“You’re at a gas station.” Firearms instructor Jamie LaBarbera’s voice crackles over the portable speaker system. “Out in the shadows, you see this guy walking up”

We are standing at the firing line[…]Each of us stares down our own personal Bob, as the instructors have named him[…]
I am approximately halfway through Patriot Academy’s Constitutional Defense course, a five-day program run by a right-wing organization that promises to give participants both “the physical training you need to be able to defend your family” and “intellectual ammunition to defend the Constitution”[…]
The insurrection, if Patriot Academy has its way, will be bloodless: a heart transplant for the body politic. Patriot Academy, along with many fellow-traveler evangelical organizations across the country, is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to rewrite America’s Constitution—and teaching its supporters how to defend themselves with a handgun, just in case[…]
Rick Green would not approve of my sarcasm. “You [said] David Barton teaches that America was founded on Christian principles,” he told me when I pulled him aside for an interview four days into the Constitutional Defense course. “I argue there’s no question. America was founded on Christian principles. You read the Founding Fathers, 95 percent of them were Christians. Even the ones that weren’t Christians were still believers in God”[…]
Our instructors referred to the bad guys as “scumbags,” sometimes “scums” for short. Scums tend to lurk in bushes around ATM machines or approach unsuspecting victims in parking lots. Occasionally, they might break into your house. They love to hold up convenience stores. None of them seem to have much in the way of ideology. But there are occasional hints regarding their identity[…]
The next day—our final day of training, when our aim is best and our confidence high—a second group of bad guys with guns assembles to oppose us. All of them appear to be people of color