A gun-making extremist who said minorities ‘should be shot’ has been sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison.
Vaughn Dolphin was arrested last year after a police raid found guides on how to build a shotgun and homemade plastic explosives on an encrypted USB drive.
They also found Nazi-related material and a gun he’d made himself from a piece of aluminium tube. Police described the weapon as a ‘viable’ firearm.
Dolphin, 20, had communicated with white supremacists, making anti-Muslim comments while calling for minorities to be shot.
He filmed himself in a gas mask surrounded by a thick cloud of smoke as he tried to blend an explosive mixture in a saucepan on an ordinary hob.
Last month he was convicted of six counts of possessing terrorist information, two of recklessly disseminating a terrorist publication, two of having an explosive substance and one of possessing a firearm without a licence.
Dolphin, of Walsall Wood Road, Aldridge, Walsall, West Midlands, has now been jailed.
During sentencing at Birmingham crown court Judge Melbourne Inman KC said: ‘The jury heard you were a member of extreme right-wing groups holding extreme racist ideas.
‘It’s an aggravating factor that you were in contact with a number of extremists and the material was a horrific recording of multiple murders.
‘You had a rudimentary but effective muzzle-loading firearm.
‘The offences were committed over a three-month period.
‘The material related to making items that could be used to kill or seriously injure people.’
Dolphin had been studying public services as a college student at the time of the offences. The course included a topic detailing the effects of terrorism and terror attacks on civilians.
One of the charges he was convicted of related to the ‘reckless’ sharing of a video of the gun attack carried out by white supremacist Payton Gendron, 18, in Buffalo, New York, last year.
It was found sharing that video could encourage terrorism.
The judge accepted that Dolphin was relatively immature for his age. He was found not to have intended to encourage terrorism.
He will serve his sentence in a young offenders institution and will face an additional year on licence after his release from prison.
