At engagements from 1-4 yards, people don't fucking miss that often.
Someone doesn't need to be a practiced marksman to make standard shots at that distance. Anyone can do it, which is what makes guns dangerous in the first place. Ware dumped his magazine into two "trained" guys at close range and they had no time to do anything.
Rittenhouse should have made it obvious, but just because someone is an unathletic nerd without motor skills doesn't mean they can't be dangerous.
Thus, chasing down or tackling a maniac with a gun is a context-specific action. Only worked in the Rittenhouse case because his back was turned.
Don't be stupid.
And in return they'll preemptively kill how many people?
This isn't a cause of celebration. Get your head in the game.
they were going to do that already, hoping to avoid angering the abuser is not a good strategy
Totally agree with this comment but, it can get worse.
Not saying do nothing but you do have to evaluate what the result of something is likely to be.
that's true, I'll have to think a little more about this aspect
To use your metaphor, you shouldn't rely on an abuser to not abuse, but it's probably not a good idea to tell them you pissed in their coffee.
Imagine a future where traffic stops to become two military-armored guys pointing rifles and blinding light in your face, screaming at you, and if you don't Simon Says just right in ten seconds they kill you
Over a routine traffic stop
Don't give me "that's already how it is," because it isn't, and it will get fucking worse. It will become rifle rounds through windshields over misdemeanors.
They have the arms, the armor, the funding, the leverage, the courts, and public opinion. This isn't a singular 'abuser,' this is an entire system that can destroy you and your family and your community on a whim.
Defend yourself, obviously. But this is not good.
I'll give you that. From a principled standpoint, we aren't going to overcome systemic violence through sporadic incidents of hyper-individualist retribution. The situation calls for principled, organized resistance, not egotistical acts of self-destructive vigilante justice. The problem is, the working class lacks this discipline, and even among the minute fraction of the working class which employs disciplined, theoretically informed practice, these disciplines vary greatly. We should work to educate and organize the working class, but by the time we have a spontaneous uprising on our hands, the die is already largely cast and we are forced to work with what we've got.
We probably shouldn't celebrate the violence. The violence is just a harbinger of worse times to come. On the other hand we cannot fall into the trap of blaming the movement for the retribution inflicted upon it by the state. I see the celebration as an inevitable knee-jerk reaction against the overbearing social expectation for us to shed a tear for death of people who signed up to execute the repressive functions of the capitalist state. Everything in our culture is designed to make us see the police and armed forces as invincible and omnipotent, so people will inevitably celebrate the rare occasions where we are reminded that this is not entirely true.
Unfortunately, I don't see a way out. With every layoff, every eviction, every medical-induced bankruptcy, and every death caused by Covid, every home turned to ash by climate change, the situation of the working class will only grow more precarious. We were already in an unprecedented state of precarity before the pandemic started. Considering the conditions we are facing, I expect there are many people out there who are reasonably not in a sound state of mental health. Now take all these people and put them in a place where they have nothing to lose, and the violence seems inevitable - regardless of our feelings about it.
If we refuse to celebrate it, even if we deem it as counterproductive, I think it will only continue. The police aren't pulling us over for tag lights at rifle point quite yet, and we shouldn't pretend things are as bad as they can possibly be, but in the grand scheme of things I don't see any options besides capitulation or escalation.
The takeaway for me is that we must choose our battles carefully - but I think we all already know that. Movements are chaotic, and a lot of things will happen which are beyond our control. Even the most disciplined movements are vulnerable to agents provocateur, and the state will certainly respond with these measures if we don't sufficiently reach the threshold of violence they wish to portray in their reactionary media campaigns.
I guess just don't get caught up in the blood lust.
Thank you for stating this better than I could have.
I feel you comrade but it is increasingly becoming the only option available to us, and is likely the inevitable trajectory of this system anyway.
Like, weirdly, both things are true. This will be the justification to make things a lot worse. But they're going to do that anyway, and the only praxis going forward is going to be organized retaliations against misconduct.
Because they are not gonna abolish ICE or the cops. And no one is calming down as things get worse. The state least of all.
The police officer that was killed said a week before that he was hesitant to use lethal force due to public opinion. This probably kept David Ware from being shot outright. And this was in Oklahoma.
Every manual on guerilla warfare emphasizes the importance of public opinion.
The problem here is that the police have a propaganda machine and the counter-propaganda is essentially livestreams and social media.
What does this mean? Every dead cop will be leveraged against the working class, easily. Every dead civilian will have to brought to light, because no one else will do it.
Fighting back when cops come to kill you means you've probably already lost. The effort should be in proving to as many people as possible the corruption and sadism of the cops--and the amount of resignations and closer scrutiny shows this has some effect.
This is all taking place in the imperial core so it's an impossibility, but still.
I would rather they were afraid of real organized retaliation, than any public "perception" which the vast majority don't give a single shit about.
There's not a guerilla war I can think of that doesn't leverage making populations feel insecure and forcing them to pick the insurgency over the occupiers. And there's never going to be a "popular" US insurrection. The best you can hope for is like 25% sympathy. But that's all you really need if it's the right people.
I'm not like, excited, or even optimistic, that violence will accomplish anything.
But there is no other way out now. No one is going to turn this shit around, and it's going to get worse no matter how nice people are.
Be realistic about this trajectory, and you realize that really the only possibility is that untraceable, unpreventable violence against the state makes their enforcers too sheepish to do anything meaningful, and then hopefully some real praxis grows in that unenforceable space.
But like, the idea that if we just keep letting people get shot, cops are gonna feel bad, or politicians are gonna start cracking down on them? That's just a fantasy at this point. It is downhill from here.
Like I said before, this is the imperial core. Any real or organized attempts to self-police communities or protect citizens will get torn apart--either externally or by saboteurs. The moment a vacuum shows up the wreckers and opportunists will get sent in.
The point isn't that cops will feel bad or politicians will feel bad. The point is to make cops feel unwelcome and unwanted, to lower morale and make being a cop no longer prestigious. That every action they take will lead to funding cuts, to fingers being pointed around the station to find a fall guy, for politicians to start running on reining in the police, for kids to stop saying they want to be a cop when they grow up, for cops to be removed from school campuses, for ACAB and 1312 to show up in mainstream culture, for people to stop calling the police unless they absolutely have to.
If they have a concrete enemy, they will destroy it, and they will have their sycophants ready to justify every last killing. The cops will never be 'sheepish' if the attack is directly against them.
Be prepared to defend yourself, obviously. But this isn't about revolution or insurrection, this is about something much less complex that crosses ideological boundaries (albeit inconsistently).
Reminder that MLK had 63% disapproval rating before his death. It's always been known that propaganda machines would be used against leftist movements, hence "the revolution will not be televised".
By the way, "you should die to prove that there's corruption" is such a lib take. If every cop today became leftists there would still be 200 years of American history to support disbanding the organization.
Let's at least argue amongst ourselves in good faith