Meet American Gun Culture’s Biggest Nerds

Meet American Gun Culture’s Biggest NerdsVisuals by Zach CaldwellText by Thomas Gibbons-NeffDec. 9, 2025Share full articleUnder a cloudy night sky in northeastern Ohio, Brent Cook adjusted his $15,000 night-vision goggles and looked out at the shooting range. Around him were dozens of people, wearing expensive night-vision gear and carrying rifles that looked like clones of those used by American troops over the past several decades.It was the first night of Clone Shoot #III, an annual event that attracts roughly several hundred American gun owners who call themselves cloners, enthusiasts who turn civilian firearms into its military-modified equivalents, down to their most specific, and expensive, parts.“We are the grandchildren of the military-industrial complex,” said Mr. Cook, a former U.S. Marine who cloned his old M16 service rifle.The United States’ failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan injected enduring violence and imagery into every corner of domestic culture — from fashion to film to video games — that left its mark on American gun owners. AR-15s, the black rifles capable of a dizzying amount of modifications, became common in civilian hands.But as the AR-15 spread and those wars ended, cloners emerged in the basement of an evolving American firearms movement. They are little-known gun enthusiasts who are mostly millennial and Gen Z men and resemble a mix of ’90s nerds, tactical skateboarders and well-armed commandos. And their population is growing.“It’s the same with guys who like trains or cars,” said Chris, who runs the website Clone Rifles, a trove of listings for parts and reference pictures for military rifles that represent weapons fielded in the various chapters of U.S. conflicts. As his website and Instagram page grew in popularity, more cloners wanted to “hang with all the other nerds,” said Chris, who The New York Times is identifying by his first name because he fears retribution from his employer.In 2022, Chris put together the first clone shoot with around 100 attendees. The second shoot, in 2024, doubled in size and had 16 sponsors. Last month around 300 people came to Garrettsville, Ohio, for Clone Shoot #III, and roughly 20 percent of them had served in the military.Cloning, like any hobby, has a gaggle of social media influencers that regularly post their rifle builds online.Douglas McCage, a talkative 20-something-year-old from Memphis, spent the early hours of the event eyeballing the many guns set out to handle or shoot. It was his second clone shoot. He was always interested in war paraphernalia, but after finding the Clone Rifles website, “it was downhill from there,” he said.The very existence of cloning may seem dangerous, representing a vision of the United States where war is central to its identity and guns are a gateway to violence. In reality, cloners come off as the Dungeons and Dragons crowd of American gun culture and are somehow — for better or worse — mostly divorced from their creations’ origins.The popularity of cloning can be traced back to the early aughts both in popular culture and online message boards. Neil Batelli, a 53-year-old former waiter who now runs a gun shop in Florida, is one of the original cloners. In the early 2000s he saw a picture of a modified M16 on AR15.com, one of the early online meeting spots for AR-15 enthusiasts.“So I was like, I want to find out about that because it looks cool,” Mr. Batelli said.At Clone Shoot #III, people could pose with a giant photo of the former leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. History often takes a back seat to aesthetics when it comes to the type of guns people want to clone.Allen Engineering Suppressors, which sponsored the shoot and owes its current iteration to cloners, handed out an in-house magazine with a cover that read in all caps GWOT VIBES + SUPPRESSORS, using the acronym for the so-called global war on terror that began in 2001.If the aura of George Lucas’s 1973 film, “American Graffiti,” helped popularize the Ford Thunderbird for car enthusiasts, Ridley Scott’s 2001 war drama, “Black Hawk Down,” based off a 1993 U.S. special operations mission in Somalia that went awry, mainstreamed the Colt 723 carbine for cloners.A modified version defines the cloning movement: a mixture of Hollywood, history and firearms ingested over the last two decades and distilled down to “the vibes.”“We grew up watching ‘Black Hawk Down,’” said Brian Sanders-Smith, a marketing manager at Allen Engineering. “Now people have the money to buy this stuff.”Related ContentSite Index