Note, I’m neither American, nor heavily in that scene. I’m merely signal boosting what I feel is important information countering lib propaganda.
Note, I’m neither American, nor heavily in that scene. I’m merely signal boosting what I feel is important information countering lib propaganda.
Concealed carry is legal in SLC. If you’re carrying a concealed weapon at a peaceful protest and you realize that the “peacekeepers” are armed, you might want to be obviously also armed to deter escalation (as we’ve seen advised on lemmy a bunch lately). However, pulling a weapon out of your bag in the middle of a crowd is almost certainly going to scare someone, so it’s probably best to go off to the side, unpack it out of sight, and rejoin the group afterwards.
I’m not a gun owner, but this seems like a totally reasonable course of action to me. Am I missing something?
Making it reasonable to shoot someone who does this. That’s literally self defense, even if they fucked it up and shot someone else.
But he didn’t, he went off to the side behind a wall, right?
Those were your words, not mine. In fact, I think it’s much more suspicious to hide and then pull out the weapon than it is to do it surrounded by people.
I was saying that it’s reasonable to go behind the wall, because doing it in the middle of a crowd could scare someone. Why do you think it’s more suspicious to hide? It’s a pretty big gun, I imagine the process of removing it from his bag would either take serious gymnastics or involve the gun at some point having up to a 30 degree angle from the ground.
Why do I think hiding a gun at a protest, then sneaking away to pull it out is suspicious? Is that a serious question? Because I would think the answer would be pretty obvious.
Also, I’m curious what your thoughts were on his actions when you first read about the shooting at the protest versus now, and how that compares to your thoughts on the actions of the guy who assassinated the two democrats were when you first heard about it, vs now.
Did your opinion of the accused in either event change at all? If so, what new bit of information made you change your mind? Because the only new bit of information about this particular guy and what he did is that he’s allegedly a leftist. It seems to me, reading this thread, that that’s all it took for a lot of leftists to suddenly be very OK with what he did, and calling him the victim.
It’s honestly not. Can we go through the steps? Concealed carry is legal in SLC protests (and guns are scary and crowds are excitable, so there’s no need to raise alarm unnecessarily), peacefully and openly carrying weapons at a protest is a strategy to deter escalation of violence (and once you see the peacekeepers are armed, the benefit gained by not having a visible weapon around is gone), and dropping out of the crowd to do it lowers the likelihood of someone getting spooked during the unpacking. Those are the three parts of the situation I see from my perspective, which one(s) do you find problematic/which would you describe differently?
I’m pretty sure I read about it for the first time in this post, so I can’t help you there, but I was thinking it sounded iffy until I watched the video. The video makes him look totally unsuspicious to me.
I don’t think my thoughts on the assassin have changed (he’s seemed like a maga monster the whole time)- did I miss something about that?
OK, let’s do a little make believe here then. The same question, but you know for certain the person coming out of the alley is a right-wing MAGA chud. Does your answer change?
You mean I know they have committed politically motivated violence before or I know they’re a trump supporter?
The first one definitely changes my opinion. The second one doesn’t necessarily, it depends on how they handle themselves (most trump supporters I know are gun people, and there are way more wannabe tough guy trump supporters than there are people who commit political violence). The video doesn’t show something that looks like the rifleman is violent.