Several niche, left-leaning gun advocacy groups said that since the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, they can hardly keep up with the surging demand for firearms training.
With Donald Trump sending armed federal agents into communities around the country, even more once gun-shy liberals and leftists are considering getting armed.
And while Americans tend to think of gun owners as leaning more Republican and male, already more women, gay people and people of color have taken up arms in recent years, particularly after 2020.
And then Huey Newton, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton lived happily ever after?
Activists being assassinated by the government should tell you what the people in power are actually scared of. (It’s armed, organized resistance rather than one-day protests and email campaigns)
The notion that simply parading around with guns made any of these civil rights leaders safer is empirically proven false by their government-sanctioned assassinations. They were not made bulletproof by carrying guns. They were never truly allowed to use these guns, as the stigma against firing on a police officer continues to be far higher than the stigma against a police officer firing on a civilian. And their overt display of gun ownership quickly became a rational that excused their executions, ultimately undermining their mission.
Take this further - to a degree of full militancy - and you end up with Hamas and Hezebollah. Organizations that have failed to rebut imperial militancy and have even become the rationale for imperial expansion.
You want to believe waving a gun in a cop’s face makes you safer because it’s an expedient and accessible solution. Guns are easy to get. Sporting one is an easy thing to do. But the reality is harder to swallow. You’re not Rambo. You’re not in the Vietcong. You’re not part of a well-organized militia movement of able bodied, adequately trained resistance fighters.
You’re not going to deter the entire federal bureaucracy by brandishing a gun.
I fucking can’t with you. I deleted a whole paragraph. What’s your fucking solution that’s so much better than exercising our rights?
‘No Sleep for ICE’ Campaigns Expand
And Nicole Good and countless other unarmed people. The point is that we are already at risk of being pointlessly murdered for exercising our first amendment rights, exercising our second amendment rights in the manner I described is not going to make us less safe.
What exactly were you trying to say? Do nothing? You just pointed out what you consider a flaw in my argument and provided no counter. Did you just want to dunk on me? What’s the point in that?
Owning a gun doesn’t make you bulletproof.
I laid out exactly what I think can be done in other posts. Community organizing and direct interference with ICE operations have been successful in saving lives and shutting down deployments across the country.
Stuffing a gun in your pocket and hallucinating self-defense scenarios is the same as doing nothing.
You’re putting words in my mouth. How are you going to shove a rifle in your pants? What hallucination are you talking about, people are being extra judiciously killed in the street. You’re saying to do nothing as far as I can tell.