We can kick the broader topic around all day, be happy to, but I’m wondering if many liberals have changed their view. I’ve seen a great many posts on lemmy stating just that, but is a sea change coming?

During the first Trump administration, and maybe continuing until today, LGBT, blacks and women, taken as a whole, were the top gun purchasing demographic. I’ve posted that fact dozens of times over the years, both here and on reddit. I’m betting that caused some cognitive dissonance!

“We love trans people!”

“They sure are buying shitloads of guns! And they’re most welcome to the community!”

“…”

While we’re at it, notice how ICE is targeting non-armed areas like NYC and LA? OTOH, that may be to punish liberal areas. Both?

Anyway, I have a brown, legal, immigrant wife, so I have a dog in this fight.

  • Quik@infosec.pub
    1·
    10 days ago

    Honestly, left leaning people (like myself) currently saying stuff remotely pro self defense using guns is more an expression of hope of arguably evil people (read: ICE) being shot than actual belief that this is likely to happen on a broad-scale.

    This is for at least these two reasons:

    1. For a variety of reasons, minority groups that could currently have use for guns for legitimate self defense are the ones who overwhelmingly do not have guns. As someone from a country with sane gun laws, I consider it relatively straightforward that having more guns is not the solution to this, also, see 2.
    2. Shooting someone from the government coming to kidnap you will not really prevent you from being kidnapped for longer than a few hours, maybe days. The state out-arms you as an individual significantly (which arguably is not a bad thing), and this has been the case for over a hundred years now. Meaning: the actual effectiveness of guns for self defense against state violence is near zero for the individual.

    On a systemic level, it would however improve the status quo if there were notable risk for ICE agents to kidnapping people, i.e. being shot. This is probably not gonna happen for the aforementioned reasons. You can (and we do) still have hope though.