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

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 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.