The US Second Amendment and Protesting

[Ninurta]

Sad to read views on this topic .  There was absolutely nothing to justify the killing on Good & Pretti .


Common sense eh ?  seems like you lack it .


Breaking  ICE  car rear tail light days earlyer is not in anyway a reason to execute someone , with multible gun shots .

Neither Good or pretti did anything that justify killing them .

I feel like it's possible that you may never have carried a gun for a living. As someone who has, I can tell you that without a doubt I would have shot Good, and, under the circumstances, I might have shot  Pretti, too.

Anyone who has the gumption to try running me over with a 2 ton weapon is fair game as far as I'm concerned.

In the Pretti case, tensions were high, adrenaline was high, and it had already been announced that he "had a gun" while in conflict with law enforcement. That was why the officer had him covered with a gun to begin with. Add a random shot ringing out, and that pushed the tension right off the cliff. Whatever or whomever you have covered with your gun in that instant is likely to catch a hole from it. It may be right, or it may not be right, but that's irrelevant because it is REALITY. reality doesn't care about "right" or "wrong", it only concerns itself with potentialities.

And, as I said before, when you go armed to confront other armed men, you are taking responsibility for whatever happens to you during that confrontation. Right or wrong, that too is reality. Every single time I've ever confronted armed men, I have known at a gut level that there was a pretty high probability that one or the other of us was going to catch some lead. My job was to make sure it was them rather than me. It's not something to go into lightly or flippantly or "just because you can".

That's why if I have to go past or through a protest area to get to somewhere else, I'm going to be armed. You never know what is going to happen on the spur of the moment in those situations, so it's best to be prepared. You might need a few rounds to extract yourself from the situation to get elsewhere, in a hurry.

It's also why, if I go to PARTICIPATE in a protest, I'm likely NOT going to be armed. If there is a confrontation with the police, I want all of us to go home happy and healthy. The reality on the ground is that I'm not going to participate in any protests. That decision is already made and has been for a very long time, so it's second nature now. I don't participate in useless protests. That's just a ticket to disaster for no good reason. Protests - as engaged in today - don't usually help or hinder anything at all. Never have, never will. In America, if you want to make change, you appeal to your politicians and threaten their power in the next elections. That gets their attention. Just hitting the street and yelling angrily at strangers accomplishes nothing here.

Before you tell me that I've no idea what I'm talking about since I've never confronted armed cops, I have. In October of 2014, my house was surrounded by not one, but two SWAT teams - one local, the other State Police. I went out to meet them, armed, because I had no idea who these men with guns surrounding my house were, but inside were my wife, my sister, my niece, and my mother. I wasn't about to let whomever was out there  get themselves collected for an assault. All I knew was that there were strangers with guns hiding in the shadows around my house, and had no notion of who they were.

As soon as I got out on the balcony overhead with my rile to handle it, I heard two or three shouts of "GUN! GUN!" and that was when I knew they were cops. Bad guys don't generally train to do that. So I shouted "hold yer damned horses!" and ducked back into the house, laying the rifle on the sofa, and went back out with my hands up where they could see I was no longer armed.

Of course every man on the ground had his rifle pointed up at me then, just in case. I can tell you that is a pretty sinking feeling. Unarmed, you feel a little naked under those circumstances, but it's the only way to get out alive. I had expected 3 or 4 men I could get the drop on from above, but I had NOT expected about an acre of SWAT guys in my yard.

Anyhow, we got it sorted, and it was a case of bad directions from a caller leading to the wrong house. I pointed them to the right house once I knew who they were after, an arrest was effected, and everybody went home happy.

The sheriff came by and apologized for the misunderstanding, even though it wasn't his fault, but most likely the fault of the caller giving bad directions.

THAT is how you survive an overwhelming force of police. You don't try to face them down with a gun, you comply and try to keep them as calm as possible. It's better to be heard in court, later, than it is to get planted in the ground, also later. An even better strategy is not to confront the police at all, if you can avoid it.

Pretti made bad decisions all the way around, and he paid the price for those decisions. Anyone with any training at arms at all should know the potential consequences of bad decisions, and if they aren't trained, then they probably shouldn't be carrying, but that is their mistake to make if they so choose.

The best decision is avoiding confrontations if you can, and if you can't, then the next best thing is de-escalating and getting the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible. Your chances of surviving get a lot slimmer as you go down the list of possible decisions from there.

Violent people gonna do violent things, and that is why we even have armed cops to begin with. It's what they're for, and what they are trained for. They're not Social Workers, they are armed men prepared for violence, and usually expecting violence from violent people. They are trained and prepared to act accordingly. Don't be a violent person, or give the impression of being a violent person, and you will most likely be fine and survive the police.

Alex Pretti ignored all of those sounder decisions and went straight to confrontation with armed men while armed himself. We saw what could possibly go wrong. He should have known what can happen when you bring a gun to a gunfight, just as Renee Good should have known what's likely to happen when you try to run down an armed man with a 2 ton weapon.

Neither one should have been involving themselves in violent situations that were none of their damned business to begin with.


.