This 9-year-old girl carrying an AK-47 is among a group of Florida survivalists’ children who are trained at a very young age to use assault weapons.
The girl, identified only as Brianna, is also seen holding a different rifle in photos that offer a stunning inside look at a pro-gun “survivalist” camp.
In one image, Brianna hands the AK-47 to a man she affectionately calls “Uncle Jim.”
That’s Jim Foster, a 57-year-old retired cop and founder of the North Florida Survival Group, which staunchly defends the right to bear arms and fears the government is trying to take its guns.
The photos were taken six days before the Newtown school massacre, in which 20 children and six adults were gunned down by a 20-year-old man taught to shoot by his mother.
But Foster apparently saw the Connecticut slaughter as a threat to gun owners, not children.
“The government is trying to disarm us,” photographer Brian Blanco quoted him as saying.
“There weren’t enough dead bodies to do it before, but now they’ve got the bodies of 26 dead kids, and I’m afraid that’s enough for them to get what they want.”
Another of the photos, taken at a weekend camp in Old Town, Fla., a small town about 40 miles southwest of Gainesville, showed a boy sitting on a child’s toy — sulking because his sister got to carry the rifle he wanted.
In one image, a boy bears a Ruger rifle. His back turned to the camera, he wears an oversized T-shirt printed with the group’s motto: “I’m willing to die to defend my 2nd Amendment rights Are you willing to die trying to take them from me?”
The group claims to have 219 members ages 16 to 70, including at least two dozen women. Members train themselves and relatives for living in the wild in the event of an apocalyptic disaster. The group’s Web site says it teaches “patriots to survive in order to protect and defend our Constitution against all enemy threats.”
Brianna is the daughter of one of the group’s members.
Foster said membership had grown at a faster rate, with one or two new members a day, since Newtown. Blanco said Foster referred to the group as a “militia.”
Steve McFarland, a member who said he is no longer active in the group, said mass shootings like Newtown were carried out by youths “who were never properly taught” how to handle guns.
“It’s not the kids who are given hunter-safety classes that are going out popping other kids,” McFarland said.
Many of the members won’t reveal their real names or faces on the group’s Web site, including “Dusty Bones 2112,” who says he lives in Brooklyn.
One woman, identified only as “Stacie” from Jacksonville, Fla., showed a sign that read: “Give up my gun? I’m female, not stupid.”
Another member, who described himself as a 55-year-old Gainesville man, posted the message, “Don’t call us ‘gun nuts.’ With a government like ours we’d be nuts not to have guns.”