Kentucky’s ‘Family-Friendly’ Machine Gun Festival, with Neo-Nazis
In West Point, Kentucky, the Knob Creek Gun Range held its biannual “Machine Gun Shoot” last weekend. Their slogan is, “Nothing brings families together like blowing stuff apart…safely.”
Good old wholesome family fun. With a few neo-Nazis.
I was on site at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot fewer than 20 minutes last Saturday before I passed a shaved-head lad with with a Totenkopf death head on his chest. (The Totenkopf was the symbol of the Nazi SS division that ran death camps like Auschwitz during the Holocaust.)
The shirt looked brand new. I took that to mean the kid or whoever gave it to him bought it from one of the dozen or so permitted vendors who openly sold white supremacist merchandise. This included a wide selection of t-shirts and flags bearing symbols popular with racist skinheads and neo-Nazis. (And no, I’m not counting Confederate battle flags.) Also for sale were the race war fantasy novels Hunter and The Turner Diaries by William Pierce, founder of the National Alliance, a notorious hate group. A Friends of the NRA fundraising booth was located within sight of a stall of swastika flags.