Tag Archives: extremism

This paramilitary leader, a bachelor who slept with his gun Shirley, wrote of trying “to satisfy that primal urge that makes you want to kill.”

The quote is from a July 5, 1996 New York Times article about an Arizona militia group called the Vipers, which probably sounds familiar to you if you watched Countdown or Rachel Maddow’s shot tonight. The article profiled two members of the Viper Militia, a guy called Dean Pleasant, a chronically unemployed twenty-something (at the time) failed political candidate who according to a former roommate, never grew out of his G.I. Joe phase, and his then-32-year-old housemate “Randy L. Nelson, a house painter who called himself the Captain of the Viper Militia,” and as described in the quote, “slept with his beloved ‘Shirley,’ a Browning machine gun mounted on the headboard of his bed.” The two wound up in the middle of a scandal, a year after the infamous Oklahoma City bombing… Continue reading →