Waltz found himself alone and seething at the kitchen table night after night. Dressed in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, the muscular forty-nine-year-old with close-cropped hair opened his laptop and logged onto Facebook. On discussion threads on gun-rights pages, he found lots of people agreed with him that Obama’s statement about “meaningful action” on the day of the school massacre was code for wanting to crack down on AR-15 ownership. Feinstein’s quick introduction of a bill to accomplish just that proved politicians were coming for their firearms. They didn’t understand how many AR-15s were owned by people like him.
“If everyone who owned an AR-15 was a psycho, you’d all be dead,” he said.
It was time to stand up.
Three weeks after Sandy Hook, Waltz created a Facebook page called “AR-15 Gun Owners of America.” The chief motivation was anger, Waltz remembered. Night after night his wife had urged him to let it go, to come to bed. He couldn’t. He needed to reach out on social media to other gun owners, to rally them. Sandy Hook and Aurora were horrible, but they weren’t the chief danger to the nation. They were excuses that the liberals were using to take away guns.
The first thing that he posted that night was something he took from a blogger, a meme titled “2011 Deaths.” It began with a photograph of an AR-15. Next to the photo were the words “323 by these.” Below was a photo of a hammer: “496 by these.” Below the hammer were photos and stats for people killed by knives, drunk driving, and medical malpractice. At the bottom of the meme was this sentence: “You are SIX HUNDRED TIMES MORE LIKELY to DIE by using your OBAMACARE, than by a semi-automatic rifle. Sooo, feel sick?”
Waltz followed up with a flurry of posts and reposts. He started reading about the Three Percenters, a militia movement founded in 2008 that believed only 3 percent of the colonists had fought to gain American independence. The loosely organized group believed an armed citizenry was needed in modern times as a bulwark against governmental tyranny. Waltz embraced those beliefs.
He took jabs at Obama and other Democrats on his page. He posted links to news stories about AR-15s from conservative news sites or commentary from gun-rights bloggers.
“If I really wanted to poke the bear, I would put something out there for the Second Amendment community to say, ‘This is what Obama is doing, have you heard the latest?’ and that’d just inflame everybody and you’d get all sorts of comments,” he said. He started discussions about technical aspects of the AR, rifle equipment, and ammunition. Long threads among the gun’s fans ensued, further fueling interest in his page.