I'm feeling so uneasy with everything I've been seeing. I keep thinking about what we will be this time next year, and if shit hits the fan, what is your plan? I'm queer and was politically active in 2020, so I would potentially be considered a political enemy.
The only blueprint I can think of is what you do in an active shooter situation; Flee, Hide, Fight.
I know there's that romantic notion of "don't be a coward, get out and protest", but I remember the brutality of the 2020 protests firsthand, and even then I thought "thank god I'm going toe to toe with the CPD and not the CCP". Next time is going to be different. The president now has authority to send drone strikes. Protests and riots don't stand a chance agains missiles and live rounds.
Flee- I have an Uncle in Montreal who my family could potentially use as a way to at least temporarily escape the chaos. The hope I'd have is that Canada and other countries would accept American refugees, however that's not a guarantee.
Hide- If borders are closed, lay low and move away from major cities if possible. If civil war breaks out, try to get away from the violence even if you think your side will win. Todays losers may be tomorrows victors.
Fight- If cellular data/ social media algorithms can keep track of you, and surveillance can make sure there's no movement, this would be the last resort of desperation. I guess if possible try to either find a group for safety in numbers, or conversely go guerrilla as groups of resistance would make easy targets.
Sorry my mind is running and I'm getting scared.
you guys have cried about your guns for two hundred years in case of this exact situation
i think the gun people might be voting for trump
Never underestimate dem/liberal gun ownership. We are just quiet about it and don't make it our entire personality.
I can't be the only one to roll my eyes at comments like this. Like in one respect I get it, we want to say we will fuck up the fascists. But on the flipside, what the fuck are you guys actually suggesting here?
Bear in mind per Propublica reporting that the right-wing extremist groups want to incite a race/Civil War. They hate the fact that there is such a stark contrast in violence between the left and right and it's making them look TERRIBLE.
Bear in mind firearm manufacturers are actively trying to break into the leftist market to sell more guns. Pretty obvious.
Forgetting the evidence that guns for all intents don't make you safer. We need to use our brains before bullets, lest we've all already lost.
I’d say it’s a reaction to where ammosexual conservatives talk as if they have all the guns and would therefore win instantly in the civil war scenarios they masturbate over.
Fair I can see that. In the event they threw the first punch a la Fort Sumter, it may take a while for the left to spin up but I have no doubt they'd get steamrolled as they always do, from the Confederacy to the Third Reich.
After all, we'd just have to wait for their heart meds to run out.
For real, diabetes and war marches don’t exactly pair nicely.
You seem to be taking an "either / or" approach here. In my opinion the left should do everything possible to avoid violence, and also own guns in case these efforts are unsuccessful. It doesn't need to be one or the other.
It's really kind of a matter of definitions to me. In my view, there exist situations where a firearm is about the only way to prevent super bad outcomes for myself. Those situations are uncommon, there are many good ways to avoid them usually, and I hope to never find myself in one. But by definition, if I find myself in a situation like that, having a firearm available is the difference between having agency and having none.
Some people feel that the likelihood of such a scenario is so small that it's a bad idea to prepare for it. Maybe this is how you feel? I do understand that point of view, I simply disagree. I don't really understand points of view that seem to argue there is no scenario where firearms are useful, or that we're magically "past that" as a society (and to be clear, I'm not sure you're taking that stance). To take one example, just look at the response to Hurricane Katrina as an example of how flimsy our law and order really is. Once a situation is bad enough to overwhelm the existing structures we have in place, all bets are off and rules for behavior evaporate. We've seen this happen, in our country, in our lifetimes, more than once. I don't understand the derision - why eye roll?
Fair points.
I view it mostly as either/or chiefly for two reasons:
The statistics to me suggest that the possession of a firearm generate greater alternative risks than the probability of the positive use-case we all imagine in our heads. For me, I am not in a bad neighborhood. Nobody is out to get me. Despite how bad things have become, we are a long ways away from some civil war. So to me it's a net-negative.
Any time focused on firearms is time taken away from focusing on preventative measures to shift this country in the right direction. One more phone conversation with a friend or relative on the fence to alter their vote to me is far more impactful at preventing what we all come to fear.
I roll my eyes because some people get very gung-ho akin to the whole "fuck around find out" vibes of righties that I cannot stand. Big talk almost yearning for civil war when they're focusing on the wrong things.
Ah, those are reasonable points of view to me. I think responsible gun ownership is fairly straightforward and the statistics look that way because of the extremely irresponsible folks who don't take it seriously, and because suicide is usually included. Proper gun safety really only requires diligently following a few simple rules, make those consistently followed - habitual - and the additional risk drops to pretty close to zero.
But I concede that owning a gun does - at again just a definitional level - create a path of escalation which is almost always inappropriate to pursue, which is not available without that gun, and that's inherently risky too. It's not a decision to be taken lightheartedly, but we all face risk at varying degrees and have to make our own decisions about what are good and bad tradeoffs there.
There are a lot of folks (of all political persuasion, which is not to say it's evenly distributed at all) who are definitely LARPing, and I think their idiot rhetoric is foolish and potentially harmful. I just think the quiet gun-owning left shouldn't be automatically associated with that group, and if I remember the original comment right, I don't think the poster indicated any hidden desire for violence.
I agree that we should be discussing and insisting on action for way more substantive and impactful stuff, guns are a ridiculous wedge issue that will never be "resolved", and our limited time is definitely better spent trying to force improvements that would benefit and be popular with a majority of people.
As a liberal gun owner, I can't agree more. I hate that I have to own a gun to feel safe. I have been within 1 mile of no less than 5 mass shootings, and in 2 scenarios where I had to put my hands on my gun ready to use in the last 5 years. My wife was 100 yards from the shooter at the Texas State Fair shooting last year.
I own guns to protect my family. I also own them in case civil war breaks out and all my right-wing, crazy neighbors lose their shit.
There never is a suggestion. It’s never thought through. It’s all just abstract. Civil war is an abstract thought that can be talked about without anyone needing to consider how it would actually play out.
So how does it work? Do conservatives from Texas take a greyhound bus to california, get out, and start blasting indiscriminately? Do they stop people on the street and randomly ask their political views before blasting?
It’s hard to have a civil war when your enemy is ill defined. People arent going to be standing in fields with blue and grey uniforms.
What is more likely to happen is simply clashes during protests .
The issue is military and police tend to side with fascists, and fascists know this so it's a 3 way fight
While police will always side with fascists - it's a purely fascist institution, after all - there is some caveats when it comes to the military, and, surprisingly, the prospects of the US military simply joining with fascists does not look promising for them. The problem is that the military-industrial complex has it's bread buttered on both sides by the liberal status quo - it simply has nothing to gain from a fascist regime in any way whatsoever.
The bad news is, of course, is that they might not actually need the military if they just plan on doing it through lawfare as they are currently doing it.
sure, but they're in the minority, and i wouldn't bet on even the majority to win against the national guard and their tanks
Tanks need support personnel.
Ask the Russians how well it goes when the tanks fight alone.
Okay? What's your point? That the national guard will rise up against the system?
The national guard are famously conservative. Which side do you think they'll pick when push comes to shove?
Wait so we're getting Jan 6 Part 2 if Trump wins?
I am still sure that the right has more. Like you might have 1 or 2. A lot of those nutjobs have 1 or 2 hundred.
What, are they going to aim 200 guns at once?
Knowing some of the redneck mother fuckers I've met:
They'll figure out how to do it, yes
"I've gon' an' dun it, y'all! I dun made a weapon to surpass Metal Gear, I tell you hwhat."
Arm their friends? Make boobie traps?
Making boobie traps is illegal they can't do that /s
Your absolutely right. But how many guns can you shoot at once?
Well they've only got 2 arms at the most (maybe 3 in Alabama) so they can only hold 2 guns at once. Kinda hard to hold an arsenal dual wielded
While they have a large number of guns, they can still only operate one at a time.
Not me.
They're still crying about Biden coming for their guns (I'm American), happily ignoring "take their guns first due process second" Trump
Not America’s left. America’s left has wanted gun control.
That said, it’s not like the left leaning cities are hurting for guns. There is a reason the left wants gun control.
And the strong push against gun control isn’t a 200 hundred year old thing. It’s a 40-50 year old thing. The NRA used to be about responsible gun ownership, not saving up for the fallout wasteland.
America's liberals have wanted gun control. go far enough left and you get your guns back.
Maybe I'm more of a moderate but I just want some gun control, like universal background checks and mandatory training.
Not really on board with other things though, for example: Banning certain models of guns is just stupid and ineffective: Ban one and there are probably at least half a dozen other functionally identical firearms they can be replaced with. It's meaningless performative legislature.
You make it sound like these people have a bone in their bodies to take the fight to their government.. all a bunch of hot air. Even the ex military ain't got it in them. Not many people are willing to sacrifice their lives for their ideals.
I sure haven’t. That’s a deluded conservative thing… they say they need guns to defend from an overbearing government, then they’re the idiots who vote for freedom-infringing authoritarians. It also hasn’t made sense in decades at best, given that they’d be gravy seals fighting army or police with their handguns while the government has helicopters, grenades, night vision, comm systems (like, they think they’d have cell service in a civil war?) and so on. Maybe some organized group could pull off an Iraq or Afghanistan style resistance, but it seems unlikely.
Lmfao
The problem is that the cops are on their side.
I've dabbled in ham radio a bit, comms is something that at least some of the right are thinking about with these kinds of things, there's more than a handful of right wing doomsday pepper lunatics in the ham radio circle, if you ever decide to listen in on CB radio chatter, there's a good chance you're gonna hear some lunatic ranting about conspiracy bullshit, I'm pretty sure I saw some pictures of guys at 1/6 with some baofengs (cheap Chinese ham radios, pretty much every ham has one or two kicking around)
I remember when I first started looking into ham radio, I was googling some stuff, clicking into a whole bunch of different results not paying too much attention to where I was, and I found one forum thread that was actually pretty informative until halfway down the thread someone said something really unhinged about race wars or something, and no one called him out about it and some even agreed with him, so I took a look at what site I was on and it was the stormfront forums. Nope I out of there really quick.
Also not the only experience I had like that, few of my hobbies and interests have significant overlap with the right wing lunatics fringe since I'm into some outdoors camping and survivalist type stuff, the algorithms try really hard to suck me into crazytown sometimes.
Honestly. I wish we had more leftest prepped stuff. The darknet hacker scene (privacy is a mixed bag) is decent IMHO, but as soon as you want to prepare for disasters (canning, homesteading, HAM radio, reloading, guns, etc) ALOT of the content and social media is a mix of ethno or Christian nationalism bunk.
We, the left, really should be interested in this stuff. This is how you provide mutual aid in disasters. How you help the marginalized avoid oppression and how you raise the cost of faciest take over.
Small arms like pistols, shotguns, rifles are great against a random meth head that breaks in to your home. But against a coordinated response by the government!? They have machine guns and drones and troops and bombs. And have been known to use them on civilians.