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.

@RobPountney @HeavenlyPossum

But, there are armed groups protecting people from ICE. See the Black Panthers in Philadelphia.

@CorvidCrone @HeavenlyPossum I did not know that. We don't get full coverage in the UK, just selected info. It's terrible to see though and genuinely worrying that this is a symptom of a worldwide trend.

@RobPountney @HeavenlyPossum

That's by design. The administration doesn't want you to know how bad it is here.