The Federal government has brought guns out two notable times in US history to force states and their citizens to bend to national will:
The Civil War
The Civil Rights Act
That’s the government tyranny that has happened. 2nd Amendment supporters are always saying they’re ready when the government comes for them, but the only time we have ever used the government as a military force against its citizens seems to have been to provide rights for black people.
So, logically, that’s their fear. That the federal government will come and enforce more rights for American citizens who are being oppressed by local government.
That said, people shouldn’t be shooting each other. Cops or citizens.
In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. As the civil rights movement developed, armed self-defense and resistance became a significant means by which the descendants of enslaved Africans overturned fear and intimidation and developed different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.
Point taken, but this doesn’t look like a case of self defense, nor even retaliation against the murderous PDs who are getting away with it. For all we know, it could be (for instance) white libertarians who have a beef with the local police and knew they’d have cover at a BLM protest.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown said one suspect is dead after a long standoff with police. Negotiations were underway when Brown says the suspect told police he was angry over #BlackLivesMatter and was mad at white people. He wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.
I think you are assuming that gun rights supporters are all racists. Some are, but that subset has been getting smaller for decades. Probably today’s events will hurt progress in that area.
Look, I didn’t choose to be in a war, and I don’t “approve” of it. But I sure as hell recognize that we are in a state of civil war, and it didn’t start with these cops getting shot. It started with the enslavement of African people, and continues today with the systematic occupation, enslavement, and arbitrary murder of those people’s ancestors.
This war has become such a part of the fabric of our everyday lives that many of us somehow manage to forget that it exists. So when a counterattack like this happens, we get a lot of “gosh, what a tragedy” and “how does this help anything?”
It’s not a tragedy when Iraqi civilians defend a city from US invasion by sniping at them from rooftops. It’s a natural and expected result of the US war effort to invade that city. Nobody asks “how does this help anything?” because it’s obvious that armed resistance plays a role in things we recognize as war.
It’s stressful and disheartening to be reminded that we live in a war zone. It would be nice to pretend otherwise; that we live in a peaceful civil society where everyone gets what they deserve and our choices can all be morally pure. I spend a lot of my life ignoring/suppressing this situation in order to stay sane. But denying it entirely is the worst kind of insanity.
It could be that what you’re denying is the reality of what some sort of mass armed resistance to police brutality would actually mean. I think what it would mostly mean is an exponential growth in the very state repression being fought against.
I don’t think you’re wrong about that. In fact, one could trace a line from the rise of the civil rights movement directly to the prison industrial complex and modern militarized police force. Perhaps if the civil rights movement had not happened, we wouldn’t be stuck with these things today.
Just in case I’m misunderstood: obviously it was good that the civil rights movement happened, even though it inevitably led to other forms of repression. Any time you resist, the opposition will increase force in an effort to suppress you. So it’s important to be very serious about questions of strategy and tactics. But a strategy of “avoid resistance because it makes them angry” is effectively surrender.
I think you’re begging the question about what it means to resist. Shooting back obviously isn’t the only way, nor is it obviously the best way. I also think that by implying tacit approval for shooting back as a strategy/tactic, you’re ignoring and slighting the great deal of recent resistance conducted as the various forms of protest that constitute BLM.
I think people who say the government is coming for them is basing their statements on the two events that the government has brought guns at its people.
If other gun owners want to associate themselves with people who are interested in fighting back against a government that has only used those resources to help the oppressed, well, I’m going to draw the connection that if you want to hang out with people who want to fight for racist policies you’re going to get painted as being a part of racism.
Yeah, that’s a discussion I’m totally down with, and I think there are a lot of good arguments for why sniping cops might not be the best form of resistance in this particular case. However that’s a much more thoughtful conversation than the one I’ve been hearing mostly, which is a sweeping condemnation of using guns against the authorities on some quasi-moral grounds.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the popular resistance in the streets is the exciting story here. Thousands of street protesters blocked both sides of the interstate in Oakland - that’s powerful! Tactics isn’t a zero-sum game, though. Endorsing one approach is not a slight toward other approaches. It’s not only possible for us to embrace multiple forms of resistance, it’s necessary if we’re ever to have a movement that’s broad enough to transform society.
Another lone gunman terrorist with a justification sloppily painted over their true intentions - which is murdering people, committing suicide by cop, and being splashed on headlines.
