The thing about a gun is it’s not a passive defense. You can put an extra bolt on a heavy steel door if you’re feeling threatened without increasing the tension. But when you pull out a gun, you’ve raised the stakes to kill or be killed.
If you pull out the gun just to show you’re serious, you’re these fools.
Guns don’t work that way. If someone in the crowd had been carrying a gun, they could have felt threatened and shot at them, then they start shooting and everything is awful.
This guy’s words from the Vegas shooting stuck with me:
“We actually have members of our crew with CHL [concealed handgun license] licenses, and legal firearms on the bus,” Keeter said. “They were useless. We couldn’t touch them for fear the police might think that we were part of the massacre and shoot us.”
This is a point that doesn’t get made often enough, so thank you for making it.
The whole point of democratic constitutions is to provide non-violent mechanisms for changing government as needed at any time. That’s how we prevent tyranny.
There is something almost quaint about the idea of asking permission before organizing a violent overthrow of the United States government. “Well, we would have lined them all up against the wall and unloaded a few clips into them but it turns out the Constitution doesn’t guarantee a legal right to firearms so we had to scrap the idea.”
I mean we know exactly what this person is talking about, and they need to be exited from this site post-haste. They want the right to make trans people live in fear and be persecuted.
Shit. I just found out the Nashville shooter was a trans man. Goddammit.
ETA: To be clear…this fact shouldn’t matter. But it’s just going to fuel people like Carlson and MTG who are now going to say, “SEE! I TOLD YOU!!” Fuck.
