RE: https://cyberplace.social/@WiteWulf/115962212168435175
There is something particularly obscene about watching Americans literally fighting and dying in the streets of Minneapolis to protect their immigrant neighbors from a fascist pogrom and choosing to focus on “gun violence” as an abstract issue to solve by disarming those same Americans.
I get the sense that more Europeans than I had I realized have crafted their identities around a sense of smug superiority over primitive, barbaric Americans and a handful of stock issues like “the guns.”
Which is how you end up with people who probably imagine themselves to be sensible liberals laser-focused on “gun violence” as if it is a cultural trait rather than on the guns that literal fascists are currently using to murder people on the streets.
Liberals have done such an extraordinary job of connecting guns per capita with gun violence *causally* that some of them have convinced themselves that the mere act of possessing a gun causes gun deaths, as if contributing to some general gun-violence miasma.
So we end up with a situation in which the state is literally summarily executing people in the streets and all they can focus on is trying to talk people out of arming themselves in self-defense.
Of course not, because they’re an adjunct to the fascist state and capital. Their positions have always been instrumental, not consistently principled.
@HeavenlyPossum Every time we see guns, we die. That's just how they work. You look at one, and you perish. You collapse upon sight.
It's also bizarre to watch Western Europeans act like it's only the US who allows people to have guns and uh...
... I'm sitting in an EU country where there are... six levels of licensing, including "concealed carry" and "home self-defense." So like... what the fuck are they even on about.
It’s mostly Brits who are convinced that having outlawed guns has insulated them from political violence in perpetuity.
@whatanerd @HeavenlyPossum seems like a pretty clear case of the basic but common error, thinking that the differences between life in different geographies are pretty much entirely the direct and intended result of which state's legal system prevails there.
(also sitting in an eu country where there's a pretty active hunting culture for europe and compulsory military service which teaches most men to use guns, but a murder rate like 1/6th of the US's)
Setting aside the fact that gun violence in the US is largely the product of a fascist gun culture and decades of a simmering fascist insurgency, rather than guns qua guns…
…there’s a difference between a preference for less gun violence (understandable) and responding to fascist state murders by decrying people who want to defend themselves as “part of the problem” (obscene).
People do not cause gun violence merely by possessing a gun, as if committing some spooky action at a difference, and especially not by arming themselves in the face of a fascist pogrom.
@HeavenlyPossum Be all of that as it may, I’m just suggesting some reasons why you’re going to have a hard time making that case to folks on this side of the pond.
They may not be reachable on this issue, either at this time, or by you, or at all, and accusing them of being clueless liberals inadvertently propping up fascism is neither accurate nor fair nor particularly comradely.
If someone’s response to a fascist pogrom is “don’t defend yourself because you will contribute to some miasma of gun violence” or, worse, “you’ll just provoke the murderous cops,” then I don’t feel particularly comradely towards them.
This is not some vague problem of more guns = more gun violence. This is a specific problem of a fascist state using guns to murder people.
Alex Pretti was armed in self-defense when he was murdered by the state.
Because his armed self-defense didn’t work, should we conclude that armed self-defense is therefore impossible and not worth pursuing by the targets of fascism?
@HeavenlyPossum @RobPountney @adamgreenfield
I don't like guns, never have. Back when my political thoughts were limited to naive, superficial reflections of liberalism, I advocated for banning guns in the US.
But now that I have embraced anarchist thought I understand that talking about banning guns means advocating for state and police, and saying that the ends justify the means. I cannot approve of these things.
It's also about more than just abstract principles, it's understanding that in the US banning guns would have the most practical effect (including being killed) on marginalized people (which now includes people expressing thoughts like I'm expressing now) and would least affect the worst assholes.
1. As hopeless as it may be/seem, one individual with guns still has better odds than one without one in this scenario.
2. Why do you consider that community self-defence is a solitary action? It is not, in this case one individual against 100, it's dozens if not hundreds of people armed and/or supporting, healing, in short organising against 100.
3. The vietnam war (among thousands of other examples) proved that you can actually resist a better armed enemy.
So no one should ever resist fascism unless they’re guaranteed invulnerable success.
I wonder how many other people that ICE will murder would have been spared if Pretti had shot and killed some of his murderers.
But, there are armed groups protecting people from ICE. See the Black Panthers in Philadelphia.
That's by design. The administration doesn't want you to know how bad it is here.
@HeavenlyPossum @adamgreenfield I don't like how easy it is to get guns un the US compared to Europe but we shouldn't confuse individual and systemic issues.
I think there's a hard-to-deny link between the ease of getting guns in the US and gun violence/fascist gun culture there, but in a country where fascists are active, violent, are a significant part of the population and largely use their country's lack of gun control to easily get guns and become more likely to enforce fascism through coercitive violence, then I can't blame minorities for benefitting from the same system to arm themselves and narrow down the power gap with fascists.
@tichodrome_colvert @adamgreenfield
Exactly. It’s like refusing to use a hose to put a fire burning down your house because there’s a problem with systemic water wastage in your country.
There’s a pressing, immediate issue of survival against an imminent, existential threat. Focusing on a general problem of gun violence, one that isn’t caused by the people considering armed self-defense, when people are literally being murdered in the streets feels *obscene* to me.
@adamgreenfield @HeavenlyPossum
Europeans apparently prefer being stabbed or beaten to death to being able to defend themselves. Not me.
@LevZadov @adamgreenfield @HeavenlyPossum That argument would perhaps make sense in a world, where the US homicide rate was not a multiple of the EU rate.
As it is, it's more like "I'd rather not be stabbed in the EU, than being shot in the US".
@guidostevens @LevZadov @adamgreenfield
Even before the development of firearms, most adult human beings have been roughly equally capable of killing each other, at least since the development of the thrown spear.
The problem of lethal violence in the US is not because some or even many people have guns, but rather because the US as a settler-colonial garrison state has maintained an (increasingly radicalized) cadre of armed auxiliaries among the public ready to do lethal violence to maintain hierarchies of race, sex, and capital.
Alex Pretti did not murder people with his gun. He did not provoke a fascist state militia into murdering him by possessing a gun. His gun and his possession of it did not somehow transitively contribute to the US rate of gun deaths.
@HeavenlyPossum @guidostevens @adamgreenfield
Colt himself had his invention sold in a fancy wooden case on which there was a brass plaque inscribed: "Be ye tall or be ye small, I have made ye equal all."
@adamgreenfield
I'm kiwi, but from the time I've spent in the US, and with US citizens it's seemed to me that the expectation of confrontation possibly escalating into gun based violence makes for significant behavioural changes.
Sometimes that's about forms of politesse, and sometimes it's about knowing, and choosing to put your body in the way anyway.
One of the things that seems to be missing from more of my European friends is the everyday concrete understanding of the consequences, and of the choice to step up.
Then again, the US acquaintances who've been more 2nd amendment aligned, generally have shown little respect for unarmed resistance.
Should Europe be tested, I'm not at all certain we'd do as well.
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