NYT: At Protests, Guns Are Doing the Talking

[DBoon]

Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s.

This month, armed protesters appeared outside an elections center in Phoenix, hurling baseless accusations that the election for governor had been stolen from the Republican, Kari Lake. In October, Proud Boys with guns joined a rally in Nashville where conservative lawmakers spoke against transgender medical treatments for minors.

In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced. Among the others were rallies in support of gun rights in Delaware and abortion rights in Georgia.

Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.

But the effects of more guns in public spaces have not been evenly felt. A partisan divide — with Democrats largely eschewing firearms and Republicans embracing them — has warped civic discourse. Deploying the Second Amendment in service of the First has become a way to buttress a policy argument, a sort of silent, if intimidating, bullhorn.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/us/guns-protests-open-carry.html

or

https://dnyuz.com/2022/11/26/at-protests-guns-are-doing-the-talking/

[Kid Berwyn]

1. If money is free speech, why not guns?

[zanana1]

2. Can you say "Rittenhouse"?

[judesedit]

3. Books are free speech and they don't have a problem banning them

[gratuitous]

4. You expect conservatives to advance their odious policies by appeal to logic and reason?

What kind of monster would do that to these barely literate folks who know only that Might Makes Right? You're depriving them of their sole means of self expression! Which leaves them no choice but to start squirting lead, so it's all the libs' fault they have to go around strapped.

[TigressDem]

5. I'm seeing self-contained, police-sheild/grade, mobile protest pods with drop down gas masks.

With Right/Left slots so you can group together with a staff for steering.

A round pyramid shaped cone of bulletproof plexiglass. Put a fan in there too to reverse any tear gas toward the attackers.
Better center of gravity.


One like this would topple easier.

[Mblaze]

6. Pre-Magna Carta thinking

They’re back to “might makes right”. Civilization be damned. Jesus’s “Peaceable Kingdom” be damned. “We the People” be damned. Stone Age values.

[maxsolomon]

7. The term is "Paramilitary Groups"

Which evolve into Death Squads.