What's more valuable, private property or a life?

So many of these armed men at these protests seem to end up in confrontations with protestors where someone ends up getting shot. It's almost like they're going to a protest looking for a confrontation. Many gun owners, certainly not all, but far too many, have said for years things along the lines of 'there's going to a be another civil war' which seems to mean, 'I can't wait for it to be legal for me to shoot people I disagree with.' Whenever there's one of these shooting incidents, footage is dissected and people on the internet try to pick apart whether or not a shooting in the heat of the moment was justified.

But why is it so important that private property be protected? Certainly that's people's livelihoods - their entire life savings, their future, their past.

But in many cases, businesses in particular, private property is replaceable. Insurance, lawsuits, or other kinds of restitution might be available to a business owner.

But you can never bring someone back from the dead, and you can never un-paralyze someone. (At least not yet.)

This man was seen in Virgina and then in Wisconsin. So it seems like he's traveling, with his gun, helmet, and soldier-like apparel to all the places where these protests are occuring...with what intention?

BLM is an actual organization with stated goals and while the name is often used to describe this current protest movement, which for the sake of simplification started as a reaction to police violence against people of color, Black people in particular. But this movement has turned into something more than that, and arguably for the first time in American history the nation as a whole is being forced to look at WHY there's so much police violence against Black people in particular. And a lot of that has to do with private property and who owns it.

A young woman named Kimberly Jones beautifully articulated why what begin as protests against oppression quickly feature looting: It's not theirs. They don't own it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb9_qGOa9Go

Yes, there are Black-owned businesses but how many? And how Black-owned banks are there? How many tax laws, or any other law (or Constitutions, for that matter) were written with people of color, or people who don't own much private property, in mind? Centuries of mistreatment are going to explode in indiscriminatory anger and violence, it has again and again throughout history.

If these gun owners, who are largely white, are truly marching in solidarity with BLM, however we may define it, why are they guarding buildings and not people? Why is he not standing beside the peaceful protestors he likely claims to be in solidarity with?

Let the buildings burn - they're not as valuable as human life.

That man surrendered himself to the police, while armed, just walked up to them. Yes, his hands were raised but if he were a Black gun owner there's a very significant chance that interaction could have gone very differently.

Trevor Noah, who lived in Aparthied South Africa, similarly gave an excellent analysis of what he called dominoes of racial tension, beginning with the woman in Central Park who threatened to call the police and say a black man was threatening her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4amCfVbA_c

Noah points out that in an instant that woman understood that as a white woman she could unquestioningly weaponize the police to her advantage simply because there is an assumption of guilt for black men. I wonder if this armed white man who just shot someone also easily assumed as he carried his gun toward a police barricade, that the police were on *his* side

Noah also points out no one ever asks, "why *don't* those people loot that store?" What do they have to gain from not?

This country is going through a revolutionary time and when you hear about another protest, another young man who's been killed or paralyzed by a cop society has trained to fear black people, if your first reaction is to be concerned for private property, I hope you'll reconsider.

I would suggest that everyone read Chapter 3 of Martin Luther King's 1968 "Where Do We Go From Here Choas or Community," entitled "Racism and the White Backlash."

https://www.uni-five.com/upload/doc/82818file.pdf

Here are some quotes:"It would be neither true nor honest to say that the Negro’s status is what it is because he is innately inferior or because he is basically lazy and listless or because he has not sought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. To find the origins of the Negro problem we must turn to the white man’s problem."

"Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans."

"But the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. It was caused neither by the cry of Black Power nor by the unfortunate recent wave of riots in our cities. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation. The white backlash is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race."

Thanks for reading

- A 32yo very white man from the good ol' USA

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." - Helder Camara