2.1 Country Road

The next morning was hard. Having slept through multiple alarms on his phone, some internal clock finally forced Tyler awake and into a panicked start, somewhere around a respectable hour, simply timed to his former coast. Teeth brushed, hair combed if not exactly styled, he was in his briefs, holding wrinkled shirts to shapeless trousers, trying to imagine what he would wear if this were any other job, any other day. All his sharp casual and quiet luxury failed him. His traveling wardrobe was creased, crushed, listless, and stale as he felt.

The lobby was mostly empty, the sort of business traveler clientele this hotel catered to had cleared out for nine AM meetings or off sites, already. In the restaurant two servers in black vests on black button-ups were steadily disassembling the buffet line, the restaurant quiet and still, otherwise. Along the back Tyler found Dave occupying a banquette, a tablet and notebook both open in front of him, his attention fixed, punctuating aggressive scrolls and clicks with rapid and furious taking of dense, scrawled notes. His greasy plate had been cleared of warming tray bacon and rubber eggs, dismissed and pushed aside, forgotten in a corner.

Tyler’s shadow fell across him, something subtle shifting in his boss’ spine as it did. The older man said nothing, showed no confidently discernible sign he had noticed, but eventually gave in all the same, absently gesturing to an empty seat across from him. Order or instruction, Tyler sat and almost immediately flailed out for the attention of a passing server, whom he begged for coffee and forgiveness in whichever order the server felt inclined to dispense them.

Withdrawing to see what he could rustle up, oatmilk-wise, the server left them to their own devices, Dave’s attention having never once wavered from his. He was scrolling through stories organized by content tags, these grouped under the heading BLACK CRIME¹ . His notebook was full of the cramped, unreadable cipher that was his handwriting, he was adding to it frequently. 

In the space between them, Dave’s attention fixed and distant, Tyler examined him in detail. Somewhere between the office and the banquette, Dave had abandoned the solid red tie he had barely been wearing the previous day. Other than that there was no discernible difference in the outfit he had worn then and now. The shirt remained terrifyingly wrinkled, but the man wore it with an utterly impressive apathy. Unbothered by the tails which couldn’t be tamed, unfurling from his waistband at will or the shirtsleeves that never stayed rolled, cuffs peeking out, spilling unevenly, one arm exposed from the elbow, the other covered.

Tyler had been told many times that fashion was about confidence more than anything else, anything could be a look, given a commitment and confidence in the carry. Any such standard would’ve marked Dave as the most fashionable man he had ever met. Dave had absolutely no fucks to give for what any one else thought of his presentation, and wore it so clearly in the cut of his pleated slacks, a lightish sandy tan, so far out of fashion they’d come back any day now.

The tie, he realized in a rush, must’ve been abandoned somewhere on the flight. The comedy of airport errors lead to Tyler putting down his card for four or five times the original ticket price just to avoid a seat assignment in the last row of economy, next to the rear toilets. In first class they separated, the older man’s seat in the first row, Tyler’s in the last, that space an unmentioned but not undervalued benefit to the upgrade. The tie was still on Dave’s neck then.

Maybe it was that escape velocity out of Palm Beach, away from the storefront office, the functional campaign HQ at the golf course. Away from all that heavy gravity Dave had ditched the tie. He hadn’t been wearing it upon arrival, where Tyler had been subjected to his boss’ complex reasoning for why he always rented the same car in every city–it was an entire fucking thing, culminating in the older man comparing himself to Einstein, admiring his own efficiency.

In the light of the morning hotel restaurant, his coffee steaming in front of him absent any oatmilk, Tyler noted that the missing red tie was the only evidence Dave had changed his clothes at all. Maybe he had simply climbed into his coffin, the dirt of some former kingdom in the old world his only comfort, rising the next morning restored, revitalized. But no, they had spent too much time in the sun even within the little time they had spent together at all.

Within that span though, Tyler had begun to understand the corners of the man who was his new boss, the details of the architectural drawing yet to be filled in, just the space sketched out. The design yet to emerge, a suspicion of the structure just becoming clear. Dave brought his head, and attention, level with Tyler for the first time since he sat down, a motion that suggested audible pops and cracks of ancient bones, despite the smooth silence of the motion.

One thing Tyler knew for sure was that the weary discontented sigh that escaped the man when their eyes had met wasn’t about him. Or not just about him at any rate. Dave’s sighs were expansive, encompassing the world and marking his positionality within it. His disappointment was vast, omnidirectional. Everything disappointed him, always, and maybe in this way nothing ever really did.

“Rough night,” the older man said, after an appraising.

“Jet lag,” Tyler offered back, neutrally. 

“Sure,” Dave said, and that was it, his head back to his notepad, his tablet.

The coffee was good, Tyler noted, mostly in the way hot morning coffee burning your throat helps sharpen attention, before the caffeine winds its way through the bloodstream. The burning was pleasant, and a momentary worry that he had invested the mug with hopes of vast powers of recuperation it could never meet dissipated with the steam. His expectations were simply for coffee, and he enjoyed having the relatively low bar cleared with ease.

Dave brought up his briefcase, a lawyerly looking sort of affair in battered brown leather, peeling at the corners, a flap cover closure which he clasped shut after dumping his tablet and notepad into it, sweeping clear the tabletop just carefully enough to avoid including breakfast crumbs. He had also fished something out and an off-handed spin toss landed his business card face up. Under his name, in the little space between it and his contacts, there was no title.

“Next time you plan to sleep in, give a head’s up,” he said, swinging bag over shoulder.

“Oh, sure,” Tyler muttered, feeling his cheeks flush, like failing the first pop quiz.

“And get yourself a to-go cup,” Dave pointed his chin at the coffee, “places to be.”

A few minutes or miles–they blended together in these suburban sprawl places–from the hotel, driving in silence, Tyler did a little light daydreaming from the passenger seat. The green leafy canopy meeting from either side of the road over top and in the middle pooled on the roadway stretching out ahead of him in a dull green. He reflected on the back road-ness of this particular back road, thought about how it felt like nothing at all, so it felt like anywhere at all.

The dream was fragile. Even deep in it Tyler admitted to himself that one would not likely confuse the winding, quiet desolation of upstate or northeast back roads with the fresh concrete, the tiny twin lane tributaries dotting LA that lead to ten-lane-two-direction rivers. But the road felt so much like nowhere, this and the silence lulled him back to the fantasy.

“So listen,” his boss interrupting his revieres, “this meeting, not really the kind of scene we brought you on board for. Keep quiet. We’re meeting my guy Stan there.”

“Stan,” Tyler repeated, demonstrating his attentiveness.

“Yeah, Stan. He’s back from some meetings out west, down south, he’s got a contact in the union, they made an intro last night, earliest we could meet was today. Just follow his lead,” Dave chewed over his next sentence, Tyler guessing he was tasting various flavors of truth, “just act natural. You know, no sudden movements, I guess.”

“No sudden movements,” Tyler repeated, grateful for the designer plastic sunglasses shielding his rolling eyes, and any concern lingering in them, “Should I take notes?”

“Notes.” Dave echoed icily.

“On the meeting?”

“Notes. On the meeting,” the coldness in his voice a clear but uncertain signal.

“Things to circle back to? Follow up on?”

“Kid, we don’t do notes kinda meetings.”

“No notes, then,” Tyler affirmed, anxious to get something right.

“No notes,” Dave replied firmly.

“Uh, noted,” letting it slip, the younger man couldn’t help himself.

“Know what else we don’t do, kid, we don’t do fucking puns,” Dave said, and the corolla’s steady little engine whine ratcheted up a pitch, the car jumping forward.

“Yeah, got it,” Tyler retreated.

“While we’re on the subject,” the older man pivoted, “you maybe want to clean up a little bit nicer, you know,” his head tilted, implying the once-over without taking his eyes off the road, “you look like hell.”

“Didn’t,” Tyler started, struggling to contain the laughter, mostly succeeding, starting again, “didn’t realize there was a dress code.”

“Think of it like the assignment,” Dave clarified with a soft growl, fishing a pair of top gun style aviators from a center console, slapping them on, “dress the part. You’re here to be your father’s son. Fucking least you could do is dress the fucking part, kid.”

“Yeah,” Tyler’s focus snapping back, the irony of the moment gone cold, “yeah, okay.”

The silence wasn’t too tense, and in any case they were on the road just another few minutes before Dave slowed and pulled off to a dirt path, carved through dense woods, further back than their own back road. Tyler read a sign, hand carved and deeply weathered, the yellow paint that had highlighted the whittled gorges of lettering cracked and flaking, but still legible, reading OYSTER BAY ROD AND GUN. Beneath it thick-tipped black magic marker on poster board spelt out, less formally, and much more insistently, MEMBERS ONLY.

They rolled along slowly, kicking up then dragging along a little cloud of dust, rising off the path where Dave veered left or right, avoiding deep tire tracks puddling into thick mud. Deep enough in the woods to feel far from civilization, the path dumped out like a dirty little tributary into a parking lot pond press-ganged from sparse grass, beaten into shape with repeated use. 

The lot was full up with trucks of varying sizes, SUVs of nearly-exclusive German luxury mingled with American branded heavy- and super-duty pick-ups. Tyler thought he saw some smokestacks studded among the pick-ups but didn’t think that made any sense, though little made sense about the array of extended cabs and axles, matched with immaculate truck beds. 

Where he could see, both species of truck present shared a plethora of bumper sticker plumage, badges, shields, crosses, crossed rifles, blue line/black flags. At least one truck’s paint scheme explicitly matching that last logo, a long thin blue line dragged across ominous and inky black backdrop of unreflective matte paint on the body work. Off to the side he spotted a little collection of bikes gathered up together on the grass, the sort of harleys someone taking themselves too seriously would correct him for not labeling them “hogs.”

The car in park, the dragged-along dust cloud drifting over and around them, Dave hopped out, spitting some grit out from between his teeth, back into the dust and dirt it had come from. Tyler followed him, both angling towards the mouth of another carved little path, this one maybe a wingspan wide, trampled down grass directing their way deeper in. Coming the other direction was a silhouette in shadow, a formless sort of blob, resolving into business casual.

“Stan,” Dave called, no warmth or surprise there.

“Boss,” the business casual nodded sharply, fell into a sort of formation, wedging himself a little awkwardly behind Dave, in front of Tyler.

They tramped along the path, and as they moved deeper in heard pops and cracks further up the trail, Tyler quickly noticed that there was no pre-pop whistle having learned in college that was the key to winning rounds of the gunshots-or-fireworks game. The closer they got the more the noise multiplied, not just louder, but more numerous and rapid, shots chaining into one another to form an ongoing roar. The birds twittering in the trees above them, unsure the sort of predators these metallic and inorganic noises signified.

When they exited the path and blinked back into the sunlight, they were between two masses of forest, a softly hilly expanse of overgrown grass stretching out two football fields wide, rolling to horizon in either direction. Overhead, they were ceilinged in by high power lines, towers strung up lifting the cables high, a faint hum, possibly only imagined where they stood under those sprawling arms.

There were the remnants of athletics fields here, like the parking lot, mostly just dirt and grass, trampled down or torn up. But there, on their right, was the recognizable shape of a baseball diamond, and to their left a rusting upright, rotting wood bleachers framing and defining an endzone. Scattered all over these were two or three dozen men, out of uniform, but impossible to discern from each other. On the football field they swarmed like ants, their bodies resembling the same insectoid segmentation, here recreated in bits of ballistic black, pads and vests, helmets, face masks, and gloves.

And there was a lot of gunfire. On the football field a car slipped and skidded into the midfield from between two brokedown sets of bleachers, its sliding stop tearing up grass and splattering mud. In one fast, violent moment the driver and passenger popped out, weapons drawn and sighting in, the scene like something out of a movie, and then they were firing towards stacked sandbags, little atomized clouds of dirt showing where their shots landed. 

Over on the baseball diamond someone had arranged plywood cruciforms throughout the infield, targets staple-gunned up, corners flapping in a light breeze. There were sawhorse tables made up of two-by-fours, a staggering array of weaponry and ammunition stacked on each. Men gathered around different makeshift stations, some guns in various states of disassembly, their owners fingering and caressing them, oiling parts like a lover might. 

Separating the two was an ancient and failing fence, mostly just posts suggesting the memory of a fence, like the outline of the baseball diamond suggesting some other, better, use than the deployment of ordinance. What was left of the old fence sort of ran aground under a copse of trees. There were gathered three or four men, talking amongst themselves, their non-uniform-uniforms topped with leather vests, plucking them out a bit from the others on offer all around them.

Along the fence, Stan leaned against one of the posts, no rails to rest on either side of it, angling his head like a chin point but accomplishing the motion entirely with the buttery colored beard his face was framed in and consumed by. Dave ran a hand over his mouth, like there was a taste there he could potentially scrape out, then nodded, and pushed both sleeves up–the left instantly rolling back down–angling towards the cluster of trees in a sharp walk.

Alone with each other, Stan and Tyler eventually made an uncomfortable bit of eye contact, Stan rolling his, a bit of conspiratorial laughter behind the boss’ back. Tyler nodded, widening eyes a bit, leaning into noncommittal so hard he almost started whistling tunelessly while looking at his shoes. Stan pushed off the fencepost and towards Tyler, wordlessly sort of sweeping him up, a friendly shoulder squeeze turning in a gentle reorienting push. He was guiding them towards a helpful table someone had set up, covered in safety equipment.

“So,” Stan began, speaking over his shoulder as he handed Tyler a set of ear protectors, giant cans to cover his ears in insistent orange. “You get the grifters speech, yet?”

“Grifters,” Tyler chewed, thinking it over while he put the ear protectors on. Sound shifted to a sort of underwater mute, so he took them right back off, rested the contraptions weighty on his neck, “uh, grifters? Don’t, uh, don’t think so” he said trying, and failing, to place the question in context.

“I think it’s the sort of thing you’d remember,” Stan said, the sound weirdly muffled by all that beard, even with the big ear cans off, “this too,” he added a pair of yellow tinted safety glasses, “what about Clausewitz?”

“Claus-which?” Tyler wasn’t sure he was matching the questions to his available information, the interview like a game show no one told him he was appearing on.

“Yeah, the speech, you know, politics-slash-war, that whole thing,” this time Stan winked, eyes shaded by his own neon tinted glasses, then turned back to the table. “Grifters, Clausewitz, I mean, he’s got ‘em high in the rotation, speech-wise,” his beard rustled again, without looking he pushed a neon-bright safety vest into Tyler’s chest, “that too. How long have you been on the team, man?”

“Started yesterday,” Tyler sighed while pushing his arms through the safety vest, reflective patches catching sunlight here and there, prismining off the grass and leaves.

“Well,” Stan huffed, started leading the way back to his fencepost position, “I mean, early days, I guess. But you know, maybe he likes you special, that’s why.”

“Why what,” Tyler said, still looking over all the various safety gears, “hey man, you forgot a vest, too,” he realized, but didn’t see an extra one available among the sets of eyes and ears in all their safety color spectrum.

Back among the pieces of fence left, Stan leaned back, crossed his arms, resting into a contented sort of absent smile. Tyler tried to make sense of the man, somewhere between him and Dave in age, a sort of average of them both. His checker, collar-buttoned, shirt strained a bit, placket-wise, around a respectable paunch, the sort that says its owner has entered middle age with a what-can-you-do-about-it-anyway shrug and a smile. His hair and beard were both a sort of blond that suggested vintage clothes, not so much graying as color fading in the sun.

Finding his own fencepost to recline against, his own arms to cross against his chest, Tyler cultivated the same attentive stare into some middle distance. That distance was populated by a dozen or so cops, clumped together in threes and fours. Mostly they floated near the sawhorse tabletops, occasionally firing, or at the very least handling the weapons in a way that seemed to border on the sensual. There was a lot of that, and Tyler reddened watching it.

These men were mostly, but not exclusively, white, and the majority shared a sort of springtime uniform that seemed common among their tribe. Cargo shorts in configurations likely labeled tactical, golf polo shirts sheening with some unspecified marketing promise of performance boost. These shirts were covered in a dense symbolism of shields, badges, swords, rifles, and crucifixes, some crossing against and over each other, more than a few patterned into silhouettes of stars and stripes, echoing the parking lot truck plumage.

There was little of it he could decipher, and he wondered absently about jobs like anthropologist or archeologist. Titles that had sounded so much more evocative and exciting to him than the prerequisite coursework attached to them had proven. He had savored the idea, once, of disappearing into a jungle, or a city neighborhood, coming back with thick ethnographies, having sorted out the symbolism through immersion in an alien culture.

Here, he suspected there was nothing too complex actually happening. On the football field men were running around, shouting codes back and forth, sprinting, dropping to one knee, firing, repeating. Over by the baseball diamond men held open complex looking mechanisms in massive firearms while other men gestured towards some detail with the sweating longneck of a domestic beer bottle. The guns and armor, their symbols and strange fraternities all just seemed to Tyler to be a bit too much window dressing for one massive, outdoor man cave.

Some of his friends had started families young, settled down, and that meant he sometimes got a text or ran into one out on the town, full of some indefatigable nervous energy driving a flight from responsibilities, a grasping attempt to recapture some long gone moment of youth. Mostly they preferred eight balls and bottle service, but he supposed the firearms and swat-cosplaying wasn’t too different, even if personally unnerving. Same energy, at any rate.

One of the cops detached himself from his little clump and started ambling in their direction. Upon arrival he slid in behind Tyler, another friendly shoulder squeeze and a push, this one firmer, directing him towards the firing line baseball diamond with a meaty catcher's mitt of a hand, sausage fingers straining in their intestine casing. He tossed off a question, “fng, right” towards the direction of Stan, who smiled his absent smile. 

The meaty-handed-man left it resting on Tyler’s shoulder, sort of a gentle force march towards the row of sawhorse tabletops. The guns on them started small and increased in size along each table until a patchwork of beach blankets and towels laid out in the grass, weapons there too big to lift and shoot at the same time, requiring more stable ground under them.

Arriving at one of the blankets, Tyler saw resting there a lanky long and skeletal framed gun, a sort of steampunk vintage to it, seeming out of date with the sharp angled matte black handguns the men who carried openly kept or the stripped down black plastic  of assault rifles. His entire frame of reference here was first person shooters, action movies, so he labeled what he saw as james bond or john wick. Call of duty a catch-all bucket for anything two handed.

“This is the buzzsaw,” Meaty Hands said, through his own beard, which shook when he spoke, dark and deep in contrast to the straw-colored Stan. “It’s a design classic,” the cop went on, lowering to one knee, the hand on Tyler’s shoulder getting heavier until he sunk down too. “It’s got a kick, but that’s just muzzle energy, it’ll push you back but just keep bringing your shoulders forward on to it, get that sight picture back down with your weight to push against the climb from the recoil. Front site on target. I’ll feed.”

As he finished, he went belly down, picking up the long strip of belt studded with brass bullets, glittering in the sun, Tyler beginning to realize what was expected of him. Picking up the end of the long thing by its pistol grip, he felt like he was being harnessed into it as he adjusted the butt against his shoulder. Meaty Hands stood up abruptly and splayed over Tyler, feet on either side of his hips, bent down and started rearranging, tightening shoulders, pushing in elbows that bent out at angles, kicking toes to the side for feet to lie flat.

He reassumed his position, hefting the glittering belt, oily fabric matte against the shining finish of the metal and bullets, which seemed patinaed with the fingerprints of many hands. The man was still whispering to Tyler, but he was having a hard time making out the words, something about breathing, and squeezing. A space between heartbeats. He blinked and realized sweat from somewhere was pooling in the corners of his eyes.

Looking out to the range he realized for the first time that the targets weren’t just abstract silhouettes of criminal threat, not just the weirdly faceless targets he had seen in tv and games. These shared a threatening shape, an outline of a hulking body, barely concealed in dark hoodie. But the face under the hood was a child’s, just this side of legal adulthood if even that. Instead of a bulky gun or sharp knife, in one hand was a tall can of ice tea. Refocusing his eyes out wide he realized all the targets were the same, dozens of teenage hoodies staked up on plywood out at staggered distances, staring back at the heavily armed cops² . 

“Going hot,” Meaty Hands said to the world at large, then to Tyler, “you’re set kid. Remember, count to three in your head for each burst, don’t just hold the trigger down.”

Which, along with pulling not squeezing, whatever the hell that meant, was precisely what Tyler did. His eyes closed against the strobe flash fire in front of him, he held down the trigger, trying to keep his weight on it, his pull on the grip and trigger slowly dragging everything right. When he opened his eyes, what felt like hours later, Meaty Hands was screaming, but his hearing was just a dull and constant roar.

Looking out over the field he saw that he had hit several targets, just none of them what he had been aiming at. Maybe a third or a half a football field out the hoodied target stared back at him, placidly untouched. To its right he saw where he had sort of sawn along, an increasingly angled and jagged line of torn paper holes in other targets, far afield from his own.

“Fucking move, dipshit.” 

Meaty Hands’ voice finally cut through the static roar in his ears, and the man pushed him so he rolled over. He went with it all the way until he was on his back, staring up into the empty sky beyond the power lines and he could feel the nylon plastic safety vest sticking to him, through his shirt covered in sweat. Heat was pulsing off the gun he had fired, and his instructor was engaged in some complex mechanics with a long metal tube in one hand, his other wrapped in some asbestos-industrial-strength oven mitt.

“Fuck you do now, kid.”

Dave’s bland observational tone came to him, and he found the man had returned from his sequestered meeting under the tree shade. More, he had brought back with him an ancient looking cop in a leather vest, his hair slicked back up top, wearing a handlebar mustache and wide mutton chops that didn’t connect on his face. That hair had gone gray far ahead of his head, like a statement that the style had aged everything prematurely. Tyler found this funny, wondered if the man would’ve, too, if he found anything funny. He didn’t look the type.

“Fucking barrel’s fucking melting,” yelled Meaty Hands some more, yanking the smoking metal out of the bodywork of the gun, “fucking told you bursts, fire in bursts.”

“Kid, you can’t fire these like that, you gotta fire in bursts,” Dave stating the obvious for someone-other-than-Tyler’s benefit, punctuating it with a spit into the dirt.

“Christ, man,” the Mutton Chops complained, “you have any idea how hard it is to find fresh barrels for these things? It’s not like they still make these. They’re not cheap.”

“What does he owe,” Dave inquired neutrally, the question more directed to his wristwatch than anyone present, “four hundred, five? Kid’s good for it. Bill him.”

“Jesus christ, what did you fire the whole fucking belt?” Mutton Chops was astonished, his hands on his hips, surveying the errant shots spread out across the makeshift range.

“We’ll mail you a check,” Dave looked up, “right now we’re back on the road.”

“Hey man,” Mutton Chops tried to do friendly, it didn’t really play from Tyler’s vantage. “We got another barrel, don’t leave home without it kinda thing, you want a go?”

Dave fished out his phone, consulted it, put it away, looked appraisingly at the gun, its guts opened up, smoke flowing from every angle out of it, the light not so much bouncing off its dark metal framework, more like absorbing into it. He ran a hand over his lips and chin again, like there was that taste he still wasn’t quite rid of.

“We’re on the clock,” was all he said, now, and walked halfway in Stan’s direction before shouting, voice pitched to carry over the space, “in the fucking car, Stan.”

“You’re missing out,” Mutton Chops called to Dave’s back, walking backwards towards the still-smoking gun, “not everyday you get to play with Hitler’s buzzsaw.”

The firing spread out over the fields had started back up, Tyler realizing belatedly it had died out while he was busy spraying lead everywhere. Stan was returning his safety gear to the little plastic table where they had found it. Tyler tore off the safety vest, didn’t see any others to return it to, tossed it on the table, glad to be rid of it, glasses and ears following in a clatter.

“You tell the man,” Mutton Chops was yelling now, loud enough others could hear the pops and cracks petering out, “he can count on us out here. We’re on lock,” he said, spread his arms while still backing towards the machine guns, making a sort of always-welcome-here gesture. “Fuck the farmbelt and the south we’re his people, too.” 

The man smiled wide, finally turning towards the gun, overseeing whatever operation in process to repair the damage Tyler had done. The back of his leather vest was covered in a massive patch, scrollwork lettering in some ersatz gothic font along top and bottom, framing a cartoon skull, cigarette clamped between teeth, smoke circling in a curlicue through empty socket eyes. Two skeletal hands floated on either side of the grinning skull, in one hand a massive revolver, barrel thrusting out at the viewer accusingly, in the other a badge. Above the skull read WHITE KNIGHTS MC and below NEW YORK CITY.

Tyler kept watching over his shoulder as Mutton Chops sank down to the blanket, conferring with Meaty Hands, who was unrolling another belt of bullets. He turned back, falling in behind Stan who trailed behind Dave. By the time they made the path through the woods the steady roar was rolling out and over the hills behind them. The birds above took flight, leaving behind the shaking tree branches they had been perched on, the shadows from them pooling all over their path, swallowing them up as they made their way through. 

1   The rightwing outlet Federalist, in addition to being very touchy about being asked who funds them, infamously had a content tag of “black crime” in their archives for years, though admittedly no longer. Wikipedia article retrieved 7 October 2024.

2   This is a minor bit of embellishment, but circa 2012 during the criminal trial of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin targets clearly meant to resemble Trayvon began appearing on the internet (The Week, “The disturbing shooting targets resembling Trayvon Martin” updated 8 January 2015). At least one Florida police officer was fired for bringing the targets into work (ABC News, “Trayvon Martin Targets Were ‘No-Shoot’ Tools, Fired Cop Says”, published 14 April 2013), despite claiming his intention was to use them as a shoot/no-shoot scenario, with the hoodie targets serving non-shooting/non-threatening use.