat, attack!" Bull Halsey)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Salon goes to Knob Creek? How could I possibly pass that up? Twice the intellectual stimulation of a Palestinian scientific study of Israeli genocide, but only half the fat!


4 posted on 11/09/2013 12:44:22 AM PST by Standing Wolf (No tyrant should ever be allowed to die of natural causes.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Stopped reading at “It’s an odd feeling”


5 posted on 11/09/2013 3:10:36 AM PST by Red in Blue PA (When Injustice becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty.-Thomas Jefferson)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
The "funky manuals and goofy pamphlets" table is pretty much a staple at any gun show I've ever been to. There must be a market for it. Leave it to liberal Salon to focus in on that. Can't say as I've ever heard of any of it being put to use over the years.

Best as I can tell, the policies of liberalism are far more dangerous and costly in lives than anything sold at a gun show. d:^)

6 posted on 11/09/2013 3:11:15 AM PST by CopperTop
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
.” For sale among them were spiral-bound copies of white-power manifestos and neo-fascist fantasy fiction, including a samizdat edition of The Turner Diaries....

Have to confess I had to look that one up. Samizdat, citizen publishing and dissemination, essentially. The writer implies an almost terroristic aim of the practice and uses TTD as prime example. He intentionally doesn't imply through context that the rest of the definition of the word, ...dissemination in response to government bans.... is an important qualifier as far as the comparison goes.

That said wholesale description of the Knob Creek offerings as subversive or terrorist manuals is ludicrous. And, as for the Turner Diaries, I read it years ago and while it does instill a sense of race hatred in some respects (e.g., the rape-tents, black-on-white murder and oppression, et al), other parts of it are remarkably like what Obama has intended way before his presidency (i.e., a civilian force as well funded, well armed as our military). Personally, I thought the ending was rather novel idea.

7 posted on 11/09/2013 3:24:29 AM PST by Gaffer
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

It’s good he concludes that there is no political impact.


8 posted on 11/09/2013 3:53:31 AM PST by SC_Pete
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Big Sandy in Arizona is much bigger.
9 posted on 11/09/2013 4:01:38 AM PST by Yo-Yo
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To: Gaffer; All

The reason that much of this literature is semi-underground is that the Fourth Circuit made a decision back during the Clinton years, I believe, that publishers could be sued for publishing a book that someone used as a blueprint to commit a crime. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

I am not kidding. A direct assault on the First Amendment, indirectly sanctioned by the Supreme Court. Its immediate effect was a cessation of the publishing of many “how to” manuals on improvised weaponry and explosives. Clear, direct censorship.

http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/HitManLawsuit.htm

The book that was targeted in the suit was “Hit Man”, written by a housewife looking for some extra cash.

The Internet has made much of that censorship moot, but it is a chilling decision, none the less.


10 posted on 11/09/2013 4:32:17 AM PST by marktwain (The MSM must die for the Republic to live. Long live the new media!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I was waiting to see a picture of my books on a table.


11 posted on 11/09/2013 5:30:50 AM PST by Travis McGee (www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

12 posted on 11/09/2013 5:31:29 AM PST by Jack Hydrazine (IÂ’m not a Republican, I'm a Conservative! Pubbies haven't been conservative since before T.R.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Lefties from Salon never see any evil in the books they appear to champion, like books written by Bill Ayers. I have never seen any lefty complain about Che Chic.


13 posted on 11/09/2013 5:44:25 AM PST by theBuckwheat
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
I've been to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot several times, and it's full of law enforcement types—as customers and shooters. There's a bible on the gun store counter top and an old dog asleep on the floor, with a bench for the old regulars to sit side by side and view the goings-on. The range and gun shop are located right by Kentucky's Salt River, and not far from Fort. Duffield, and old civil war site. This is an area brimming with history and well worth the trip for gun lovers of a certain temperament willing to brave the mud, dust and smoke. Best people in the world.
14 posted on 11/09/2013 5:56:15 AM PST by binreadin
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Reading the comments at the site....looks like more Freepers read Salon than Proggies. I kicked in few.

Thanks for posting. Otherwise I would not have seen this....not my usual haunts.

2ndDivisionVet, you are my hero. Only an iron man could stomach wading through the toxic tripe you do to bring us “the news from the other side”.

Thanks again!


15 posted on 11/09/2013 6:14:14 AM PST by Lowell1775
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Alexander Apparatchik hates us, he really hates us!

Why doesn't he just stay in unarmed 1Brooklyn and accept the gentle ministrations of his bathhouse buddies?

You know, I think I live in a different country than people like Alexander Zaitchik.

16 posted on 11/09/2013 7:34:27 AM PST by backwoods-engineer (Blog: www.BackwoodsEngineer.com)
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To: nathanbedford

Of course, the left invented it.


17 posted on 11/09/2013 1:37:16 PM PST by fieldmarshaldj (Resist We Much)
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