Remember when Sharon Angle in Nevada talked about "2nd Amendment Remedies" to oppression?

[Bucky]

This is what Dallas was yesterday. Americans, following open carry laws and feeling under threat by their own government, gunned down 11 public servants, men who were only keeping the peace and protecting Dallas citizens, both protestors and their nearby fellow-citizens. Five of those police officers have died so far. A couple of others are in critical condition still.

This is what the gun nuts' scenario of a people's militia rising up against government oppression looks like. This is the NRA's fantasy brought to life. Almost certainly the upshot of this is that more people are going to be murdered. Maybe it'll be a copycat. Far far more likely it'll be a white cop with now intensified feelings of isolation and suspicion about all black Americans will over react to some nonviolent street encounter and gun down another black man. And then the NRA and the murderous extremists in Dallas will have won.

You cannot destroy all this hatred with more hatred. We can only fight it with active, engaged, and inclusively-minded love. The murderers in Dallas probably want to provoke a race war. We can only beat them by standing resiliently for peace and inclusion. The cops who killed Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile believed that all African Americans are suspect and need to be controlled by excessive violence. We can only beat them if we insist that there is equal protection for all Americans under the law.

We are taking dangerous steps down a broken road that leads to the destruction of our civil society. We need to deliberate together to find a different path. The first thing we need to do is break the voices pushing for more division and more escalation and more suspicion against one another. We need to defeat those voices by embracing even those we disagree with and accept them as fellow citizens. We can't fight suspicion and paranoia with accusations and rising tempers. We can only fight suspicion with the earning of trust and the demanding of an honest discourse on how to make our world a better place.

[baldguy]

2. And what do you think the armed revolt in America that the RW crazies want would look like?

They're always going on about how oppressive the gubmint is, seems reasonable that those that represent the gubmint would be targeted.

[baldguy]

23. Hindsight is always 20/20.

The "2nd Amendment Solutions" fantasy described in the OP that gun worshipers always advocate for would look EXACTLY like the events in Dallas yesterday. And those gun worshipers are be no less cowardly & insane than the perpetrators of this horrendous act.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. "what it would LOOK like", not necessarily what it is. . . . nt

[Bucky]

6. That's a fair question.

I don't anything about the murderers' ethnicity yet. But I do know their actions, and that is what I addressed.
Hostile, malicious men chose to use a peaceful BLM protest to ambush the police. They were organized and they had a plan, which they executed with some degree of efficiency. They were calculating for maximum shock to the society. This was a political statement because they choose a political event to hide behind.

Now these two very twisted men were either pro-BLM or using BLM for a false flag attack, but the choice of the controversial group was clearly as deliberate as the attack itself. Thus they wanted the world to associate violence with the political message of Black Lives Matter (despite the fact that, for all its anger, BLM is a non-violent and anti-violence movement)--so that even if the killers were sympathetic to the message of BLM, this is still false flag.

Their intention is the exact opposite of the anti-police violence message of the protesters yesterday. What they wanted was to intensify the hostility between the cops and the black community. Implicitly, they wanted more people to be killed after their attack ended. Inevitably that will mostly be more African American young men who have run-ins with the police in which the police escalate without justification.

After the facts come in, this description will still fit the killers. They were extremists and thus are enemies of the calm civilized center in which people peacefully air their differences and respect each others' natural rights.

[CBGLuthier]

7. First day on the internet?

DU thrives on baseless speculation.

[Vinca]

4. Good post, only the gun nuts' scenario involves just the white people having guns.

[stonecutter357]

5. K&R!

[Odin2005]

9. At least one of the shooters was Black.

[Bucky]

10. Thanks. I don't think their race changes my point. This shooting wasn't caused by race.

It was caused by racism trying to promote civil violence. It was caused by evil.

[Katashi_itto]

11. Its caused by cops murdering people and getting away with it. Now groups are taking advantage of

that fact to push their own agendas. Rwanda started much the same way with hate talk radio. That turned into genocide.

[Katashi_itto]

14. I said Rwanda started out on Hate Talk Radio. Much like the thirty years we have had that poison

poured in into America's subconscious. Thirty years of making ethic groups out to be the bad guys.

The results should no be unexpected.

The victim long ago has been trust in societal constructs.

[Katashi_itto]

16. Coming from you this is not unexpected. Try posturing with someone else.

[Katashi_itto]

18. Yay!!!! I never have to listen to your dribble again.

[brush]

19. I've read many of your posts and we've been on the same side on most

Last edited Fri Jul 8, 2016, 10:38 AM - Edit history (1)

This one I'm not sure of. IMO the Dallas shooter is a direct result of all the shootings of innocent black men by police in the last couple of years, especially the two most recent ones in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

The videos of both of those are so egregious, the cops so murderous, it should not be all that surprising that there was some push back.

You can't keep killing people, with the cops not even being indicted in most cases, without there eventually being a reaction.

What we saw last night in Dallas was a reaction to cops murdering innocent people, and unfortunately several innocent cops were murdered.

There probably will be more of this until police departments all over the country get rid of the bad apples, the out-of-control sociopaths in their ranks. They know who they are. The ones with the multiple excessive force complaints in the folders, yet they do nothing. I understand the murderubg cop in Baton Rouge has multiple excessive force complaints register against him. Now he has the ultimate excessive force complain against him. And we've all seen it on video.

[brush]

21. Thank you for working with BLM

We are on the same page. I still feel though that what happened last night in Dallas was inevitable.

If I may paraphrase Fannie Lou Hamer: People get sick and tired of being sick tired of police killings.

Sooner or later someone was going to do something in reaction.

I was listening to progressive radio yesterday as they intervewed a young black guy about the Baton Rouge and Minnesota killings. Of course he was upset and complained about the repeated frequency of these killings with the cops seemingly never suffering consequences, but one thing he said raised my eyebrows. He commented that if Trump wins the election "things are going to start popping on these streets."

I think his prediction came through quicker than anticipated last night. From the latest reports is seems this was a lone wolf shooter but we've seen reactions to sustained violence like this before — the Black Panther Party of the '60s was formed because of the police brutality in Oakland, Ca.

And interestingly it goes back through history. Nat Turner, Denmark Vescey and Gabriel Prosser's slave revolts are the only ones that one can find much history on, but the Gullah Wars went on for decades and were successful (John Horse led many battles won against army units) and eventually led to the Civil War as slavery was becoming unsustainable because of them, yet this is purposefully hidden history as the larger society doesn't seem to want it known that black people fought back against slavery and repression.

[treestar]

24. Having so many guns around

is a lot of the problem and it's so sad we cannot have sensible rules like Canada, the UK, Australia, many others.