Comment by quailfarmer

9 hours ago

Disagree. The most valuable feature of a fraction of people having guns is that the risk of someone having a gun discourages the most extreme harassment, even if no gun is ever fired.

You've just seen the people at the very top of the administration saying that just having a gun in any sort of proximity to federal agents = terrorist. If you show up tomorrow with a rifle on the other side of a Minnesota street from a bunch of ICE agents, do you think they're going to prioritize de-escalation and professionalism or just light you up? Serious question.

Yes, just like government operators were recently discouraged from escalating with that one protestor who had a legal gun that he wasn't using.

If only there was an extremely high profile example of how this isn’t at all true in the past several days!

Two protesters were murdered by government agents (one of them armed!). How much more extreme do you want to get?