jimm
4d ago
Just the opposite. "I can carry a gun and get in their way, and they wouldn't dare shoot me!" is banking on ICE playing by rules that they weren't playing by. Debate over whether they "should have been" aside, they demonstrably did not.
In contrast, Bundys brought a lot of men with rifles and willingness to use them. That's what you do when you're serious about enforcing rules that the other side wouldn't ordinarily abide by.
jimm
3mo ago
You can keep your beliefs about the relative prevalence of these things, and I have no interest in challenging your perspective there. But there's something interesting to notice, which I hope you'll take an interest in exploring.
Obviously one could say the opposite of your statement, with "The vanishingly small likelihood that I or somebody I know gets themselves justifiably shot seems to not outweigh the additional risk that comes with not having a firearm available for self defense in time of need."
The interesting part is about what this choice of what to minimize and what to focus on says about our implicit worldviews.
What experiences have you had, or not had, which leads you to the opposite? Is it easy to imagine losing your cool "randomly", and ending up shot? Easy to imagine people you care about doing the same? Hard to imagine anyone being genuinely above that? Have you had any experiences where you or someone you care about were threatened by a predator of either the two or four legged variety? If so, is it hard to imagine the situation being safe if the "good guys" were armed?
In spirit of going first, I have a hard time imagining myself or anyone I care about getting shot by someone who can then pull off a self defense claim. I have had experiences, and known people to have experiences, where there's serious threat of harm in the ways that firearms can stop. Given how these events played out it's easy to imagine having firearms making things worse too, but there's still a clear possibility that not having that option could prove disastrous. Naturally, this leads to me being sympathetic to the idea that we should allow firearms for self defense, and if someone gets themselves shot by being "randomly aggressive" in ways that puts an innocent person in reasonable fear of serious injury or death... so be it?
What about you?
It's because "they shouldn't be shooting me, dammit!". They're modeling ICE as if they'll do what they should, then getting angry when they don't. They're trying to use their righteous anger to force ICE to do the right thing, so that they don't have to update their expectations.
If instead they'd update on the fact that ICE isn't gonna do what they think ICE should do, they wouldn't be able to feel outrage anymore, because it'd just be "What do you expect? They're fascists". And then they'd have to sit soberly with the question of whether this is a hill they're willing to die on. And if so, whether they want to die a martyr for their beliefs or try to martyr the fascists for theirs.
Showing up with a holstered pistol and getting in physical confrontations where you don't use it shows that he hadn't thought things through and made a serious decision. It's like coming up to a fork in the road, and unsure whether to drive left or right, splitting the difference and driving straight.
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