Opinion
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- After the unconscionable treatment of George Floyd in police custody, righteous outrage led to angry protests, which too often became violent riots. As the MSM told us they were all peaceful protests in many cases putative “protests” were simply cover for rampaging looting, arson, and vandalism.
Meanwhile, Democrat mayors and governors ordered police in many jurisdictions to take a “hands-off” approach, supposedly to allow the protesters to “burn off” their anger and frustration on innocent citizens’ private property, without police intervention escalating the situation. Time and again television and social media showed police standing by as violent “protesters” (often led by white, middle-class Antifa punks) broke windows, torched buildings, and ransacked stores. In one videoed incident, a large contingent of heavily armed police showed up at a store being looted, and viewers watched as the looters, with their arms full of other people’s stuff, poured out of the store, running directly through the ranks of police, who made no effort to even slow them down, much less take them into custody.
It has become clear that in places where police have taken a “hands-off” position, the violence and criminal behavior escalated, while jurisdictions that met force with force and attempted to at least contain violent protesters, vandals, and looters, there was less violence and less destruction of residents property. Those locales returned to something closer to business-as-usual fairly quickly, while the “hands-off” jurisdictions were still putting-out burned city-long block-fires and experiencing eruptions of violence and criminality two weeks later.
As the protests sputtered out in some places and dug in elsewhere, organizers and activists were faced with a serious question for which they originally had no answer: “What do you want?”
In the case of George Floyd, the officers involved in his detention and death had been fired from the Minneapolis Police Department within days of the tragedy, and the officer who had spent some 9 minutes taking a knee on the back of Floyd’s neck, was arrested on a murder charge. And this all happened before the first large gathering of protesters. Soon the charge against the former policeman was elevated from 3rd-degree murder to 2nd-degree murder, and the other 3 officers present during the incident were also arrested and charged with aiding and abetting murder.
The wisdom of those charges being escalated will almost certainly be a point of argument for legal scholars for decades to come, since “over-charging” those involved could ultimately lead to an acquittal, but the point is, the only real demands from protesters were “Justice for George Floyd” and “Stop police violence against African Americans.” With the officers involved losing their jobs and being arrested for murder and accessories to murder, the wheels of justice for Mr. Floyd seemed to be rolling in the right direction. As to stopping police violence against African Americans, that’s a pretty broad demand, that, unfortunately, overshadows a related and much larger issue: African American violence against African Americans.
Even so, the overwhelming disgust of virtually everyone, over the treatment of George Floyd, was already generating a broad public outcry, leading to reviews of police “use of force” policies and plans for additional training in departments around the country.
Americans and our elected servants were taking the deaths of George Floyd and other Americans, such as Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, seriously even before the protests started. So after more than a week of marching and sporadic rioting, the protesters seemed to be running short of objectives. Then a new chant started making the rounds: “Defund the police!”
Defund the Police!
Soon the chant morphed into signs and in Minneapolis, where this all started, blackface masks with “DEFUND POLICE” emblazoned across them in bright yellow, appeared on the scene. The Democratic mayor of Minneapolis went to one of the protests to grovel and apologize for being white and having privilege, but when he wouldn’t go so far as to support the total abolition of the Minneapolis Police Department, he was booed and shamed from the area.
Now various politicians and media elites are making excuses or expressing support for some version of defunding the police. Most are qualifying the idea as more a shift of some resources from the police to social services, but that doesn’t seem to be jibing with the demands of the protesters.
Meanwhile, several other dynamics are playing out. The same Democratic politicians who are expressing the strongest support for the idea of defunding the police, are also among the strongest supporters of draconian gun control proposals. And, of course, the case of Ahmad Aubrey, who was shot and killed by a group of white men who suspected him of criminal activity, has also brought renewed attention to “vigilante” activity, so opposition to vigilantism was added to the protesters’ demands.
At the same time, Antifa backed protesters in Seattle have “occupied” several blocks of the city and declared it the CHAZ, for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (now renamed CHOP – the Capitol Hill Organized (or Occupied) Protest). They’ve put up walls and posted armed guards to control their borders, and have bands of armed people policing -uhm- patrolling the streets to maintain order and make sure that no one is violating any of their new laws. There isn’t any official “government,” per se, but a rapper called Raz seems to have declared himself to be an authority figure reinventing Government services including fire protections within the CHAZ or CHOP. Then having his followers protect the property of people supportive of the cause, and threatening violence if people don’t obey.
Agents of destruction start a fire. @RazSimone and others rush to extinguish the fire. #TheCHAZ
(You won’t see this on your right wing media outlets and blue check accounts) pic.twitter.com/XhZi43Uk50
— Hotep Jesus (@HotepJesus) June 14, 2020
Behind the scenes, a Seattle City Councilwoman appears to have been one of the primary instigators of the creation of the CHAZ, and she seems to still be pulling a lot of the strings within the Zone. Other protesters in other cities have been attempting to create their own “autonomous zones,” but as of this writing, only the CHAZ has been “successful.”
All of this boils down to the question of how to move forward from here?
Virtually everyone in the country agreed that what happened to George Floyd was barbaric and inexcusable, but a politically motivated prosecutor upgrading the charges to a level that will be harder to gain convictions, could result in acquittals, and a new round of rioting. Protesters are making demands that can’t possibly be met, so they can never be satisfied. The core protest leaders are avowed Marxist Communists who openly call for the abolition of the United States and private property. The Democratic Party and its leaders are pandering to these Communists in the most embarrassing ways, while simultaneously calling for bans on “assault weapons,” “high-capacity” magazines, private transfers, and all sorts of other restrictions on the private possession of firearms, all while expressing support for defunding the police, and calling for open borders…
So who’s going to go collect the “assault weapons” from the deplorables in the heartland when the police are defunded?
It’s starting to seem like maybe these folks – from the protesters in the streets to the politicians in their gated communities – haven’t really thought all of this through.
About Jeff Knox:
Jeff Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The Firearms Coalition. His father Neal Knox led many of the early gun rights battles for your right to keep and bear arms. Read Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition has offices in Buckeye, Arizona and Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.