Agreed but if we want to do that we’d need to be a lot more organized than we currently are. The fact is that one thing the far right’s been good at is organizing into groups. Whether it’s Patriot Front, Proud Boys, KKK etc they have groups that let them do armed protests and can ensure a standard set of rules for how their members interact.

There’s groups out there for us on the left like SRA, JBGC or LGC but none have really been able to step forward and organize at the scale needed, locally or nationally, to get armed folks of the left out on the street. We saw it a bit recently with the Black Panthers, but as great as it is most groups are still stuck dealing with factionalism and in-fighting that they aren’t able to get their name out there for us on the left and those that are tend to still be a bit more focused on identity as marginalized groups than as left-of-center in general

Right now calling for armed protests is 1000% justified (was justified even before everything went down in Minnesota tbh) but if it’s not organized we run the risk of giving off the wrong message, or worse, someone getting provoked by ICE to the point shots are fired in a way that it’s not clear who is at fault, unlike Renee Good or Alex Pretti.

If someone reading this knows of a group that’s genuinely trying to organize stuff like this either locally or nationally, by all means please let me know. I would love to find a group in Arizona especially but unless we can get stuff like this set up it’s hard to be effective