- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
For decades, the image of gun ownership in America was white, rural and Republican, but that’s been changing, according to gun clubs, trainers, Second Amendment advocates and academic researchers.
They say more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ folks have been buying guns for years and particularly since Trump’s reelection in 2024. This story was based on more than 30 interviews. David Phillips is on the training team of the Liberal Gun Club, which has chapters in more than 30 states and provides a haven for liberals to train and learn about guns. He says club membership has grown from 2,700 in November to 4,500 today. Requests for training, he says, have quintupled.
“The concern is about the supporters of the right-wing who feel that they have been given permission to run roughshod at least, if not commit outright violence against people they don’t like,” Phillips says.
Guns are a good example of how everything else went. Like I believe in regulation. Allowing it to be banned on private property and at local levels if the citizen majority want it. Also to limit modern capabilities. At the same time I think it should not be banned nationally or limited to a point of not being able to work as defense or hunting or such (and I mean reasonable not bend over backward like silencers are necessary because you can’t be bothered to wear ear protection.) One side looks at me as super anti gun liberal commie etc and the other as promoting murder as such. Admitadely the one side is the average folk of the side while the other is an extreme few.
Buying into antigun rhetoric is one of the biggest missteps “the left” has made in recent decades.
We have an authoritarian fascist state coalescing as we speak and there are still leftists advocating gun control. It’s a losing argument in the U.S. right now. I tell people as often as I can, especially my trans and bipoc friends; now is the time. Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them. Learn some basic first aid, you really just need to know how to stabilize someone. Start networking with like-minded people in your communities. The police will not protect us, they’ve proven they’ll happily club senior citizens to the ground and shoot any protesters in the face with rubber bullets while escorting a rightwing murderer to safety. Iran was a secular, liberal state until almost 1980 when they (mostly legitimately) elected an Islamist theocracy; it could happen here.
Our current situation really is the culmination of almost 70 years of rightwing efforts. It’s a long listen but worth checking out How Conservatism Won by Robert Evans. He lays out in a clear concise way “how a consortium of rich failsons got together to fund a network of right wing think tanks and shift American culture in a fun new direction. (note: it was not actually fun at all).” They’ve been very successful and those think tanks are now pipelines used to funnel ideological purists into powerful positions like our current Supreme Court.
The shadowy cabals the rightwing says are behind everything is classic projection again, they’re controlled by shadowy cabals of rich people. One of the primary ghouls/traitors responsible for the attempted overthrow of our government on J6 was Roger Stone, the same traitorous ratfucker who began his career working for Nixon and has a fucking Nixon tattoo on his back. It’s really impossible to overstate how bad these people are and they’re winning.
The coup was successful, they’re in power and if they don’t want to give it up they won’t.
Get to know people in your community. Take an interest in growing food, learn how to fix things. Establish secondary lines of communication and start preparing.
https://www.dsausa.org/
https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/
https://socialistra.org/
https://generalstrikeus.com/
https://afsc.org/news/how-create-mutual-aid-network
https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/raids/
https://mutualaidhub.org/
I mean im still for it as much as I have ever been but its never been something important enough to negotiate for. I won’t give up one iota of social safetynets or civil rights or whatever for it. Of course gun control is like regulation to me. I want businesses regulated but I don’t want to throw out capitalism.
“…but I don’t want to throw out capitalism.”
Suppressors are a prime example of how Hollywood has shaped so much of the population’s perception of firearms. You even make a great example yourself by calling them silencers.
Suppressors are a great tool for making a loud hobby less likely to damage people’s hearing (yes, even with proper ear protection) and less annoying to everybody else within a few miles. They don’t make guns silent like in the movies. Some countries like the UK even require them or make them readily available because they’re so obviously beneficial.
I really think the folks who get all up in arms about silencers (another legitamate word for suppressors) are being disengenous. It makes guns a fuck ton less noisy and that is what people know. No one thinks it makes them silent any more than a bow, sling, or rail gun is silent. When folks hear gunshots though they get the hell out but if “suppressed” they might react with. What is that. Thats weird.