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writerkitSomeone has missed some important details about militias.
It's not just the whole "words mean things" bit, although they've definitely missed that-- it isn't magically not a militia because you're on the left or because you're agitating for weapons being taken up only in the defense of civil liberties, and it definitely isn't magically not a militia because you say it's not a militia. The rank and file among the Republicans also believe they're taking up weapons in the defense of their civil liberties and in response to attacks. You're agitating for getting your hands on guns in anticipation of there being violent uprisings in the US. It's a militia.
The thing people having romances with their guns miss is that when you keep escalating the violence it gets out of hand until it's all violence and the sides are blurred and no one knows anything. Most civil wars devolve into massive civil unrest or someone ending up an autocrat. This is where the mythologizing the American Revolution hurts us. The colonies were already functioning largely independently of England-- that was the point. So it was possible to revolt and then keep functioning because the social order never broke down in the first place.
That is a different thing entirely from functioning in a world where social order is in the process of breaking down. Planning to add more violence to that isn't... helpful. It feeds into the Rugged Individualism myth. To prevent societal breakdown, community building is important. If you and your neighbors are all united against the authoritarianism it's a lot harder to take over your neighborhood. (Just look at the Rosenstrasse protest-- at the height of Nazism, intermarried women whose Jewish husbands had been taken gathered at the gates and stayed there, in a mass demonstration, ignoring all threats, until they got their husbands back. And they did-- including some men who'd already been sent to Auschwitz and were taken out and sent back.)
But that's a lot more work, and doesn't let you play out your gun fantasy that you're totally in denial about having. Honestly, this essay reads like the "I want people to punch" of gun fantasies-- the author really wants to heroically run around with a gun, shooting people is bad, therefore imagine a situation where there is no choice.
Why am I sharing this? Not so much to yell at it as to point up that it exists-- I've spent a lot of time around "the glorious socialist revolution" types but this isn't that. It's something altogether more concerning: someone who's not a child on tumblr agitating for going out and getting a gun "just in case".
It's not just the whole "words mean things" bit, although they've definitely missed that-- it isn't magically not a militia because you're on the left or because you're agitating for weapons being taken up only in the defense of civil liberties, and it definitely isn't magically not a militia because you say it's not a militia. The rank and file among the Republicans also believe they're taking up weapons in the defense of their civil liberties and in response to attacks. You're agitating for getting your hands on guns in anticipation of there being violent uprisings in the US. It's a militia.
The thing people having romances with their guns miss is that when you keep escalating the violence it gets out of hand until it's all violence and the sides are blurred and no one knows anything. Most civil wars devolve into massive civil unrest or someone ending up an autocrat. This is where the mythologizing the American Revolution hurts us. The colonies were already functioning largely independently of England-- that was the point. So it was possible to revolt and then keep functioning because the social order never broke down in the first place.
That is a different thing entirely from functioning in a world where social order is in the process of breaking down. Planning to add more violence to that isn't... helpful. It feeds into the Rugged Individualism myth. To prevent societal breakdown, community building is important. If you and your neighbors are all united against the authoritarianism it's a lot harder to take over your neighborhood. (Just look at the Rosenstrasse protest-- at the height of Nazism, intermarried women whose Jewish husbands had been taken gathered at the gates and stayed there, in a mass demonstration, ignoring all threats, until they got their husbands back. And they did-- including some men who'd already been sent to Auschwitz and were taken out and sent back.)
But that's a lot more work, and doesn't let you play out your gun fantasy that you're totally in denial about having. Honestly, this essay reads like the "I want people to punch" of gun fantasies-- the author really wants to heroically run around with a gun, shooting people is bad, therefore imagine a situation where there is no choice.
Why am I sharing this? Not so much to yell at it as to point up that it exists-- I've spent a lot of time around "the glorious socialist revolution" types but this isn't that. It's something altogether more concerning: someone who's not a child on tumblr agitating for going out and getting a gun "just in case".
