Written By Dawn De Noon
Directed By Jonathan Kaplan
Gunfire breaks out on a school playground and three children are shot, one fatally. Initially, police suspect an elderly neighbor who's been molesting one of the children, but he has an alibi. Meanwhile, Olivia learns that the fatality, a young African-American boy named Jeffery Whitlock, is the adopted child of a Department of Corrections officer from Rikers Island and his wife, and the police speculate that the boy may have been targeted over his father's profession.
The only real clue is the gun itself, found near the scene, which leads the SVU squad to "Gun-Ho!", the gun shop where it was initially sold. They discover that the building doubles as the headquarters for a Neo-Nazi white supremacist group known as the "Revolution Aryan Warriors", or "RAW", led by the store's owner Brian Ackerman. Ackerman is not present, but cops encounter his son, Kyle Ackerman, and a young woman by the name of Star Morrison (Marcia Gay Harden), who is arrested shortly thereafter for slapping Munch. Ackerman comes into the precinct but denies any knowledge of the shooting, claiming he barely remembers the sale except that it was to someone he'd never met before.
The gunman responsible for the sniper shots, Brannon Lee Redding, is identified by DNA and brought in, and the cops begin to suspect he may be connected to Ackerman as more than just a customer after finding various Nazi paraphernalia in his apartment, including a copy of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf". Casey negotiates a plea bargain with him but the judge refuses to accept it, and Star is arrested for repeated contempt of court when she protests this. Casey meets with Brannon again and convinces him to testify against Brian Ackerman, who supplied the rifle. Star is subpoenaed to testify but pleads the fifth when asked her name.
Brannon takes the stand next and describes how Ackerman gave him the gun and encouraged him to do the shooting, only for Kyle to leap up shouting "Race traitor!" and shoot Brannon, and then he and another RAW operative go on a rampage, shooting the judge, two bailiffs, and Munch (who thankfully escapes with only a minor injury). Kyle takes ADA Casey Novak hostage as a human shield, threatening to shoot her in the side of the head. Elliot kills the adult shooter but Kyle, enraged, lets Novak go unharmed and then comes after him, shooting him in the arm before he can fire first. Kyle moves in to finish Elliot off, but just as he's about to pull the trigger, Kyle is fatally shot from behind, and the shooter is revealed to be Star Morrison. As officers rush the courtroom, guns drawn, Star tells them that she is a federal agent. Meanwhile, Brian cradles his son's lifeless body.
As it turns out, Star Morrison is really Agent Dana Lewis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, having gone undercover in RAW some months earlier. After making amends with Munch and Fin regarding her behavior to maintain her cover, Lewis departs, while Olivia fills Stabler in. She tells him that the adult shooter, Christopher Rawlings, smuggled the guns in with a fake badge, that the judge, Brannon, and one bailiff are dead; the other bailiff is alive but still questionable.
Brian is convicted of all charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. Back at the SVU squad room, Lewis arrives to reveal that with the SVU's support regarding Brian and the school playground shooting, the FBI busted RAW and arrested the whole group before they could pull off something that, as Lewis put it, would have been similar to the Oklahoma City Bombing by Timothy McVeigh, as they purchased all the materials that McVeigh used in his bomb, revealing the Neo-Nazis to have been terrorists as well. However, Lewis' investigation also uncovered something regarding the deceased child from the playground shooting.
It seems the Whitlocks had taken out a very large life insurance policy on the boy and then contracted with RAW to kill him in exchange for a portion of the money, so that they could get the rest. What Lewis and Benson hear afterwards leaves them in silent disgust and shock at what the parents did out of greed.
This episode provides examples of:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Brannon Lee Redding hits on Novak on the basis that they would create beautiful white babies together. Given that he's a fat child-killing Neo-Nazi, she's less than flattered.
- Abusive Parents: Brian Ackerman brainwashed his son with his white supremacist, Neo-Nazi beliefs which ends up leading to Kyle shooting several people in the courtroom. And then there's the Whitlocks, who actually adopted a foster child in order to arrange his death so that they could get the payout from his life insurance policy, an act which also led to two other children being caught in the crossfire of the shooting (thankfully they survived). They have no remorse for poor Jeffrey's senseless death, with Mrs. Whitlock callously saying they "just needed the money".
- Alas, Poor Villain: A subtle example; even though Kyle was a racist piece of garbage, most of the cops believe he is this way because of his father's brainwashing - even Fin, who is African-American, straight up tells the kid he pities him when Kyle insults him. When Olivia tells Stabler in the hospital that Brian is proud his son died valiantly in the name of his race, Stabler looks visibly dejected.
- Armor-Piercing Question: When Kyle verbally attacks John for being Jewish, saying that Jews are "the spawn of the union between Eve and Satan". Fin replies "And who do you think made you?", leaving Kyle completely at a loss for words.
- Bald of Evil: The skinhead Brannon Lee Redding.
- Category Traitor: Kyle Ackerman considers the cooperating Brannon Lee Redding to be a "race traitor".
- Cool Uncle: The uncle of the little girl molested by Buggesi goes full-blown Papa Wolf mode and beats the crap out of him when he admits he has unnatural urges. Even as Stabler is handcuffing him, he asks to be put in the same cell as him so he can finish beating him.
- Early-Bird Cameo: The lab tech who finds the hidden gun is a minor and not especially distinctive character in this episode, but plays a major role in the next one.
- Even Evil Has Standards:
- The Whitlocks object to being called racists, as they only killed their black adopted son for money.
- A possible variation: the shooter kills his intended target, but only wounds the other two kids. So, while he has no qualms about murdering a child, he at least seems to avoid unnecessary deaths.
- Everyone Has Standards: Played with. Barry Moredock agrees to defend Brian Ackerman because he believes that everyone has the right to a fair trial and is willing to go the distance to defend that ideal, but isn't shy to admit that he personally finds Ackerman's openly racist ideology "morally repugnant".
- Fat Bastard: Again, Brannon Lee Redding.
- Foreshadowing:
- Star Morrison reacts badly (in a genuinely troubled way, not a hostile/defensive "won't betray the cause" way) upon learning she's going to be subpoenaed for the trial against Brian Ackerman. Stabler assumes that she's scared of retaliation, but we later learn that Star is actually an undercover FBI agent, and that she would have committed perjury just by stating her name on the stand.
- When Brannon makes a derogatory comment about the black child he killed, the people in the aisle are understandably disgusted, with one woman shouting, "Burn in hell, you racist pig!" But when a shot is shown on the Whitlocks' faces, they hardly change their muted reaction. One would think this is because they are still in shock and grieving. Then, it's revealed they planned the murder of their adopted child to collect the insurance money.
- Genre Savvy: Mrs. Mc Corkle quickly deduces that that one of her neighbors was molesting her daughter simply from hearing Stabler asking how often are the two alone together. She relays her suspicions to her brother, who is furious.
- Good All Along: Neo-Nazi Star Morrison is actually FBI agent Dana Lewis.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Even though Brannon Lee Redding pulled the trigger in the playground shooting, Brian Ackerman is seen as the bigger threat, which is why Novak reluctantly cuts a deal with Redding to testify against Ackerman. Ackerman is also indirectly responsible for the courtroom shooting (due to his brainwashing of his son Kyle and generally rallying a violent group of white supremacists with himself as their adored leader), and Dana Lewis reveals at the end of the episode that Ackerman's group RAW was planning a bombing.
- Hidden Heart of Gold: Star was an undercover agent all along and deliberately antagonized the detectives in order to not blow her cover. After she is exposed, she promptly apologizes for the anti-Semitic slurs she used towards Munch and anti-black comments towards Fin.
- If Only You Knew: Maddy’s uncle dismisses the idea that Stabler understands the disgust he feels about his niece being molested, unaware that Stabler’s job involves dealing with pedophiles all the time. Not only that, but there are some cases where even Stabler loses his cool.
- Judge Schuyler starts raising the charges against Star Morrison for disrupting his courtroom, not knowing that she’s an FBI trying to keep her cover from being blown. Unfortunately, he doesn’t live to learn the truth.
- Insurance Fraud: The black child was killed because his adoptive parents took out life insurance policies and orchestrated his murder through a white supremacist group.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: When Benson accuses the Whitlocks of being racist and orchestrating their son's murder, the adoptive mother is quick to insist they are not racist. They just needed the money.
- Life Imitates Art: In a deliberate step to prevent this, NBC bought the rights to the domain names blitzkreigwarriors and blitzkreigkids dot com so that no hate group would use them.
- Loophole Abuse: While having racist beliefs isn't against the law, Brian was savvy enough to know that by having Kyle homeschooled, his son would be fully indoctrinated into his views without hinderance from students and faculty from a public or private school.
- Meaningful Background Event: When Casey and Barry Moredock are debating the case, behind them a man who appears to be a plainclothes cop can be seen entering and not going through the metal detector. It turns out he's a white supremacist using a fake badge to smuggle in two guns, which he and Kyle use to shoot up the courtroom.
- Morton's Fork: Agent Lewis almost ends up in this situation when called to the witness stand. Either she tells the truth and blows her cover, jeopardizing the FBI operation, or she perjures herself. She circumvents it by pleading the Fifth.
- Offing the Offspring: The Whitlocks hired the Neo-Nazi Brannon Lee Redding to kill their adopted child, so they could collect the insurance money.
- Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Cragen makes a point to have an African-American police officer escort Brian Ackerman out of the precinct.
- Poe's Law: Stabler and Munch trace a murder weapon to a gun shop that turns out to also be the base for a white supremacist group. Of the three workers/members seen during their visit, the most obviously racist of the group turns out to actually be undercover FBI agent Dana Lewis.
- Political Overcorrectness: In-universe, Ackerman makes a few comments about this supposedly being the case, such as saying that he didn't think straight white men were "allowed in positions of power anymore" and faux-innocently asking if "African-American" is still "the current PC phrase".
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Pretty much all the bad guys here, being Neo-Nazis and all. Brian Ackerman takes the cake though, even going so far to call Olivia “the requisite tuna feminist” and “Hillary”, and expressing to Cragen his shock that "they" still let white men have positions of power "unless, of course, you're a homosexual".
- Reality Subtext: Lewis explains that RAW had gathered all the materials for a bomb identical to the one used in the Oklahoma City Bombing. The Oklahoma City Bombing was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. soldier who wanted revenge on the U.S. government for Ruby Ridge involving Randy Weaver and his family, and the Waco Siege on David Koresh and his Branch Davidians that resulted in Koresh and over 70 of his followers burning to death when their hideout burned down during a standoff with the FBI and ATF.
- Red Herring: When one of the child witnesses reveals she was molested by a neighbor who threatened her with a "giant gun", he seems to be a likely suspect. The police find him unconscious in his apartment as the victim's very angry protective uncle is kicking his ass for molesting his niece. But while he's guilty of the sexual abuse, he had nothing to do with the shooting; his gun is a fake, and he has an alibi.
- The Reveal: Jeffrey's parents were behind his murder; they adopted him solely to have him killed so that they could collect on his life insurance policies.
- Rewatch Bonus: Nearly every scene with "Star" takes on elements of this when you know her real identity.
- You'd be forgiven for not even noticing the Meaningful Background Event mentioned above the first time around, but on repeat viewings it's easy to recognize the man.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The titular RAW (Revolutionary Aryan Warriors) are very, very far-right gun nuts.
- Serial Killings, Specific Target: A sniper shoots several children playing in their school's yard. One of the murdered children is the authentic target; the sniper shot the others intentionally to muddy the waters and make it seem like a random crime.
- Shot in the Ass: Munch in the courthouse shootout.
- Suspect Is Hatless: Stabler interviews the children at the playground after the shooting. Not only do their accounts contradict each other at every turn, it turns out that none of them were accurate. Given that they're children (and traumatized at that), neither he nor Huang are surprised.
- Those Wacky Nazis: The SVU detectives have to deal with a Neo-Nazi terrorist group that shot up a school. All the members are shown to be extremely racist and constantly spout racist rhetoric (for example one of them tells Munch, disgustedly, that Jews are the result of the union between Eve and Satan and his father's friend (who was really undercover FBI agent Dana Lewis) yells in the courtroom that the judge has been brainwashed by the Jew-controlled Zionist media).
- Western Terrorists: Of the far-right variant. The Ackermans insist they are merely white supremacy activists, and crime is beneath them since they believe "only minorities" perpetrate it. They reveal themselves as this trope when they gun down a courtroom, killing a court judge, a few guards and injure two policemen (Stabler and Munch) in their attack.
- Wham Shot:
- A literal one, Kyle Ackerman shooting Redding makes it clear the episode is about have a very different ending than what was expected.
- A second literal one shortly later, "Star Morrison" killing Kyle to save Elliot shows she isn't quite who we thought.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Judge Schuyler tears into Novak for trying to let Redding serve his sentences concurrently in exchange for pleading guilty. He instead forces Redding to either go to trial or serve his sentences consecutively.
- Would Hurt a Child:
- Brannon Lee Redding shows no remorse over killing a child and wounding two others.
- The Whitlocks hired the above-mentioned Redding to kill their child so they could collect the money from his death.
