But there are similarities, too. It's not just that passionate gun rights activists and animal-liberation freedom fighters can be capable of nearly identical forms of arrogant intolerance. Or that both Web sites employ the same freely available Web conferencing software on their message boards -- a program that makes anonymous and forged postings fairly easy. Both sites feature numerous topic-oriented message boards where there is little tumult -- but each has at least one board in which political discussion regularly leads to flame wars.

Most significantly, Subguns and VegSource are both excellent examples of one of the most salient recent developments in Web life: they're topic-specific online communities that have settled next to quasi-commercial hubs. Subguns belongs to Tom Bowers, a federally licensed firearms dealer who sells rifle silencers and equipment for modifying semi-automatic weapons. VegSource is a non-profit organization, but it sells ads to support its operation and features numerous links to other commercial, vegetarian-oriented Web sites.

Both sites exploit the Web's greatest strength, its nurturing embrace of niche communities. The Web makes it easy to create a home for any point of view, any particular predilection or prejudice. But the fallout from such niche-ification doesn't have to be friendly: It's just as easy to brew hate as love. Jeff and Sabrina Nelson found that out the hard way in early May.

Last fall, says Jeff Nelson, he and his wife set up a forum in which VegSource regulars could discuss politics. The Clinton impeachment provided the inspiration, says Nelson, and at first the experiment seemed to work well.

"Regulars seemed to have fun sparring with each other over the dealings of Clinton, Starr, Tripp, Lewinsky and the rest of the gang," says Nelson.

On this board, any topic was fair game -- and on the Net, open debate almost inevitably leads to arguments over gun control. According to several regular posters to the VegSource message board, including at least two vegetarian gun-owners who also regularly frequented the Subguns site, the tenor of discussion, while spirited, generally remained within civilized bounds.

But then came the Littleton massacre. Suddenly, says Nelson, "some very disturbed-sounding people began showing up."

Gun-rights enthusiasts are well-known for being vigorous online debaters. But to the Nelsons, it seemed that the newcomers had arrived solely to stir up trouble.

"Someone would ask a question about taking care of their cat," says Sabrina Nelson, "and one of these guys would respond: 'Why don't you shoot your cat and eat it?' That's not the way we want people interacting at VegSource."

"It was bizarre," says Sabrina Nelson, "and totally out of the blue. All sorts of people showing up on the site as though they had been personally attacked by our site, and posting pictures of assault rifles, talking about masturbating, making jokes about killing their neighbor's pets and murdering homosexuals."

The boards at VegSource are moderated -- "it's a family site," says Sabrina Nelson. So the Nelsons began deleting posts they considered particularly obscene or harassing. But as anyone who's been involved in an online "gun thrash" knows, the one thing most likely to drive gun rights activists to a frenzy is limiting their freedom of speech.

Never mind that there is no such thing as a First Amendment right on a privately-owned Web site. The gun advocates responded to the deletion of their posts by posting in ever greater numbers. Soon the Nelsons discovered, from analysis of their site logs, that the invasion of VegSource was actually being coordinated and organized at other, gun-related Web sites -- notably Subguns and another machine gun-friendly Web site, F.J. Vollmer & Company.

A typical message exhorting gun owners to cause trouble at VegSource read as follows: "FUN!! No shit! Go look. You can't use profanity but you can say ugly stuff. FUCK 'EM!!!!"

Finally, Jeff Nelson decided that enough was enough. In an announcement posted on the VegSource political board, he stated: "We've added a new guideline for removing posts and posters from this board. We've decided to ban people who are a-holes and who argue with us when we tell them to drop it. And for those who send us letters saying 'You banned me! You don't believe in freedom of speech!' Well, that just proves that you don't know how to behave yourself, so don't expect any return letter."

Nelson says that the mass deletions resulted in an intensified reaction, including a barrage of obscene phone calls and some physical threats in personal e-mail messages. But after he contacted the police, the Internet service providers of several of the most egregious posters and the owners of Subguns and F.J. Vollmer, the thrash eventually subsided.

If the ruckus had ended there, it might serve simply as a typical example of the kind of crank-infested hot air outbursts that afflict so much online discussion. But then came the direct attack on the Web server -- strongly suggesting that the threats posted at the various pro-gun Web sites (and mostly removed since then) were far from empty.

VegSource is not the only nonprofit site hosted on the server that was assaulted, raising at least the possibility that it might not have been the target of the attack. But there's no question that it was an attack: According to the server's administrator, the assailant took advantage of a known bug in a popular mail-server program that, if carefully exploited, gives an outsider the chance to change the passwords controlling access to the machine -- and then wreak whatever havoc they like.

Even if it wasn't gun advocates who launched the server attack, the pro-gun partisans on the Subguns site certainly saw the "veggies" as their enemy. What drove them to such rage?

It's all Rosie O'Donnell's fault, says Gary Zimmerman, a regular poster on the Subguns message boards.

Next page | The battle escalates from Rosie O'Donnell to Adolf Hitler