The only advice my father ever gave me was “don’t get so drunk you end in hospital or jail”
As an european, the thought that at any moment a significant percentage of the people on the street might be carrying a weapon is completely alien to me. Any argument escalation might result in a punch up at the most or if you are in a really dodgy situation maybe, just maybe get stabbed
Mentally I am not prepared to live in a society like that, I remember not long ago on a business trip I had to catch a domestic flight from Atlanta just for the day. I only had my laptop bag with me, when I went to the check in desk first thing they asked me was whether I was carrying a weapon. It took me as a surprise and at first I did not know how to reply!
Long tradition but I would not call it proud, that’s a very slim piece of pie.
Most people are appalled by killing, that’s majority human nature to my thinking. Only a few really groove on it, and we try to keep them in prisons or armies.
Update: Only a few groove on it, but those few may be charismatic and gather followers.
Update 2: They will be extremely few in the US military. I don’t mean to slur the military here. But it does happen, and it is a historical force to be reckoned with.
Update 3: A passage from John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider comes to mind:
“They [government infiltrated by organized crime] took to leaving tribes alone when they went on the warpath, and the result was that the most ambitious kids, the ones with both rage and intelligence, wound up dead or crippled. That came naturally. Since time immemorial they’d been carefully isolating gang wars from involvement with the general public.”
In my first semester of Graduate Business studies (1973), the management theory instructor spent the entire three hours extolling the virtues of a career selling Amway products. This was a core studies class that EVERYBODY had to pass. There were maybe thirty people in the class, and ten of us reported that asshat to the dean of the college of business. The Amway pimp was gone shortly thereafter. I spent my Vietnam GI Bill money to go to college and then grad school, and wanted to learn useful stuff.
If still around, I wonder what his opinion is on Amway now? Most people I knew who were pushing it eventually soured on it down the road.
Their operation over the years seems to have evolved. I was in Phuket Thailand and couldn’t help but notice all the Amway brick and mortar stores. They looked a lot like drug stores. I don’t know what that’s all about.
The justification at the time was illegally blocking the roadway, which is the most common excuse for arresting protesters.
As our dem governor said at the time “If orders are made not to obstruct a roadway and you step out into the road, that is cause for arrest. Period. That is just as much for the safety of yourself, as it is for the motorists and law enforcement officers, as well as other protesters in the area.”
Of course as you can see in the photo, the cops had completely shut down Government st. (which aptly enough is where it was) so no traffic could have gone through anyway.
I lived in BR for 6 years less than a mile from where that protest was. I had already moved away (or else I would have been there that day) but I followed the story quite closely. Also that is usually the BS grounds for arrest during protests
No, no, no. Terrorists would never be allowed to do this. See, we define “terrorists” by very simple criteria here: brown people, +1 for accents, +1 for turbans or any sort of veil. These are Real American Patriots™.
ETA: This isn’t a dig at you at all, but you have no idea how deep our depravity around guns runs.
The cynical part of me worries that just like it took Oklahoma City to get the FBI to go into these groups undercover and arrest ppl, it’ll take the National Guard needing to storm a capital before open carry laws are changed.
Not many know this but open carry was originally well intentioned- meant so if you carry a gun in the woods you aren’t automatically hunting out of season (or so I was told in my home rural state)
Or if it’s ccw only and your shirt rides up you are “brandishing”
In my ideal world a law would be crafted so carrying a .44 mag for bears on your hip on a hike is ok, but walking around a city center with a gun out is not.
That’s how it was in the old west
(Movies were fiction most towns banned carrying weapons in the town limits)
Most of us feel this way, and the temptation to chuck it all and move to Canada or some other saner country is very strong. But most of us here are educated and mid to upper-middle class - we have the ability to do that. We are VERY privileged.
I think it is our duty to stay and do the hard work to fix this. I’ve started writing local officials to take action regarding the recent demonstration outside the MN Governor’s mansion. Having guns at a pre-planned rally, with permits for the rally, etc. is one thing, going to public official’s houses and threatening them is another. Going to the actual state assembly and threatening them like we saw in Michigan goes even further.
This is so elementary, so obvious, I can’t believe that we are letting this happen. It’s well past the point where any thinking person could say “it can’t happen here.” IT’S HAPPENING HERE! Sinclair Lewis said that when (not if…) fascism comes to the US it will be wrapped in the flag and toting a bible. Yup - he just left off the part about them also having assault weapons slung across their backs.
Writing letters is a start, but we need to do more. I have told these public officials that I will stand with them and help in whatever way I can. Showing up at a rally and holding a sign is not going to do it. Posting snarky memes on twitter and “owning those assholes” isn’t really doing anything either. You’re preaching to the choir. We will need to mobilize and work - go door to door circulating petitions, talking to voters and getting them to see that common sense gun laws will not mean they lose their guns - it will merely codify what 99% of them already feel and know. YOU CAN’T THREATEN PEOPLE WITH YOUR GUNS! If you do, you lose them. Plain and simple.
I’m sorry. I have been given every advantage society can give. As I said I’m privileged - and I know it. I should have said it’s MY duty, and the duty of people in my position - not everyone’s.
The color of her skin and her lack of “proper deference” is all the ‘justification’ that’s needed for many LEOs.
Millie is right; it’a mob of idiotic over-privileged and selfish assholes for sure… but no one was shot, hung, set on fire and/or killed. That is very specifically what lynching is.
That temper tantrum with weapons cannot begin to compare with the ongoing horrific stochastic terrorism that my people have often had to live with, ever since slavery ended.
What happened at MI’s capitol is totally illegal and socially unacceptable, but it’s like comparing a bad paper cut to a knife wound… with the knife still in it.
You may be aware that the author of the terrorist bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City was facilitated by none other than the same neo-nazi, anti-American militias that threatened civil order in Michigan yesterday.
Tim McVeigh, the principal actor behind the bombing, was a member of the Michigan Militia - an organization reknowned for its racist, nationalistic, anti-American militancy.
The Trump Con Law podcast did a great episode on that exact question. The TL;DL is that SCOTUS has literally decided to ignore that clause as irrelevant in a fairly recent decision. There was debate for decades about it, but the debate is now silent. That clause has been defacto removed from the Constitution.
