Well you know me best…

‘Hiring’ in what sense? You can ‘hire’ yourself and start if you’re sympathetic and not already engaged. You don’t even have to like or agree with the ‘gun part’ if you don’t find yourself so inclined.

Knowing your neighbors and disaster prep is a good square one.

If you’d like to get involved in in your area, I’d suggest mutual aid networks, rapid response, and harm reduction groups. If you’re looking for relevant skill building SRA, Stop the Bleed/First Aid trainings, and Meshtastic communities are also useful.

You’ll find many of the same people are engaged in political actions, counter-protests, ICE watch, and labor organization. Helping organize responses, protests, and labor activity is a natural extension of building a broader community structure and helps connect the dots. When something like the Minnesota resistance to Metro Surge flares up, these sorts of networks are there to funnel the people’s energies into productive activity.

Well friend, in the case of civil rights it depends on which layer of government you’re talking about. In the case of Southern states the state governments were absolutely involved in violent action against black people through discrimination, incarceration, police abuses, and turning a blind eye to groups like the KKK or those committing violence against black communities. At the federal level, the security apparatus was definitely working in direct antagonism against Black liberation.

Please see this first hand account of why that sort of organization was needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HnDONDvJVE

You and the other responder talking about civil war are fixating on a different question than self defense and community defense. Something like that is unfortunately entirely conceivable, but were not there. I’d look at Minnesota as a great example of the current level of conflict and how to push back on violent targeted state violence. Community organization and building connections with labor to stop the economic engine forced the government to retract the enforcement efforts of Operation Metro Surge. The people won that battle.

What you can see of what I do is on a Lemmy forum, so I would not be so quick to judge. As others have encouraged in this thread, I’m pursuing the tactics of organizing community resistance, organizing labor, and political education.

Actually, I am like you in that I don’t want violence. We should use nonviolent methods of political change to their fullest extent until those avenues become fully blocked. Of course, we live in violence perpetrated by the state every day, it is just legalized.

Studying the history of Leftist movements internationally, there is a repeated pattern of persecution though violence as well as outright purges. Those that were not prepared to defend themselves and their community were killed. Even those that were, were unfortunately often killed.

Lots of people talking about revolution and fighting the government, but this is largely irrelevant at this moment.

What is a source of oppression to which this is immediately relevant? Personal defense from white supremacist stochastic terrorists and individuals wanting to commit violent hate crimes. In the near term flare ups of right-wing paramilitary and lynch mobs are possible as well, location and circumstances dependent.

If you live in America, I would wager that you’re aware of armed would-be fascists in your neighborhood. I would wager you can check social media for your local area and find a presence of right-wing paramilitary. I would wager that depending on the color of your skin or gender presentation, a call to the police could mean a roll of the dice on becoming a statistic of state violence.

Yes, it would be preferable if all of those groups did not have weapons, however this is America. Until disarmament is universal, unilateral imposition of gun access limitations means access will be affordable only to those with wealth.

Others cryptically calling for Luigi: First, I would also ask you what changed about the behavior of United Healthcare and the US for-profit health abuses as a result of his actions? If you are going to encourage others to throw away their life in the same way, what are you doing behind the keyboard? With these critiques that others don’t have any guts, aren’t you just externalizing your hypocrisy?

Second, I would ask you to look at the many decades history of assassinations in Russia in the pre-revolutionary period in which this became a very common and very ineffective tool. In fact it was so ineffective, it resulted in the Tsarists infiltrating Left groups and encouraging assassinations due to the public alienation and sense of helplessness it fostered.

Compare these failed actions to the successes of the Russian Revolution.

As Trotsky wrote in 1911:

If we oppose terrorist acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account we have to settle with the capitalist system is too great to be presented to some functionary called a minister. To learn to see all the crimes against humanity, all the indignities to which the human body and spirit are subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions of the existing social system, in order to direct all our energies into a collective struggle against this system—that is the direction in which the burning desire for revenge can find its highest moral satisfaction.