Should the Left start buying guns?

A reader commented on my earlier post today about a new cold civil war by saying “I now believe that the left must start to buy as many guns as they can and learn how to use them effectively.” Given the state of things in this country, I can certainly understand this idea.

This is my response to the commenter:

The problem with this is the training that's necessary. In the army you have to requalify on your weapon at least every six months, which essentially means re-learning how to shoot it well. Go back and have a look at the surveillance tape of the Uvalde massacre. It shows more than 200 cops with little or no training, and no retraining. They're outfitted like stormtroopers, but as we saw, they couldn't storm one 18 year old with an AR-15. The other problem is overcoming fear. That's the big one. Your instinct when you go into a situation where your life is in danger is to flee. Or to hide and protect yourself, and if you have them, your loved ones. Learning to move toward the shooting and not away from it is very, very VERY difficult, and in many cases, impossible -- see Uvalde. So arming the Left isn't enough. Not even the Right, with their militias, really means anything. They don't train. They know anything about moving towards the shooting, not away from it. If those right-wing loons really want to take over the country, they would join the army and marines in truly massive numbers and learn how. They don't. Plus the army and marines are full of Black and Brown people and women who don't want to use their skills to make a fascist state. So there's hope for this country yet, even without arming ourselves like we're going to war.

Just as more guns is not the answer to mass shootings, formulating some sort of Left militia isn’t the answer to the Right’s militias. We have the military to defend us from foreign enemies, and they are there in the form of the National Guard to defend against domestic insurrection, armed or not. We don’t need guns to defend ourselves. We need democracy, and more of it, and we learned to practice democracy better. That means arming ourselves with our votes and organizing our democratic movement.