Red flag failure in the Indy shooting spree
Who failed: “The FedEx gunman legally purchased his two semiautomatic rifles just a few months after the police seized a shotgun from him amid concerns about his mental health. Authorities apparently didn’t consider him subject to Indiana’s red flag law.”
A new Guardian article likely for a UK audience distorts the real numbers of right-wing versus left-wing firearms ownership as if the false equivalence makes no difference to Americans. The latter will always be outgunned because the former stands against democracy. The domestic terror statistics still remain firmly about RWNJs.
Groups like NFAC are not only outnumbered by the National Guard, they are in actuality outnumbered by a vast network of RWNJ groups whose most public high-water mark came with the end of the Trump regime. The plot to kidnap and kill the Michigan governor and storm the US Capitol to stop the election were significant enough for the Pentagon to declare to the previous guy that a military coup wasn’t going to be influenced by militia agitation.
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith is a dedicated Whataboutist disinformer desperately trying to find an Antifa that isn’t dedicated to self-defense. He refuses to acknowledge that the vast majority of public demonstrations where firearms are displayed are those of non-leftists.
7/In the Pacific Northwest, where the protests turned violent, leftist militias again outnumbered and overmatched rightist ones.https://t.co/gn9pLWt6wH
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 17, 2021
According to the Seattle Times, hate crimes increased in Washington by 32% between 2016 and 2017, and Duke, who is Jewish, had a front-row seat.
“I really got active in John Brown Gun Club because there were swastikas in my kid’s park,” he says. “I knew a lot of people at that point who were organizing with Redneck Revolt across the country, so I was like, this is something I can do. So I formed this chapter, and members started flocking to us.”
[..]
The club views gun control through a specifically leftist political lens. As Duke sees it, the root cause of American violence isn’t the guns themselves; it’s inequality.
“It comes out of not wanting to arm former slaves and people in poverty who are struggling and organizing, and so when we talk about gun control in America, what we really should be talking about is capital control. If you read the Dred Scott decision, there’s a line in there that says ‘We don’t want to grant citizenship because Black people might get guns,’ and I think that says an awful lot about America and gun control.”
[…]
“After Charlottesville, there was this recognition that there has to be somebody who’s not on the right who is willing to be in places that law enforcement either isn’t willing to be, or where law enforcement is supporting fascists,” Shannon explains. “When you see law enforcement escorting Nazi groups to parades [in places like DC or Detroit] you realize there’s a space to be filled by people who are confident in their skill as gun owners but whose bigger mission is community defense and protection.”
Police shootings are intertwined with gun violence. There were only 18 days in 2020 that the police didn't kill somebody, according to Mapping Police Violence.
In the first 106 days of 2021, police have already killed at least 268 people.https://t.co/ZaV08j0EsZ
— Insider (@thisisinsider) April 17, 2021
