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.

@HeavenlyPossum I mean, it’s real. After having lived in the UK for 12 years, I can tell you that not needing to worry that ordinary disagreements can escalate into gunfire is a palpable improvement in quality of life – something you don’t realize how grateful you are for until you’ve lived it. Europeans do regard the US social contract around firearms as bizarre, and I’m not so sure they’re wrong to do so.

@adamgreenfield

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 @adamgreenfield I believe that one of the arguments for gun ownership in the US is defence against enemies foreign and domestic. It now seems moot, as if that were genuinely the case there would be armed gangs roaming the streets acting against ICE. However the military backing of ICE prevents any uprising, thus rendering the argument pointless.
@HeavenlyPossum @adamgreenfield exactly. How effective can 1 man with 1 gun be, when facing hundreds, ergo what's the point in carrying? It's a very sad situation.

@RobPountney @adamgreenfield

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.

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum @RobPountney Please remove my tag from this conversation, thanks.