Words by Hope Pisoni, Uncloseted Media
Design by Chyna Sudbury

It was a quiet Thursday ahead of the Thanksgiving break at the University at Buffalo (UB) when Maria B. Quagliana received an email from the school that said campus police had confiscated several firearms from a student in response to reports of a “concerning conversation.” 

That student was Jacob Cassidy, the president of UB’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a right-wing student group. Cassidy had been overheard threatening to shoot up the school, allegedly telling his friend that he had “a foldable AR in [his] bag” and adding: “I’ll shoot them in the foot and knee so they can’t get away.” 

Quagliana, a first-year student at UB’s law school, had run into Cassidy a week earlier at a counter-protest of a YAF event in support of ICE deportations. While Cassidy has received an interim suspension, Quagliana has still felt “extremely anxious” since getting the alert. 

“This person knows what I look like,” Quagliana told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I’ve had multiple panic attacks either in my car or waiting to walk into the building.”

Quagliana says that this was just the latest in a string of incidents surrounding YAF on campus. The group, which was prominent in the 1960s but faded into the background over time, has experienced a resurgence in activity nationwide and now reportedly has over 400 chapters at colleges and high schools in the US. That resurgence comes in the wake of the assassination of conservative campus activist and co-founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) Charlie Kirk.