There are several arguments given for gun ownership and each reason favors a particular type of gun. Some people may feel they need them for self-defense because they live in places they think are dangerous or are particularly fearful for their safety. Other use them for hunting. The ones that cause the most controversy are the high-powered, fast-action ones like the AR-15 or the AK-47 that can fire many rounds very rapidly and thus can cause many deaths in a short time. These weapons are primarily designed for military uses.
The debate over guns in the US, like most things, tends to be split along left-right lines. Those who oppose pretty much any restrictions of the right to own and carry and use guns of all types tend to be on the political right. The National Rifle Association is the group most publicly identified with this hardline position but I learned that there is another group called the Gun Owners of America that takes an even harder line and boasts that it is “The only non-compromise lobby in Washington”.
But not everyone fits into these left-right ideological niches. The more common exceptions are some on the right who are alarmed at the easy availability of high-powered weaponry to pretty much anybody who can acquire them. While those advocating for some restrictions on accessibility and even bans on certain types of guns tend to be on the left-liberal side of the spectrum, in the April 2020 issue of Harper’s magazine that has on its cover in big letters ARM THE LEFT!, we see a rarer exception to this pigeon-holing, this time on the left. James Pogue, who bought his first gun when he was sixteen, writes in an article titled Good Guys With Guns (subscription may be required) that there are leftists in the US who think that it is time for the left to arm themselves, not to engage in some kind of civil war with the right, but as a means of community self-defense.
It is a very long article and I am excerpting just a few passages to give you a sense of the argument Pogue is making.
He begins by admitting to some ambivalence about this issue.
For years I had been torn between a commitment to being clear-eyed and honest about the damage guns do and a belief that the right to own them ought to be preserved. I suspect that many Americans struggle to balance these two thoughts, especially now that our national conversation about guns is driven by cable news and Twitter, zones where the issue tends to be reduced to “pro-gun” and “anti-gun” sentiment. But I clung to the hope that it might be possible to build a politics that tends toward a more caring and collectively minded society while also being sensitive to some of the currents of anti-authoritarianism that run through our national life and often find expression in an attachment to gun rights.
So he went online to see if there were other people on the left who thought like him and discovered that there were several organizations that served that need, with the largest being a group called the Socialist Rifle Association that had formed around 2017. The group welcomes members who are “working class, progressive, anarchist, socialist, communist, eco-warrior, animal liberator, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, PoC, LGBTQ+”, but excludes anyone who is currently a police officer, though former ones can join. Pogue said that most of them were younger than him, in their twenties.
The SRA already boasted chapters from Alaska to Alabama, as well as a Central Committee and a paid president. It was attempting to offer an alternative to the “mainstream, toxic, right-wing, and non-inclusive gun culture” by organizing disaster relief, by providing first-aid and wilderness-survival training, and, above all, by offering a community for people who felt uncomfortable in the heavily right-wing world of American firearms. And it had quickly enlisted more than 2,500 dues-paying members, including, now, me.
He said that the group grew when New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote a sympathetic account about the group, that “As a squishy liberal, I generally find the idea of adding more guns to our febrile politics frightening and dangerous. But sometimes a small desperate part of me thinks that if our country is going to be awash in firearms, maybe it behooves the left to learn how to use them.”
Pogue writes that these groups want to change the image of leftists. The SRA’s national vice- president is a “twenty-eight-year-old trans woman named Faye, a soft-spoken construction-materials supplier in a long skirt and denim jacket who described herself as an anarcho-communist… Alex, a tall and reserved twenty-two-year-old trans woman and former factory machinist who serves as the SRA’s president, a role for which she is paid $12 an hour out of the organization’s treasury.”
The SRA had joined various national consortiums of gun groups but after being accepted, some right-wing groups vociferously protested the inclusion of a left-wing group and their admittance was revoked.
Pogue attended a meeting of the SRA to get a sense of what they wanted to achieve.
It was just what I’d imagined any American gun-club meeting would be, except people were wearing eat the rich shirts and Industrial Workers of the World buttons, and their animating anger and fears were related to resurgent fascism, immigrants being herded into camps, and seeing every part of daily life governed by market forces and tech companies rather than marauding black rioters, George Soros, and the dangers of radical environmentalists. But the idea, as I was coming to understand it, was precisely to avoid becoming a lefty mirror of a paranoid right-wing militia—to instead use our shared interest in guns as a starting point for engaging in a more hopeful politics. It just happened that most of us thought that doing so at this particular moment might make us want to know something about using a gun.
…To Faye, gun ownership had become a reflection of a hyper-individualist and alienated American populace. “There is a narrative that’s been pushed by the NRA and other groups that’s very harmful, that’s very atomized, that’s focused on, you know, packing heat at all times to protect yourself from whatever,” she said. “The way the SRA approaches it is not necessarily focusing so much on individual, personal defense.” Instead, the SRA believes in “community defense,” a concept that can sound pretty jargony and vague, but simply denotes oppressed people using direct, and sometimes physical, confrontation to face down threats of state or vigilante violence. The Black Panthers are America’s most famous example, though re-creating anything like their parallel-state organization seems to me like an anachronistic goal, especially in a disjointed society such as ours, where so many people barely know any of their neighbors, and where many of today’s active community-defense movements—such as those combating ICE—take place over wide geographic regions.
But just as young leftists are imagining new forms of workers’ solidarity in an era when the power of big industrial unions has largely faded away, perhaps the idea of community defense can be adapted to an increasingly fragmented world.
…This, as far as one member can speak to it, is the SRA’s project: to turn the country’s long, complicated relationship with firearms into a vehicle for recruiting people into collective action and politics.
Pogue says that the knowledge that some of the people in a demonstration may be carrying guns often causes the police to hesitate to use force on them.
I mentioned at one point that, in my time reporting on militia protests, I had often seen police and federal agents stand back when they knew there were guns around. I had to admit that many of these actions had ended up looking like successes, and Faye took the point. “If you don’t have the means to defend yourself, the state will do whatever it wants to you,” she said. “Even when a firearm is not used, a firearm is a symbol of power.”
…Most often, guns in civilian hands have served as a means for power—usually white power—to violently exert itself, rather than as guarantors of liberty. This history extends back to the first armed slave patrols and up through the pro-Trump militias and suburban neighborhood-watch groups like the one to which George Zimmerman belonged when he killed Trayvon Martin. Gun-control laws have in fact been designed expressly to keep guns out of the hands of black Americans. One of the key components of Southern Black Codes—laws reasserting white supremacy after the Civil War—was the attempt to prevent black people from owning guns. Martin Luther King Jr.’s concealed-carry permit application was denied by Alabama in 1956, and California’s first law barring the open carry of a loaded firearm, passed in 1967, was a direct response to the Black Panthers’ “cop watch” patrols in Oakland. More recently, Michael Bloomberg justified the wanton stop-and-frisk policies of his mayoral administration in New York by characterizing them as the aggressive enforcement of gun laws.
The elite fear of a gun-owning underprivileged class of Americans points to a truth about the place of armed politics in our national self-conception. There’s a reason why John Brown is an American hero, and why Ida B. Wells wrote that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” At moments of political extremity, guns can remind those in power that there’s some physical risk to leaving people feeling hopeless. Eugene Debs took heart, after the violent repression of miners’ strikes at Paint Creek and Ludlow, in the idea that the miners could arm themselves. “When the law fails, and in fact, becomes a bulwark of crime and oppression,” he wrote in 1914, “then an appeal to force is not only morally justified, but becomes a patriotic duty. The Declaration of Independence proclaims this truth.”
Pogue says that people on the left need to rethink the way they argue about guns, because they tend to overlook the need to defend against an authoritarian state.
Policymakers and gun-control advocates are fond of saying that there’s no reason for a civilian to own an AR-15—a fair point if you were only thinking about guns as objects for hunting turkeys or scaring off intruders. But it’s a hell of a good gun if you’re thinking about the possibility that the country will descend into chaos or tyranny. It won’t do much if the FBI decides to send an armored vehicle up your driveway, but it’s deadly enough that they wouldn’t want to come up your driveway without an armored vehicle, and a hundred million gun owners in this country makes for a lot of driveways to deal with.
…[I]t’s entirely reasonable to think that our system of governance is no longer answerable to the people it’s supposed to represent. I’m not deluded enough to think that a collection of angry citizens with guns can suddenly change this situation, but the point of the Second Amendment isn’t that an armed people can necessarily push over the government. It’s just that an armed people can only be pushed so far.
Pogue’s view will be controversial to many on the left but I think that he is raising very important questions. The basic one is how likely you think that there is a real danger of a tyrannical takeover of the country that will require the population to engage in some kind of guerilla insurgency to combat it. The other question is to what extent you think that in such an event, armed civilians can counter the massive military might of the US.
The idea that there is threat of an overthrow of democracy in the US was once exclusively the product of fears of the paranoid right, who raised specters of a foreign troop invasion, black helicopters, and United Nations overlords. But the Trump presidency’s assault on democratic institutions has broadened the spectrum of people who have similar fears, but this time of a domestic right wing takeover. It is not clear, however, whether it has significantly broadened the spectrum of people who think that arming themselves is the way to prevent it. The answer to that question will be seen in how rapidly fledgling groups like the SRA grow.
I have donated money to the Huey P. Newton Rod and Gun Club, of Dallas, TX.
So, my plan was to get rid of most of my guns. Given the current politics, I am keeping them as a sort of “extreme veto.” -- which is the same thing the fashies are doing. It’s a sort of social mutually assured destruction.
I’m actually both a gun owner and an SRA member, by the by. As a trans person in an openly interracial and non-heterosexual relationship that engages in a lot of very visible political activism and pro-immigrant law, I do not trust the “authorities” to keep me safe from the people who have openly declared their intent to murder me, whether in text or to my face.
People love to forget that one of the first big pushes for gun control was a direct response to black communities engaging in self defense because the police would actively protect and join violent racists.
If the police aren’t going to do their job to protect us -- and they aren’t, given the horrific murder rate among trans people -- I see no reason to relinquish one of the few legal ways I have to safeguard my life.
From a rest-of-world perspective, this seems just as baffling as the nonsense of the right-wing gun nuts. The consensus of the vast majority of the civilised world, and all the academic work, is that more guns makes society more dangerous, and you need to get rid of them all as soon as possible.
It’s like watching people have a serious discussion over whether chopping off everyone’s feet is a necessary and valuable thing to do. The right-wing foot cutters froth about how it’s their god-given right to cut off their own feet, and then you have peculiar left-wingers chiming in and saying that the left needs to be similarly hobbled and setting up a League of Socialist Foot Cutting to promote that view.
You do realise that we look upon your country as a place of absolute drooling madness because of this?
@3
I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care about the condescension of other capitalist hellholes, but that’s good to know? Those garbarge societies deserve to be torn down just as much as the US does, so I could really care less about what they think about the garbage society I live in.
It might be an idea to do this, if nothing else to take a page from the Black Panthers’ strategy books; when the Powers That Be realise that liberal gun laws allow Those People We Don’t Like to carry guns around, they might be more inclined to alter said gun laws. Of course, as the BP example shows, maybe not in the hoped-for way, but you know, might be worth a shot.
#4,
Such a typically American attitude that -- burn it all to the ground rather than trying to look at where other people do things better than you and adopt their ideas to make things better for yourselves. No wonder your country is in the state it’s in if everyone thinks like that.
@6
“American” has nothing to do with it. I’m a socialist, and I think all bourgeois states should be overthrown. That is literally a fundamental tenet of socialism. The socialists in your country feel the same way by definition.
#7
We do indeed. But we don’t think this is best accomplished through some kind of apocalyptic gunfight that just serves to escalate tensions and divert energies from the real struggles that need to be waged -- the creation of alternative economic and support systems, the education of the populace and the use of existing state power and institutions to resist illegitimate corporate power. To think that violent revolution is going to solve anything is sheerest stupidity.
The 20th century has shown us pretty conclusively where violent revolution has got socialists in the long term.
@8
You aren’t a socialist if you think this, this is literally counter to the fundamental theory of every branch of socialism. At best, you’re a social democrat, and that sounds dubious, given that you seem to think any of these bourgeois nations are at all laudible.
Maybe we should have a pool to bet on when we’ll first see a protest/counter-protest turn into a shooting match. That’s the next logical step.
I agree with cartomancer’s view and there isn’t enough distance from north of the border to feel comfortable. And Porivil Sorrens, I don’t care if you don’t care about our view; just keep it to your own backyard. There’s already too much gun overflow going over the border causing problems (not to mention stupidity overflow).
@2 and @3: oh fun, a semantic discussion about the correct definition of socialism.
Let me be charitable and assume you guys pull of an April Fool’s Day prank.
These Socialist Gun Nuts of America members may be talking about “community defense”, but what they are really doing is preparing to kill police officers. Just lovely.
I for one would rather live wherever Cartomancer lives if that’s the way things are going to go here in the U.S.
@11
You don’t know what the word “semantic” means. There are actual policies and theories inherent to socialism as an ideology. A disagreement about those is by definition not a semantic argument.
@12
Imagine thinking that defending yourself against bourgeois brownshirts is a bad thing.
@Porivil Sorrens:
Serious question: it appears you advocate the violent overthrow of the US government. Perhaps I’m wrong about that, and your position somehow falls short of that point. Maybe it’s something like, “I don’t advocate for the violent overthrow of the US government, but I’m ready to take part if and when a revolution undertaken for this purpose should arise”?
But assuming for the moment that you do advocate the violent overthrow of the US government -- either generally, or only on the days you’re feeling pessimistic, but at least sometimes you use words advocating such -- how do you reconcile that advocacy with your ethical duties as a lawyer?
@14
I do, yes.
I don’t. My sole motivation in being a lawyer is getting detained immigrants out of detention centers and preventing their deportations.
I do not respect or feel any degree of loyalty towards the US as a state. I follow ethical standards solely for the pragmatic reason of being able to maintain my practice, but I don’t have any deeper belief in the sanctity of the nation or the profession.
Good defensive strategies should involve dismantling our military-industrial complex, demilitarizing our police, radically changing our criminal justice system, revoking our other laws and social practices/institutions which hurt minorities and the working class, making our country more democratic, and so forth. Things like that would certainly protect people from all manner of harm and suffering.
Guns are not an effective defense, in any coherent sense of the term, in any realistic situation. You can counterattack with a gun, but that is still a form of offense, not defense. You are more likely to die or suffer injuries if you have one than if you don’t. Given that, even if we were talking about a genuine form of “defense,” decreasing your safety rather than increasing it means that it doesn’t function effectively in that way but is instead counterproductive.
Also, although guns are extremely plentiful in the US, they’re not typically used for “defense” anyway. NPR reports that only about 0.9% of crimes involve someone using one for so-called “defense,” even though 48% of gun owners claim they own one (or more) mainly for this purpose. That is 9 out of 1000, compared to 480 out of 1000.
@16
I don’t at all understand this. I have been cornered and beaten by homophobes before. My being able to fight back, or intimidate them into backing off, would tangibly have been a defense against being beaten.
I’d like to hear an alternative that isn’t “become a fictional martial arts master that can fight off 3 people at once” or “have the prescience to avoid situations where violent transphobes will beat the shit out of me”
Body armor is an example of a defensive item. A gun is not. What you’re talking about is a counterattack.
Like I suggested before, you could go into counterproductive territory with a real defense like body armor too…. Instead of the ordinary kind, imagine encasing your body in a block of concrete. That will of course lower your chances of survival, so it would be a dumb way to defend yourself, even if it does stop bullets and punches and whatnot. It’s a silly example, but the point about guns is the same. Contrary to the fantasies (or lies) that gun owners tell about themselves, there’s a ton of evidence that a gun makes you less safe overall rather than more safe.
@18
So, going back to my question, what are my options here? I mean, I suppose this is a bad faith question because there’s nothing you could say to convince me, but if my options are “make myself slightly less safe overall but be able to discourage being violently beaten” or “be slightly safer overall but get violently beaten”, I’m not seeing much of a reason to take the former.
@19
Rather, the latter*
I’ve long had conflicting feelings about the idea of firearm ownership and such, but relatively recently have come to the conclusion that most Americans are just to damned irresponsible to possess firearms.
But, even more recently, I’ve been starting to reconsider, and thinking we may need to establish something along the lines of The Black Panthers. The right wing has been getting more and more aggressive, staging armed “protests” outside of mosques, reproductive health centers, etc. And the police almost always align with the armed right wingers, and have repeatedly made it clear that they are not at all interested, let alone willing to protect peaceful protesters from the left.
I still think the idea that an armed individual, or even an armed group, can stand up to the directed attention of the U.S. Military patently absurd, but that’s not really what I’m worried about. I’m thinking of small, primarily local groups, that are willing to protect there own, because the cops sure as hell aren’t, and the right knows that and is taking advantage of it.
I feel great sympathy for Porivil Sorrens. The problem in this country is not *just* guns -- it’s that our society is based on the idea that only rich white hetero males matter and everything is predicated on that. That might be hard for people living in a healthier society to understand. My hat is off to those who do live in a healthier society and I agree, it would be fantastic if the US would suddenly learn how to be healthy. In the meantime, I don’t know that it’s fair to expect Porivil Sorrens to solve this by not being armed.
To be clear I live on a farm and for me a gun is a tool I may need to use occasionally. On one particularly bad day, one of the horses fell and broke her hip. There is absolutely nothing to be done in that case; I had to go and get my rifle and end her horrific suffering as quickly as possible. I also once had to fend off dogs who had packed up and were killing livestock, and they turned on me and started stalking me. If I had not had a gun with me that day, I would not be writing this right now. However I am all for gun control. I do feel the situation here is completely ridiculous. Nevertheless I am stuck here and have to try and deal with the situation in my country the best I can. I highly doubt the issue will be solved by guns, I really hope it might be solved by voting and working together -- but I guess you could say I’m starting to lose my faith.
… an article titled Good Guys With Guns (subscription may be required) …
Nope, it’s wide open, and interesting reading.
You baked it in yourself that the trade-off is about merely being “slightly safer” or else being “violently beaten.” But that’s just your assumption. In all sorts of situations, that gun can severely injure or kill you, which may not be at all “slight” compared to a beating. There’s your reason, and it’s a big reason.
It escalates what might have been an unarmed fight into a gun fight, which you can lose very badly in the blink of an eye. It can be taken from you and very easily used against you. And if an attacker (or even somebody who just seems threatening) did already have a gun of their own but wasn’t inclined to use it, then brandishing yours just gave them the most compelling reason they could possibly have to shoot you anyway. They may claim afterward that they were using it in “self-defense” against you, with evidence to back up their version of events.
Along with cases like that, where the “good guys with guns” simply lose, there are many other gun-related accidents, suicides, and homicides. It’s definitely not a small thing.
@24
Yes, my assumption based on the tangible experience of being violently beaten with no means of self defense.
Oh no, the people who are beating me to within an inch of my life might shoot me! Do you think I think back and go “Hey, they might have fractured my arm and permanently mashed my face, but at least they beat me instead of shooting me”?
Literally each individual punch and kick they threw at me could easily have been fatal, much less the sum total. Saying “but you might get shot!” when I’m already at risk of being killed each time I get hit by armed homophobes is not remotely persuasive to me.
I’d rather have a chance to stop myself from being beaten and killed than get beaten and killed because I had no means of defending myself.
Applying statistical generalizations to individuals in general is an absurd argument, but especially when the risk of harm depends so heavily on the individual in question.
Plenty of people die from driving cars poorly. It’d be insane to argue that means that a person who drives safely and follows all of the rules of the road is just at risk as a habitual drunk driver that ignores the speed limit.
And, beside all of this, I’m still not sure what my alternative is here, beyond “if you get cornered by violent homophobes, just let them beat you to death because it’d be risky to have any means of self-defense”
I’ve always wondered how much Truman’s integration of the Army had on the Civil Right’s movement of the 1950s-1960s. You had groups like the Deacons for Justice and Justice before the Black Panthers. They were mostly vets, including combat vets.
…how much effect…
I’ve been assaulted too, when I was much younger, but it doesn’t change everything else I’m able to know. You were making a comparison, and you need more than one thing to do that. The other thing shouldn’t be made up by you, to give you the conclusion you wished you could get. It should also be real/true/factual, just like that experience, not bullshit which was invented to seem like you “win” the argument. It’s really not about convincing me of anything anyway, but whether this is a good way of convincing yourself.
You’re talking about your chances, but the real stats about gun ownership say otherwise. (You’re just rejecting the latter, for reasons that I don’t comprehend.)
Also, you weren’t killed — we’re both 100% certain of that — in a situation which you described as being unarmed, while multiple attackers were armed. You clearly did have chances of not being killed, because in fact you weren’t. It’s sad when anyone has experiences like that, but what else do you expect me to say? This reasoning doesn’t make any sense to me.
I think that where people on the left stand in this debate may be influenced by their relationship to the power structure. Those who feel that they are a targeted group and get no protection from the authorities are more likely to feel the need to organize to defend themselves, and the nature of that defense will depend on the nature of the threat they face. As they say, you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
I thought it significant that two key people in the SRA are both trans women and that many of the members are from lower socioeconomic classes, all of whom tend to have their interests marginalized. The trans community in particular is one of the most attacked groups and the police seem to not care about their victimization.
I think there is a big difference from some rando suburbanite who carries a firearm 24/7 for “protection”, and an individual who is the target of hate crimes.
Most of the people I’ve talked to/met who support concealed carry/everydaycarry for self-defense reasons would be afraid to get out of their vehicle where I live. Mostly, I think they are just really bad at risk assessment and how to minimize your chances of being in a violent altercation. They have a weird mix of a hero fantasy, and a lack of understanding of how real violent encounters happen.
I think for those who are possible targets of hate crimes, it’s a completely different scenario. A lot of them already learned how to avoid what the paranoid suburbanite is disproportionately worried about, but still face the random targeted violence of hate crimes.
@28
I gave you a reason, and even provided a hypothetical to demonstrate my reasoning. The fact that, in terms of general statistics, it can be dangerous to own a gun does not mean that it is dangerous in every individual situation, nor does it mean that the relevant factor is the presence of a gun.That is just not how statistics work.
If you record a sample group of 1000 people driving a car, and 700 of them get in accidents from driving drunk, you can’t use that sample to say “cars are insanely dangerous, 70% of people get in accidents, nobody should own a car”, because there are clearly secondary factors irrelevant to car ownership that led to the harm -- drunk driving, in this case.
No shit I wasn’t killed, the point is that the line between them killing me was literally completely down to chance the second one of them threw a punch. The literal second they began to attack me, it became a life or death situation. I was already at an incredible risk of dying -- and in fact, would likely have died had a passerby not called me an ambulance. If I’m already in a life or death situation, the utility of having a means to defend myself is much greater than the hypothetical risk of making a life or death situation into…a life or death situation.
And, given that you have repeatedly failed to suggest literally any alternative aside from “hope that the violent transphobes don’t kill me when they beat me up”, I’m feeling pretty fine about assuming that there was no chance of you changing my mind on this. Sorry, once bitten, twice shy.
You’re going to need more than a gross misapplication of statistics to convince me to leave myself reliant on the mercy of violent transphobes.
@ 10 Jean
there isn’t enough distance from north of the border to feel comfortable.
My thought exactly. The thought of having a low-grade civil war next door does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings.
@ 3 cartomancer
You do realise that we look upon your country as a place of absolute drooling madness because of this?
There are other reasons as well.
Not “can be.” That’s not what any stats are ever about. The risk is higher (or the danger is, if you want to put it that way).
Well, whatever you mean by this, there is a non-zero chance of a bad outcome in every individual situation. You should want those chances to go down, not up. You might be in a special circumstance in which owning a gun decreases those chances, but then again you might not be. A person taken at random is probably not in that type of situation.
The alternative to owning a gun is not owning a gun. Beyond that, there are a lot of things in general that help to protect people from violence. Something that’s made for causing violence is not where I’d look for answer. Anyway, if your situation is very unique like you suggest it is, then I wouldn’t have anything terribly specific to say about that anyway, especially since I know practically nothing about you.
Look, I just wrote a comment, you didn’t understand something, and I’ve tried to explain where I’m coming from. If you expected more … well, why? I wasn’t expecting you to give me any very specific advice about my life, and I’m not feeling unsatisfied that you haven’t do so either.
@33
Once again, not necessarily. I literally don’t know how to lay it out any more simply than my hypothetical, which is literally a high-school level statistics prompt. Just because a statistic shows that there’s a high overall risk for injury doesn’t mean that any individual person is at a high risk for injury. That is literally just the ecological fallacy.
If you’re particularly risk averse, you might be swayed by that statistic, but one could make the exact same argument to claim that driving a car, eating meat, owning a pet, or living in the same house as a water heater is an impossibly dangerous to your health and should never be done.
That’s a dishonest chickenshit answer and you know it. You’re backpedalling because you have jack shit to support your opinion beside statistical analysis that would have gotten you laughed out of a highschool-level course.
I mentioned a bunch of socialist measures in the first paragraph above, and you’ve just ignored it. Those things are certainly not nothing, and they would protect/defend people. It was only a short list, off the cuff, but there are many things we can do about it at a social level. As an individual, you may be a very special snowflake, and I just don’t give a fuck about arguing otherwise, even if you want or expect me to do that.
Gotcha, you’re a chickenshit with no actual justification for your opinions, and would fail high school statistics. Glad to know I can ignore you from here on out.
I have said for years that the only reason for owning assault-style weapons is for the purpose of armed insurrection, and that they should be banned. But, since Comrade Trumpski’s election, (and I hate to admit this), I can see a scenario where a large number of people with assault weapons might be beneficial. Unfortunately, most of the present owners of these guns are on the wrong side of the argument. As far as facing the U.S. military, any conflict would have to be, by necessity, a guerilla war. (If it comes to that, the Vietnamese beat our military in such a conflict.) As far as Porivil’s situation goes, I sympathize. If I had gone through what he/she? did, I would seriously consider a handgun. I don’t see many alternatives beyond hiring a bodyguard, always traveling with a large entourage or never leaving my house/bunker. All I could suggest would be to avoid situations which could leave you vulnerable, but you probably do that already.
With respect, Mano is on to something but hasn’t actually gone far enough. I have been present when a black, trans* woman was detained and would have been arrested by the police if I and another trans person hadn’t been present. She was routinely harassed when going out to perform basic functions like getting groceries (or even to go to court dates from previous incidents of harassment!) simply because cops thought she “looked trans*” and thought that being trans (or at the very least being black and trans*) meant being guilty of illegal sex work.
Though I haven’t been present, many trans* people arrested have reported being sexually assaulted or raped by cops and many others have reported being raped in prison. The case of Farmer v. Brennan is about one Black, trans* woman incarcerated for some type of fraud or theft (credit card fraud, IIRC), who was then transferred into a cell with an inmate known to rape cellmates and whom the corrections department had specifically barred from having future cell mates. That cell mate raped Farmer while guards watched. Some of the guards did nothing. Others cheered the rapes and verbally harassed her. She was infected with HIV while in prison.
The real critique is not just that cops are blasé about violence targeting trans* persons (and Black persons, and many other persons for that matter). The critique is that cops actually inflict violence on us -- either by proxy (as when corrections officers arranged the rape of Farmer) or directly.
Although each officer is an individual, I think it’s much more fair to say that the system as a whole **does** care about violence against trans* persons. The system is invested in seeing that violence continue, and to the extent that there are individual officers that might act or feel differently, they’re in opposition to our system of policing. I actually think that’s true even up here in Canada and even in the liberal BC lower mainland.
I still wouldn’t make the choices Porivil Sorrens makes about owning/carrying a gun, but that’s not because PS has no good reasons for those choices. It has to do with individual differences in our personalities and (very possibly) our social positions.
Strange to completely omit nominally left-wing flavors of armed accelerationism (on both white-supremacist and non-white supremacist lines). Preppers aren’t less dangerous and more cuddly because we share some basic ideological precepts with them.
Nothing short of dishonest and irresponsible to imply that people of color are treated more respectfully if they are armed or suspected of having a gun in their possession, given that the latter is the normal justification for murder-by-cop. Meanwhile, these same Americans are the primary victims of gun violence, but unlike the victims of school shootings and mass murder directed at places of worship, they are not mourned as innocent bystanders by virtue of their skin color and the crime of living in neglected, segregated communities. Crimes of poverty and disadvantage exist everywhere, but it’s only when a large portion of your population is unnecessarily and easily armed and with the wrong weapons that a successful suicide rate and interpersonal violence leading to homicide are predictable outcomes of being poor and deprived.
Owning a handgun or having proximity to one, which is the weapon we are implicitly talking about when we’re talking about gun ownership in America, largely driven by concerns about personal “safety” rather than sport, are significant risk factors for poor health and early death. Rates of violence increase as a result of concealed-carry laws. And anyone remotely familiar with American gun culture and regulation and the handgun market ought to find the suggestion that an increase of armed lefties make us safer from gubmint risible in the extreme. Who is going to teach them about responsible safety and maintenance of their weapons? We have one of the laxest gun safety and ethics and public health infrastructures on the planet, and laws vary widely from one state or district to the next. That’s by design. We can’t even have a digitized, centralized database on gun ownership and licensing. Pretending the feds fret about armed Americans or would be deterred from state violence because of the proliferation of even more handguns and military-adjacent weaponry means you’re not paying attention or are currently enjoying a privileged freedom from state violence.
Damn, I missed a cracker of a thread.
Imagine being so irrational that you think “preparing to kill police officers” and “defending yourself against bourgeois brownshirts” mean the same thing.
Dipshit terfs that have been banned off half the blogs here for their transphobia are hardly in any position to accuse others of irrationality.
Okay, but being that that description does not describe me, my point stands.
Also, logic fail: a person who has been wrong in the past is not automatically wrong in the present.
It actually does, given that you can’t post on Pharyngula after being acolossal transphobe, and as mentioned, I could really care less what you have to say on this, you TERF dipshit. The world would be safer for trans people like me if everyone like you walked into traffic.
The description doesn’t fit for two reasons: you said I had been ‘banned on HALF the blogs here’, which is not accurate, and you also said I am a ‘dipshit terf’, another inaccuracy.
And I am well aware that you could care less (as opposed to not being able to care less) -- you cared enough to return to a thread on page three just to comment.
Like I said, don’t care, go walk in traffic dipshit terf.
Showing me how little you care by returning to comment on a thread that has been pushed to page three… well done! And since we’re still doing inaccurate descriptions, I guess I’ll call you rational.
Die in a car crash, dipshit terf.
Still not caring about this thread, rational person?
Still not dying in a car crash, dipshit terf? Legitimately, killing yourself would be the biggest contribution you could ever make to the world at large.
Like clockwork, you undermine your own efforts to show how little interest you have in this thread. And now, suicide encouragement. I thought you were prevailed upon (eventually) to not do that…?
I was. I changed my mind. If you and every other terf died I would throw a party. Legitimately, killing yourself would be the best thing you could ever do.
Just checking to see if you doubled down. Still claiming to not care about this thread?
Hi Porivil Sorrens,
While I generally do not intervene in exchanges between commenters even when they become a little acrimonious, I feel obliged to step in here. While I understand why you feel so passionately about this issue, and have no problem with you stating your position strongly, I did find your comments at #44, 46, and 52 disturbing. Telling someone that they should kill themselves, while not as bad as telling them to kill someone else, is still too strong, however much you may despise them.
Such language usually ends up reflecting badly on the user and not the target.
So could you please dial it down?
Thanks.
No, sorry. That’s feckless liberalism. Terfs, just like Nazis and Klansmen, do actually deserve to die. Not only do I think that Terfs should kill themselves, I believe that people should go out of their way to kill them, just like Nazis and Klansmen.
If you show them any more consideration than you would show a dyed in the wool violent nazi, well, I guess I know where your true sympathies lie.
Porivil Sorrens @#55,
I am sorry that you feel that way. For the record, I do not think anyone deserves to die, which is why I oppose the death penalty in all cases. People who are a danger to others should be countered and prevented from causing harm and there are ways to do that. While I do not think anyone deserves to die, not mourning the deaths of some people is as far as I will go.
Furthermore, arguing that someone deserves to die implies that one has the obligation to try and kill them, which you also argue, and is the argument used by those who have killed abortion providers among others. Individuals deciding who should live and die and then carrying out their personal verdicts is a recipe for a bloodbath and it is the marginalized who will get the worst of it. Urging people to kill themselves has resulted in some people actually doing so and in the US people who have done so have been convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
So I am afraid that I will have to draw the line here and say that I will no longer allow comments that urge people to kill themselves or to kill others.
I will retain this thread so that people can understand the reasoning led to this.