Gather peacefully, with weapons

Meanwhile, an interesting rally recently took place in Richmond, Virginia - thousands of armed people gathered in the square, defending the right to own weapons. The short story is this: Virginia's gun laws are among the most liberal in the States. However, Virginia itself is divided into a village and a city: in the countryside, as you might guess, conservative lovers of guns live, and in the cities - liberal (in the American sense) hipsters who see a white nationalist, Russian spy and mass shooter around every corner. For the sake of this audience, the Democratic governor began to tighten the screws on gun laws. You can’t completely ban weapons in the USA - because the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights - but it’s quite possible to significantly ruin the life of the owners. The owners of the weapons, of course, rebelled. Then there is a rather intricate history of confrontation, implicated in the nuances of American common law - you can read it in detail in the review from the @DTOMvpa channel.

What is more interesting is the assembly. The local Civil Defense League has an annual tradition of gathering at the Capitol and shaking guns. But this time the administration of the Democrats decided to ban it - they say, there is information that there will be neo-Nazis, extremists and other bad people. And without thinking twice, they declared a state of emergency. But the result, as one might expect, turned out to be the opposite: a lot of armed people simply came to the rally out of principle. Particularly repulsed media, of course, wrote about the "gathering of neo-Nazis", but in reality the audience is motley - includes antifa, blacks, LGBT, feminists and others who are convinced that defending their rights with a rifle is still a little better than without.

So, thousands of people with semi-automatic rifles gathered. And what? Yeah, nothing. They stood and parted. I don't like the traditional pro-gun arguments about gunmen creating civil society, defeating crime, and taking kittens out of trees. However, this gathering is the best illustration of the fact that the struggle for the prohibition of weapons is a kind of animism, when evil intent is prescribed to inanimate objects ("weapons are a source of violence"). Often there are cases when gatherings of people without weapons end in pogroms (France, Britain), and it happens that armed gatherings pass quietly and peacefully. But at the same time, one can guess that the armed rally in Somalia would most likely have ended differently. So what's the deal? Perhaps not in weapons, but in the culture of behavior? Public institutes? Social connections? And other purely non-material things? It is obvious that it is.

And finally. The American First Amendment prohibits Congress from restricting "the right of the people to assemble peacefully." But nowhere is it written "without weapons." And, as we see, it is possible to gather peacefully and with weapons. Let's take the long-suffering Russian Constitution, which they have now decided to torture once again. Article 31: "Citizens of the Russian Federation have the right to assemble peacefully, without weapons." And after all, it was precisely this clarification about "without weapons" that made it possible to enclose rallies with frames and fences, turning any agreed meeting in Russia into a kind of cattle pen.

Mihail Pojarsky 2020-01-22