Okay. If it’s legal to carry torches, can I carry a pitchfork to my next rally?
How about shovels, hammers, gardening implements? It seems Bricker has already outlawed sporting goods, so I guess we needn’t fear the Badminton Brigade or the Croquet Club.
To my point, it seems a bit whack to say it’s okay to carry guns and torches to rallies like this, but everything else can be regulated.
There was plenty of bat- and other blunt instrument-swinging in the limited view that videos showed, many of them connecting. And pepper spray-shooting.
Banning weapons from the demonstration would have limited it to weapons that people could find or improvise, which would coincidentally have singled them out for police.
As it happens, there were no police around the car assault at the time it occurred. It was on a side street, not in the middle of the plaza, and probably wouldn’t have occurred if the suspect had seen somebody in (real, police) uniform nearby.
[QUOTE=Johnny Ace]
There was plenty of bat- and other blunt instrument-swinging in the limited view that videos showed, many of them connecting. And pepper spray-shooting.
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Were there arrests made, or were the police standing back and letting folks work it out for themselves?
[QUOTE=Blue Blistering Barnacle]
Okay. If it’s legal to carry torches, can I carry a pitchfork to my next rally?
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Well, here is a Google search on pitchforks at protests. These old guys definitely look dodgy. 
I was more thinking like this:
Or this:
Well, my picture was at least at an actual protest, which is what you asked. Short answer seems to be, it depends, but it can be legal…just like guns and torches. See your local regulations for details and as always, drink and drive responsibly. Oh, and try not to mow down protesters with your muscle car…
I don’t have any numbers on that, but I’m sure that, while there were arrests, there were nowhere near as many as there could have been, for practical reasons like the police needing to control the entire scene and that they simply couldn’t witness all of the occurrences. My google-hunting patience is worn thin for the day from dealing with another post.
A quick Google search indicates it was over 80 arrested (no idea of the breakdown…were those protesters, anti-protesters, those using weapons or resisting police, etc etc). That’s quite a few. I’d say your assessment seems reasonable though wrt the fact that the police can’t arrest everyone for logistic reasons, or even everyone using a bat or brandishing a torch or whatever, even if what they were doing was illegal. However, by and large doing something illegal is going to get you arrested, and that was kind of my own point. Actually using a weapon on someone else is illegal, so once the protesters or whoever went from having a bat to using a bat then they opened themselves up for legal action. Of course, had anyone used a gun that would have been a priority arrest at that point.
I’d say if the firearm is in your hand vs. holstered or slung, that’s brandishing. Position of fingers is too fine a distinction to be assessed in live situations.
Going back to Tiki torch weapons, whether or not they make good weapons, the Nazis were using them as weapons. For myself, having someone swing a lit fire at me at the end of a pole would be a less-than-peaceful experience.
This is, literally, the only video of the event I’ve watched besides the short clip of the car running into people. The situation is weird to me. It seems backwards. Why are the Nazis surrounding the counter-protesters, who are around the statue? In other events, there have been “monument protectors” that were opposing the removal / destruction of the monuments, and they positioned themselves between the monument and the counter-protesters. In this event, the positions are reversed. The people that I’d assume oppose the removal of the monument are on the outside, and the people who I would have guessed support removal of the monument are on the inside. What’s going on there? Were the counter-protesters planning on destroying the monument themselves, like happened in North Carolina? Or were the Nazis trying to destroy the monument and the counter-protesters stopping them?
The Nazis/White Supremacists were protesting the removal of the statue. The counter-protesters wanted to prevent them from getting close to the monument - to stop them from protecting the monument, symbolically.
If the counter-protesters hadn’t surrounded the statue, the white supremacists would have, and then been symbolically more successful.
IIRC the city filed an injunction to try to force the WS to protest somewhere other than around the statue, and the WS counter-sued (assisted by the ACLU, much to their credit IMO) and then the counter-protesters tried to prevent the WS from getting close to the statue. To the extent that anyone was thinking it all out, which is probably not very far.
Regards,
Shodan
Another interesting segment. I’m not sure who the speaker is, but he appears to be a leader of the Unite the Right. He’s complaining to the police about how some of his people seem to be trapped, and he says,
I am curious whether this statement constitutes protected language.
Yes, it does.
If it helps, remember that Vernon Watts was convicted of threats against the (then) President when he said that if the Army gave him a rifle “the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”
The Supreme Court overturned that conviction. That speech was protected.
You have to be really careful in analyzing this stuff, because it can get prosecuted as a threat, as incitement, or as solicitation, and there is completely different doctrine on each of them.
In this case, the most obvious missing element is that there is no crime involved. Sending guys with guns to get them out is legal. At most, there is an implication that they will use force if necessary, but even that isn’t necessarily illegal.
But if the statement had been he will send guys with guns to shoot counter-protestors who are blocking the exits, then you’d have to take a much closer look at the post-Brandenburg precedent, IMO. Not just true threats.
The elements that I think are interesting here are immediacy, specificity, and police.
First, he’s not talking about some hypothetical event in the future and what he’d like to do. He’s issuing a specific threat about what he is “about” to do–that is, what his immediate action will be if he doesn’t get his way.
Second, he’s not super-specific, but “at least 200 people with guns” is pretty specific and credible. He’s not just venting here or expressing a political opinion. He’s talking about the logistics of his threat.
Finally, he’s talking to the police. He’s telling the police that if they don’t take the action he believes they should take, he will overwhelm them with armed men so that he gets his way. The only way this makes any sense is if he wants to scare the police into compliance with his demands, to frighten them with the potential of violence.
I’m not totally sure that’s comparable to Vernon Watts.
It’s still contingent, though. If you don’t do X, I will do Y. That contingency is relevant to all three of the potentially relevant legal doctrines.
I agree that if the threatened action were clearly unlawful, and if the contingency were sufficiently likely to occur in the near future, then you might win on showing that there is sufficient immediacy for incitement.
The target of the statement being the police cuts against overcoming First Amendment protection, I think. For one, they are the group least likely to be intimidated. For another, it is closer to political speech–he is complaining about the refusal of public officials to do their job (in his view).
I agree that is a reasonable reading of his remarks, but do not agree that it is the only reading. That ambiguity works in his favor under these doctrines. What’s more, it is possible to threaten violence without threatening to do anything illegal. If I tell the police I am going to march through Harlem with hate speech on my chest and then use my gun to stop the first person who tries to violently stop me, I might compel the police to take action to protect me, but I’m not threatening to do anything illegal necessarily.
I’m wondering how that works with the police. Imagine I say something like,
“Officer, I know you just told me not to enter that house. But it’s my house, and I’m going to go in there, and if you try to stop me, I’m calling three friends of mine to come escort me and telling them to bring their guns.”
It sounds like the police have issued an order to some of his buddies, and because he believes the order is incorrect, he’s saying he’s going to use whatever force necessary to help them defy the police order. Is that an incorrect reading? And are you allowed to do that?
I obviously don’t know the full context, but my impression was that he was basically saying ‘Some of our people are trapped by violent left-wing counter-protesters. You (the police) have told us that we can’t use a vehicle to go pick them up and get them out of danger, so we’re prepared to go in on foot, in force, to rescue them if you’re unwilling to escort them to safety.’ I didn’t get the impression they were planning on defying the police no-vehicle order, just that they were preparing to enact a plan B if the police weren’t going to be more helpful.
Let me first point out the important distinction between threatening violence to your listener and threatening violence to someone not present. Generally, to be prosecuted as a threat, the statement has to be intended to intimidate the party you are threatening. So saying your buddies will go beat up some other people generally cannot be prosecuted as a threat if not communicated in a way designed to reach those other people.
Putting that aside…
The only respect in which your hypo changes my analysis is that it is illegal to defy a lawful order. That has two consequences. First, the claim that the guy will violate the lawful order means what is being imagined is a crime–guns or not. That certainly gets you closer to a solicitation or incitement argument. Second, it changes the immediacy analysis, because the contingent element is the police not changing their lawful order. That doesn’t reduce the immediacy at all, realistically. So it is semantically identical to “I’m calling three friends of mine to come [break the law] and telling them to bring their guns.”
Even then, I think it’s probably not a crime until he actually calls the friends. If the friends are in earshot or actually called, then I think you’re closer. Then you probably have solicitation, and potentially you have incitement.
Interesting, and I appreciate the analysis. I am not convinced that this ought to be protected speech–it seems to encourage lawlessness and to make it too easy to intimidate lawful authority–but it sounds like it probably is.