Sid Allen did not set out on his 3D printing journey to manufacture firearm accessories in his garage.

Last year, he was printing custom Dungeons and Dragons figurines. For a decade before that, Allen, 28, was printing accessible attachments for his increasingly paralyzed father, who has since died from brain cancer: a gyroscopic mount so his cup wouldn’t fall over; stove knobs you don’t need to press to turn on; key pads for calling — “dozens, even hundreds, of things earlier on when he still had mobility.”

Allen, wearing his signature wizard hat, held his product: an AR-15 magazine speedloader, used to make reloading a firearm faster and easier, which his company, MangaBerry West, sells for $28 apiece. The speedloader is designed partly with accessibility in mind, he said, and can be used with limited hand mobility.

Allen and the other St. Cloud State University students who help with the business identify as leftists. Allen and Tarik Alduri, 23, said so discreetly at a recent St. Cloud gun show for fear of hurting business. But at home, Allen and Alduri, along with Riley Dahlberg, 20, freely discussed food stamps and taxes, President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and their gripes with the Democratic Party. Allen is the president, and Dahlberg vice president, of the St. Cloud College Democrats even though they are left of the party establishment on most issues.

When asked if they identify as Democrats, they took a lesser-of-two-evils stance and enthused about ranked-choice voting, which they said would allow for greater political diversity beyond a two-party system.

“What else are we gonna do? I’m not voting for Trump,” Alduri said.

Still, they decried Democrats’ move to make gun control a purity test, shutting the door on potential Democrats by turning “small gaps into massive issues,” especially given Republicans’ willingness to accept a wider range of views on many issues, Alduri said. “I think it’s sad that we have gotten to this point where the left thinks that they’re not allowed to own guns in order to stay aligned Democratic Party.”

Their disgruntled, arms-length acceptance of the Democrats underscores the party’s problem with young men, who left in droves in 2024.

Although Democrats had a good night during last week’s elections, the 2026 midterm will be a more significant test following 2024’s collapse: Six in 10 white men under 30 voted for Trump, while the president claimed half of young Hispanic men and one-third of under-30 Black men, according to the Associated Press.

Having lost a defining election to Trump, Democrats find themselves forced to ask how to broaden their tent — and whether that means inviting in gun rights advocates the party has largely shunned for more than a decade.

Gov. Tim Walz embodies the Democrats massive shift on guns: His marksmanship and support for gun rights was a selling point when he ran for Congress in a rural swing district in 2006, and he earned an ‘A’ rating from the NRA. Walz was among the gun-friendly Democrats recruited and elected after the party blamed gun control for Al Gore’s loss in 2000, especially in rural America.

After Sandy Hook and especially the Parkland school shootings, Walz embraced gun control, and now he’s made it a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. He hosted a town hall in October with Gabby Giffords, his former congressional colleague who became a gun control activist after she was shot in a mass shooting; on Thursday night, First Lady Gwen Walz and DFL leaders held another town hall on gun violence.

After the mass shooting at Annunciation Church in August, which left two children dead and 21 others injured, Walz and Democrat lawmakers called for a ban on semi-automatic military-style assault weapons, defined in Minnesota law by a list of 17 firearm models and their offshoots, including AK-47s and AR-15s.

Democrats passed and Walz signed gun control laws in the 2023 legislative session, including universal background checks for all gun purchases and a “red flag” law that allows judges to confiscate guns from people who are deemed a danger to themselves or others. But they stopped short of banning assault weapons, in part from fear of election backlash, and they’re unlikely to garner the bipartisan support needed to ban assault weapons this year or next.

An assault weapons ban would “be a massive hit to our business,” Alduri said.

Allen explained the manufacturing process in the crowded detached garage that doubles as a storage space, surrounded by beakers, leftover plastic and a custom-built UV oven made from two-by-fours. He first prints the parts with a resin 3D printer and then dips those parts into an acetone-based solvent mixture before curing them in the UV oven.

Not apparent in the garage was the painstaking months-long process of perfecting the model, which included experimenting with different mixes of resin and crafting an algorithm to correct the curvature that a line of bullets make when lined up. Not counting different resins, Allen estimated he’s made 300 prototypes before the current speedloader, which allows the user to push 15 dummy rounds into an AR-15 magazine with ease.

Modifying the current model for handguns would be another obstacle.

But their devotion to gun rights — including the right to own so-called assault rifles — goes beyond self-interest, they said.

“I don’t think the issue is guns,” Alduri said, sporting a MangaBerry West cap. “It’s the fact that we just don’t care about each other, and that’s what makes it easier for somebody like Trump to come in and have ICE agents running around straight up kidnapping people.”

Alduri’s mantra, which he said at the gun show and at home, where he and Allen are roommates, is that the two best things you can do as a citizen are to bring your neighbors cookies and buy a gun.

Cookies to build community, and a gun to protect that community.

“What we see right now in the U.S. is that there’s been this destruction of community because we’re all being worked to the bone by some billionaire,” Alduri said.

Alduri studies political science and international relations and wants to go into immigration law or politics. His parents immigrated from Bosnia and Iraq — both war-stricken places.

Alduri said the current political climate gives him reason to consider self-defense.

“Am I expected to trust the American government or American cops to protect me? No, I don’t, quite frankly,” Alduri said.

Dahlberg’s argument mirrors what Republican gun rights advocates often said during the Obama and Biden presidencies: that guns offer protection against a tyrannical government.

Even though “there’s this idea that the US military would just crush people,” Dahlberg said, the presence of guns “has ensured that tyranny hasn’t spread, because people think it wouldn’t go very well for them as a dictator” in a country with more civilian guns than people.

The focus of a government should be on improving the “material concerns of the citizenry,” said Alduri, instead of banning guns and inhibiting people’s Second Amendment rights — a sentiment that the three shared.

“Democrats love to pat themselves on the back and be like, ‘We did it, guys. We banned AR-15s.’ Never mind the starving kid that’s sitting outside, or the homeless encampment,” said Alduri.

Allen said he believes that focusing on guns is an excuse for Democrats to not tackle “the really tough issues that would need a raise in taxes,” such as expanding food stamps or access to health care. He added that he prioritizes expanding social services like food stamps over gun policy, even if it meant having a gun control policy “that I really strongly disagree with and think is harmful.”

Allen, for his part, said he feels jaded about America’s capitalistic system “because of the way it abused my father.” His father, Allen said, designed inventions as a consultant for tech companies but died “in destitute poverty” after the companies gave him low disability pay and a health insurer denied his care for brain cancer.

Allen is studying patent law and also wants to go into politics in the future.

The group doesn’t take gun ownership lightly, and they do agree with Democrats on certain gun restrictions. Binary triggers, which fire one shot when the trigger is pulled down and another upon release, “are an extremely bad idea and need to be illegal,” Allen said, since it forces the shooter to have to release a second round. “It’s inherently unsafe.”

They also said they support laws mandating waiting periods before purchasing a gun and safe storage laws that would require that guns be kept in a gun safe.

“We have a lack of respect for guns,” Alduri said. “Americans love guns but we don’t really respect how dangerous of a weapon that is.”

Despite being in favor of higher taxes for more robust social services, which is at the core of Democratic identity, the MangaBerry West guys said they’ve been told by Democrats that they aren’t real Democrats because of their support for gun rights.

They opt to respond with subtlety rather than rhetorical firepower.

The group hosts backyard bonfires for the St. Cloud State debate team, and the conversation naturally turns to politics — but they avoid debating their friends, some of whom hold more mainstream Democratic views. Instead, in political discussions, they focus on “providing our ideas, and if we plant that seed in them, then maybe they’ll view it with more genuine curiosity,” Dahlberg said.