Hey yall the current insanity has finally pushed me into a place where I want to purchase a rife for self defense. Do any of you have access to a good guide on purchasing as well as any advice on finding a good firearms safety course/instruction?

EDIT: Wow! Thanks for the responses yall! A handgun wouldnt be ideal for a lot of reasons, and I wouldnt plan on carrying it around on my person anyway; I have pepper spray for that. I also dont plan on using it like in a home intruder situation, I mostly just want to be prepared if things really start to go sideways. I dont want to be the queer who is lead away to the camps without a fight, plus I have greatly enjoyed target shoting the few times I have done it. Mostly I am just looking for advice on what type of rife I should get and what is an affordable way to get it, I dont want to be taken advantage of.

  • footfaults [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    National ran out of money and didn't pay taxes, and the new budget eliminates pretty much all the paid staff because the union refused to reach an agreement that wasn't "just charge more for dues"

    My unfounded opinion was that during FY 2019-2021 the national org was treated as a piggy bank for members of a clique to get themselves hired on to the national org and draw a steady paycheck, with little to no oversight on how much work was actually done.

    My local chapter had issues with extremely divisive sectarian fights and a toxic culture that caused long time organizers to quit the org. I ran for an elected position, won (no other candidates ran) and immediately was called very hurtful things publicly during the first member meeting in my capacity as that elected position. After helping train with daily virtual dry fire sessions on and off for a couple years that I would host on my own time for the benefit of the org, because I believed in the mission, it just broke me to be called awful things because of a disagreement.

    I resigned and left the org.

    • SwampMaoist [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      comrade, in case you didn't already realize, it definitely sounds like you were targeted by feds / wreckers in your local SRA chapter. I'm not surprised by this, if anything I expected the SRA would be dismantled sooner. Membership numbers did shoot up after the George Floyd uprisings, so that's likely when more focus started going into destroying it.

      It wasn't because of anything you did. You made the right choice to walk away from that and I hope it didn't put you off organizing altogether.

      • footfaults [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It certainly has been tempting to blame it all on outside forces (wreckers/infiltration), but I believe that would excuse behavior by regular members. It can't all be infiltrators abusing each other, calling each other Nazis, absolutely destroying each other in sectarian conflict. I saw this on the national message boards, and in the local chapter communication apps.

        Nobody was willing to treat anyone else respectfully. Any argument/misunderstanding/disagreement immediately escalated to "you are wrong, and you are also an awful person who should have no place in this organization"

        Certainly there was and is harassment going on, and I believe that even though a small fraction of interactions in the organization were those that warranted expulsion, it has caused people to go into a mindset that everyone else in the organization is not arguing in good faith and that any disagreement means that person is racist, sexist, and should be exposed as such, and then have a Welfare Committee procedure initiated so that they can be publicly humiliated and then cast out.

        That's how an organization dies, and is currently dying.

      • footfaults [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I don't know. I have been struggling with this. I have thought about writing a big post here to start a discussion, but is it worth it? Maybe, just maybe my experience is an isolated event, and while I personally may drop out of leftist organizing, that doesn't mean the whole thing is doomed and you should also feel like I do.

          • footfaults [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            The idea that I have been kicking around, is that most leftist organizations are just social clubs that people want to hang out in. Even the SRA, ostensibly with a straight forward mission statement, has basically failed the mission it set out to do. Because it's not really tied to people's day to day issues. Shooting guns is a hobby, and that means that anyone can believe anything they like, and it doesn't matter. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions about what the org needs to do.

            Real leftist organizing is based on material interests. The people organizing unions in Starbucks and Amazon? They have real concrete goals that actually matter. The union wants to make working conditions better for its members. They organize in order to achieve that goal. Ideally, anything that doesn't help achieve that objective is not something the org is going to spend time on. Really, if you're trying to get your hourly wage to be a minimum of $15, there's no space for people to just go after each other about pointless ideological bickering.