I’m sort of the same way. I’ve inherited a number of guns. I used to target or skeet shoot a lot. Now I do live remote, and we do get bears roaming around, so that’s one reason to keep them. But now I’m seeing another reason.
Jesus, these assholes just tried to overthrow the government. Who knows what else they might do.
Individually, I’m not worried about MAGA folks at all. A person with any fighting experience, in decent physical condition, could drop most of them like a sack of potatoes. Mostly they are inexperienced and unconditioned and undisciplined. Some of them are ex-military, but a lot of those are rear-echeleon weenies with big ideas, barely useful even in a military formation.
But like any other flavor of bully and coward, they can get dangerous if they can gain some courage from superior numbers.
Even so - the thing to remember here is that they are not a revolution, they are a counter-revolution. They are not proletariat, they are petit-bourgeois. Point being - their violence isn’t an act of desperation, isn’t trying to gain anything. They are engaged in loss avoidance, and the thing they’re preserving is political supremacy, and being caught up in violence poses a risk of losing the thing they’re trying to protect.
Their violence is optional, designed to puff themselves up to look larger than they are. It’s not an act of desperation or survival, it’s a power flex. They’re terrified of being doxed, as they have much to lose. A house. A truck. Maybe a job, maybe a small business, maybe their credit rating or clean criminal record. So I don’t feel super unsafe while there are cameras and witnesses around.
They are terrified of playing on a level field where neither side has a birthright advantage. Where people are voted in, judged on or awarded for their merits alone. They know they haven’t earned the privilages they enjoy.
I am extremely concerned, maybe not actually scared yet, that more and more conservative leaders are openly questioning whether democracy is the best system for our country.
American caesarism is a growing force. The rationale is that conservatism can not defeat the irresistible lures of progressivism at the ballot box, progressivism leads to the destruction of the country and only a great man can seize power and restore the nation to moral Judeo-Christian values.
On second thought, that does scare the living fuck out of me.
Right, so when they get charged with felonies, they lose that. That’s one reason many of them are paper tigers. They don’t want to get too far ahead of existing permission structures.
The real thing to fear is when they get a critical mass too large for the police to manage, and the extremist-infested police departments start arguing in favor of deputizing them to “control” them.
When they start operating as paramilitary gangs under the color of law, that’s when you really need to start worrying. But until that time, most of them won’t want to do stuff that will end up on their permanent record.
Oh, Trump will just pardon them. We saw how well that worked out on January 6th.
The mistake that the knuckleheads and armchair tough guys are making is that they think only righties own guns. I’m a liberal, I own guns, and I have military combat training. You behave yourselves and I’ll behave myself.
I’d have some degree of sympathy for that position, if the “Great Man” they’d glommed onto wasn’t Donald Fucking Trump.
Julius Caesar he ain’t. He ain’t even Nero.
Well, I don’t. One of this country’s founding principles is freedom of religion.
I don’t care how stupid these Trump supporters are. I really don’t. They have had years and years (decades even) to see what an utter fool Trump is.
But no. They latch on to Qannon. The most ridiculous bullshit on the internet.
We’ve tried to reason with them. We’ve tried to educate them. Doesn’t work.
No sympathy from me.
Caligula?
A horse would have been the shining star of Trump’s cabinet. By far the most competent.
Three days ago I was promised a Civil War. Where is it?
Anyway, I went and crossposted the following… with some modifications to fit the account… on a bunch of MAGA Facebook accounts, both people I know and those whose idiocy they’re sharing:
I am done hiding my contempt.
I call him a “2nd-rate Nebuchadnezzar” when talking to Fundies. They’re never prepared for the reference.
IMO, as someone from a different country, the definition of “far left” in the United States is out of whack with the rest of the world.
Your “far left” politicians would be quite comfortable in the Conservative Party of Canada.
I am extremely frightened for our country’s future, primarily because the great underlying principles of our democracy are apparently of no concern to the extreme right. If they can’t keep power with democratic means at the ballot box, they are quite prepared to resort to either changing whose vote counts, or even discounting that universal sufferage is a good concept. And they only believe in the laws that allow them to do their thing - not the laws that are basic to our society.
And if they can’t corrupt the system to ensure that they remain in power, they seem quite willing to resort to using force to hold onto power.
A very small number of left extremists also believe resorting to non-democratic means to reach their goals, but don’t seem to pose the danger to either us as individuals or as a nation.
This is completely opposite to what I believe our nation can and should be, even though we have not completely fulfilled those principles.
Humans who will use violence and cheating to win have existed throughout our existence, and the slow steady march to become less violent and cheating seem to be failing at the moment.
I hope we can survive the present dangers that assail us from within the country.
Largely because a group of violent leftists would almost immediately be crushed by any law enforcement people in their vicinity. With the rightists, this isn’t as much of a slam-dunk conclusion. Compare the police response during the BLM protests to their response to those guys with guns who occupied a few state capitols.
With the rightists, chances are law enforcement are part of it.
I’m sure there are a lot of cops who, when the bullets actually start flying, will do their jobs and shoot back. However, up to the point of bullets flying, they will be far less likely to engage with rightists vs. leftists. The cops generally want to crack some skulls in the case of leftists, and so the response will be much swifter, and for much less provocative situations. The rightists will be given much more leeway, right up to the point they start shooting.
That’s true, but we’re talking about American politics here.
My point in saying that the party’s being pulled too far left is that they’re pulling away from the center, which is where the majority of the undecided voters are located. And the last thing the Democrats really want to do is make voting a choice of extremes. Far better to make it a choice of the extreme right of the GOP, versus the centrist/near-left slant of the Democratic party. That looks much more like a choice between crazy and sane, than between different flavors of crazy.
I’m queer. My wife is trans. I’m fucking terrified of them. The amount of damage Republicans could do to my family through legislation and court rulings is immense, and that’s not even getting to the potential for violence caused by these assholes screaming “Groomer!” at every opportunity.