A Boring Dystopia

Reposting this because it’s relevant here too: A scenario like this is what led to the formation of the Black Panthers during the civil rights era, and subsequently led to gun control laws being started by republicans. During the civil rights protests, people quickly realized that peaceful protests were violently broken. But heavily armed peaceful protests had police nervously watching from across the street.

Because police had no qualms about firing into an unarmed crowd to get people to disperse. But when the entire crowd is armed to the teeth and can immediately return fire, the police are suddenly okay with watching from afar. This was the start of the Black Panthers; a group who organized heavily armed protests.

When conservative lawmakers saw a bunch of heavily armed black people (and allies) on their front steps, and saw the police unwilling to break the protests, those conservative lawmakers got really fucking sweaty. So instead, they gave the police tools to arrest individual protestors. The Mulford Act was drafted and quickly passed. At the time, it was the most restrictive gun control law the country had ever seen. It was written by Ronald Reagan (yes, the same Ronald Reagan that the right uplifts as a paragon of conservative values,) and was supported by the NRA, (yes, the same NRA that lobbies for looser gun control laws in the wakes of school shootings.)

This gave the police the power to arrest individual protestors after the fact. Instead of firing into the crowd to disperse the protest, they would wait for the protest to end, follow the protestors home, then kick in their front doors while they were having dinner with their families. (Remember all of the “don’t bring your cell phone to protests because police will arrest you a week or two later if your phone was pinged nearby” messaging during the pandemic protests? Yeah…)

This led to the Black Panthers diving underground. They realized what was happening after protests, so they took efforts to guard their members’ identities. They pulled tactics straight out of anti-espionage textbooks. Randomized meeting places, so police couldn’t set up stings ahead of time. Code names, so arrested members couldn’t rat even if they wanted to. Fragmented info, so no one person (even the leaders) could take down the entire operation if busted. Coded messages. Dead drops. Et cetera, et cetera…

We’re on a rocket trajectory straight down that same pipeline now.

The joke was more an extension of the argument ammosexuals like to make about everyone being safer when everyone is armed. A bit of a non-sequitur, but those are nice from time to time.

I strongly disagree that not wanting an actual fight is cowardice. Turning up armed to intimidate unarmed people is cowardice.

I don’t know if it would go like that these days. Cops now have equipment to beat a small army. It’s insane that we let it get like this.

We were so innocent back in the day - my bit of activism was protesting campus security getting certified as a police force. Did no good, so now every incident has someone bringing guns and looking to escalate