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.
@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.
HeavenlyPossum
Adam Greenfield
kit