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I agree that they should. The govt is more cautious in handling crowds open carrying guns. However, most on the left are not gun owners.
Holy shit, are they? Because from the outside looking in I assume the presumption that a gun may be present is why US police is essentially a military organization willing to shoot anybody at the slightest provocation, so I would assume if you are faced with a crowd of armed people your first instinct to stop that is to shoot first.
I mean, my common sense assumption is that bringing a gun of any kind to a protest is a fantastic way to start a massacre of your own people, but I've lost the ability to parse how Americans understand both political action and violence ages ago.
It's a lot easier to shoot people when there's no chance they'll shoot back. If they're armed too, you act a bit more cautiously. The Black Panthers used the technique to notable effect.
I mean, it's a lot safer to shoot at unarmed people. I'd certainly be way more willing to shoot at someone that's armed.
Like I said, alien thoughts in alien minds. I just can't follow US trains of thought at this point.
Even if you have reason to believe they'll shoot back? Because remember, this isn't just someone; this is people. Presumably there's more than one gun in the hypothetical crowd.
Why else would you shoot at them?
Is that not what weapons are for? Who the hell goes to a peaceful protest expecting to be shot at with lethal weapons? What the hell? You are not protesting at that stage, you are at war, that's some Tiananmen shit. Listen to me carefully: if you think law enforcement at a protest is going to open fire with live ammunition on unarmed protesters do NOT go to that protest. Start organizing a guerrilla, see if you can get the legal system to act on the people responsible, get in touch with press and try to get international awareness on the serious breach of human rights happening on your country, but do not just show up in a protest you can reasonably expect will lead to a massacre of unarmed civilians. I can't believe I have to put this in actual words.
I'm always so baffled by American unwillingness to take any action followed by the immediate assumption that the very next step is going to be full-on murder. Just zero escalation, in their minds it's either eat popcorn at home or be shooting at people indiscriminately.
I genuinely don't get it. There's a mental model at play here but it may as well not be carbon-based.
It's the fact that US police regularly break up properly registered and approved peaceful protests by "less than lethal" force when they get to be incovenient for [insert power here]. Not live rounds, but "less than lethal" munitions. Rubber bullets, which often cause injury and sometimes death anyway. Tasers. Pepper spray. Tear gas smoke grenades.
You can find a decent amount of pictures and video of police pepper spraying protestors calmly sitting cross legged on the ground.
There are also psychological tactics they use to try and break up protests that often have the fun side benefit of fomenting response from otherwise peaceful protestors that is easily labeled as violent/threatening/resisting. At protests that camp in an area overnight, they will use flashing lights and loudspeakers playing audio specially designed to tap into anxiety centers of the brain to keep the protesters from resting. Literally borrowing some of the tactics our intelligence agencies used against the vietcong. They will "bottle" or "kettle" protestors, surrounding groups with riot shield equipped cops and squishing them into smaller and smaller space until the protester have to push back so people won't get literally crushed, then out come the batons.
The threat of police brutality is always there. With significant chance that there will be no legal recourse. Judges play softball (sometimes literally) with police here. Manslaughter in the line of duty? 3 months paid vacation, then we transfer you to another local police force somewhere they won't recognize your name. And decades of news media jumping at the chance to stir people up has cemented these fears in the public mind.
But here's the thing: the amount this happens is just barely rare enough that it's not international rights org level shit. And when it does happen, usually the police can justify it with some imagery or video of violent protesters.
So it's rare, just always possible it could escalate. If it does there's no rel recourse, and the news makes people feel that it's a more likely outcome than it is. Peaceful protests that go fine don't make the news.
What also isn't covered by the media is how to plan and take effective action despite these risks, or effective action from the past, so many Americans just see the pipeline as being directly from public peaceful protest to some sort of freedom fighter in active combat.
Yeah, no shit, that happens everywhere.
Some people go back the next day, some societies react to this by protesting harder and longer. Other times this devolves into outright conflict or seismic political shifts. Sometimes it settles down over time.
The reaction isn't typically some combination of "Oh, well, what can you do" and "maybe if we bring actual firearms the natural conflict with authority baked into all civilian political action will dissipate fully and permanently".
That's some US-specific delusion and intrinsic tendency to violence right there.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/thousands-of-armed-us-gun-rights-activists-join-peaceful-virginia-rally-idUSKBN1ZJ1VN/
Literally one the most peaceful protests ever. The police stayed the fuck away and it had the governor shitting his pants.
Tons of cops are willing to kill for a paycheck, not a lot are willing to die for one.
That is fucking terrifying and so is anybody who doesn't think so.
I mean, you see something terrifying, I see something that works. Armed demonstrations are a tried and true tactic for all kinds of militant activism.
Yeah, no, that's the point. You look at a barbaric demonstration of a completely broken down society and see something that works. That's horrifying.
You effectively saw some guy walk into a subway holding his erect, exposed penis in one hand and a machete in the other and went "hey, that guy found an empty seat right away, I think we can all learn a lesson here".
That's nuts. It's weird that you don't see how nuts that is.
No that's nuts because its a fucking subway seat.
I do recall Nazi Germany was defeated by a shit ton of people sitting in the streets and strong letters.
You seem to think something that's scary can't happen in a western society. It does, humans are animals and when the other side is more violent and has no morals, there is no reasoning with them. They're there to oppress and use violence.
See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It's either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.
I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn't defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so... in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We're still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.
But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The "sternly worded letter" derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just... you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.
They weren't even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.
Meanwhile the example I'm being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.
I don't get Americans. I don't think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America's political views.
I'm not the one who brought up not being able to fight against the military cause they have planes and tanks. No where in my replies have I suggested a civil war.
Please go through my post history. I've been telling the left to arm themselves for decades now. This has nothing to do with maga, get that out of your head. The gravy seals would be the ones siding with the fascist.
Which was fought and won with mostly small arms.
Not really. You seem to not live here, ICE is mostly made up from those magats...
No one said to start a civil war. Still your missing the part that being armed can be peaceful. That's why I posted the link to 20k+ armed gun owners peacefully protesting gov overreach and cops left them the fuck alone.
And burning gov buildings and killing their leaders... totally peaceful... way to contradict your point.
Again, it was peaceful because those same cops don't want to start shit and die for a paycheck. This example isn't there to show you that bringing guns to a protest magically makes things get done. I brought it up because left protesters are usually unarmed and are pushed around and arrested on bullshit.
The right is not being exported by just Americans, it's a growing movement in the world because of poorly educated people and social media.
Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I'm sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that's the way everybody wants to go.
However, let me revisit your accusation of "contradicting my point". At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I've been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were... you know, political action. Civil unrest. "Civil" being the key word.
The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general "Gen Z spring" movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn't have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.
Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That's not how this goes. "The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns" is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.