On Raids and Raiding

April 22, 2025

Last week ATF raided and arrested the moderators of a Discord server connected to the interstate development and sale of 3D NFA items. Though one of these moderators may have been a confidential informant, word is the raids were simply the result of an(other) anonymous tip.

When a journalist asked me if this is the first major raid of a 3D gun community, I said I could understand why he’d believe it was. Guncad’s folkways privilege repeated forgetting, denial, and perverse disavowal.

As if this is the first time this guy has written this. So Steven is leaving, just not really leaving, because of recent events, but not because of those events, and on the best of terms, though he’s “hurt deeply.”

We’re dealing with a mode of knowledge and its deployment that de-realizes. Just last year The Gatalog suffered a sensational raid so complete and compromising that Alex Holladay employs his knowledge of it to, paradoxically, disavow its entire reality. Biannually.

Sage counsel from the space’s most prodigious poster of felonies, offered in that spirit of detachment and courtesy for which The Gatalog has become so known. It’s as if simple kennings like “felony-poster” or “fudd-buster” alone could protect the gang from the much larger ATF investigation of their own server.

Reading Holladay, we see the knowledge of his trauma isn’t something to be disavowed. He instead recruits it to help him publicly disavow the real of that same knowledge. The structure works something like this: “We know very well that The Gatalog’s beta rooms have been dumped, and that users like UberClay are identified, and that’s why we can forget about it.”

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