[These are excerpts from:
Newsweek January 07 - 14, 2022It makes a case for how American politics have become so fractured and the schism between Republicans and Democrats is widening into an unbridgeable chasm. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) have struck down a New York law that requires applicants for concealed carry permits to show that they have an actual need for a concealed weapon. This means anyone in New York can carry a concealed firearm. And that means that the next Storming of the Capital could be by armed protestors. The suggestion is that this schism might well lead to the Second American Civil War.]
An October study from Everytown for Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) looked at 560 protests involving armed participants over an 18-month period through mid-2021, and found that a sixth of them turned violent, and some involved fatalities...
... Republicans by and large see no problem with a mob of hundreds swarming and forcing their way into the seat of American government. Half of Republicans said that the mob was "defending freedom," according to a CBS/YouGov poll taken just after the insurrection. Today two-thirds of Republicans have come to deny that it was an attack at all, according to an October survey by Quinnipiac University...
... Marjorie Taylor Greene, another prominent Republican popular with the rank and file, opined that the January 6 insurrectionists were simply doing what the Declaration of Independence tells true patriots to do, in that they were trying to "overthrow tyrants."... Greene and Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, have referred to some of the insurrectionists as "political prisoners."...
...Today Trump openly declares the January 6 rioters to be "great people." In October, he suggested that Republicans might not want to bother to vote in the 2022 or 2024 elections because of their concerns over fraud in the 2020 election. At the same time, he declared that he would achieve an "even more glorious victory in November of 2024." The notion that Republicans could turn their backs on voting booths while sweeping Trump to glory only makes sense if Trump envisions a path to taking power that doesn't require votes...
...author Rick Atkinson explains one major reason why America became the first British colony to succeed in winning freedom, where others had failed. "Unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples," he writes, "the Americans were heavily armed."...
...Today the many Republicans who have convinced themselves that they, too, must cast off a tyrannical government have plenty of guns. Americans own about 400 million guns... The vast majority of those guns belong to Republicans. Gallup found that half of all Republicans own guns, nearly three times the rate of gun ownership as among Democrats...
... Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were more than twice as likely to own a gun as their Democratic counterparts...
...In 2000, 60 percent of gun owners cited hunting as the reason they bought guns, according to a Gallup poll... But by 2016, 63 percent were saying they bought guns for self-defense. That shift was brought on by growing paranoia about street crime and mob violence, a fear constantly pumped up on Fox and other right-wing media...
... Over the past four years those fears have been blurring into anti-government, pro-Trump, and in some cases white-supremacist movements. "We've seen the flourishing of a different view of gun rights, one that focuses on the necessity of owning guns in order to fight a tyrannical government,"...
...The gun industry didn't create that conflation of gun ownership and an imminent patriotic armed uprising, but it has amplified it...
...Palmetto State Armory,... puts it this way on their website: "Our mission is to maximize freedom, not our profits. We want to sell as many AR-15 and AK-47 rifles as we can and put them into common use in America today," adding that doing so "safeguards the rights of the people against tyranny."...
...The National Rifle Association played a big role in pumping up the "own guns to protect America from leftist tyranny" theme. "If the violent left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods, or into our homes, they will be met with the resolve and the strength and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people," said NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in 2017. That same year, an NRA spokesperson railed against Trump's opponents, adding: "The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth." There wasn't much question about what that fist would be clenching...
...Trump himself hinted at the darkest of connections between gun ownership and taking down a Democrat-led government, proposing during his first presidential campaign that the "Second Amendment people" might be able to stop Hillary Clinton if she won...
23 JUN 2022
WASHINGTON (AFP, BLOOMBERG, REUTERS) - The US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday (June 23) that Americans have a fundamental right to carry firearms in public in a landmark decision that will prevent states from restricting people carrying guns.
The 6-3 ruling, with the court’s conservative justices in the majority and liberal justices in dissent and which comes as the country grapples with a shocking surge in gun crime, strikes down a New York law that required a person to prove they had legitimate self-defence needs to receive a gun permit.
“The Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defence outside the home,” said Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion.
“New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defence needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defence.”
Under the New York law’s “proper cause” requirement, applicants seeking an unrestricted concealed carry permits must convince a state firearms licensing officer of an actual, rather than speculative, need for self-defence.
Officials could also grant licenses restricted to certain activities, such as hunting or target practice.
New York’s governor Kathy Hochul said the ruling was “frightening” and strips away the state’s right to protect its citizens.
“This decision isn’t just reckless, it’s reprehensible,” she said. “This could place millions of New Yorkers in harm’s way.”
“We can have restrictions on speech – you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre but somehow there’s no restrictions allowed on the Second Amendment,” she said. “I’m sorry this dark day has come,” she added...
Nirmal Ghosh
US Bureau Chief
6 JUN 2022
WASHINGTON - On good days, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua, 59, feels hopeful.
But on most days, she is a little worried about the future of the United States amid its hardening divisions.
"Everybody wants to be completely segregated now. So there are ethnic and racial divisions that are hardening," said Prof Chua...
... One huge factor, new in its intensity, is "the division between cosmopolitan elites... on the one hand (and) on the other hand, America's rural, working class, southern population, many of them white working class, but not entirely".
"The difference between these two groups now is so intense, that there is almost no intermarriage between them," she said...
... "And... if you're in a situation where the cosmopolitan coastal urban elites are not interacting or intermarrying with any of the rural, southern, working class whites, you start to get into a situation that (is) more like an ethnic divide."...
Internally, "it used to just be the minorities who felt threatened", Prof Chua added.
But "now you have whites feeling threatened".
"It used to be a just hugely majority white country that dominated everything politically, culturally, socially, economically," she said.
But "today… we are on the verge of an unprecedented situation, in which whites are about to lose their majority status at the national level for the first time in US history".
"There's a lot of debate about when that will happen… (and) if you look at our major cities, whites - non-Hispanic whites - are no longer a majority in many, many major cities.
"And… you could think that's something to be celebrated. But one result of that is that every group in the United States now feels threatened."
A growing number of RADICALIZED REPUBLICANS are willing to grab their guns if the next presidential election doesn't go their way
DAVID H. FREEDMAN
MIKE “WOMPUS” NIEZNANY is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane from the combat wounds he received during his service...
...Nieznany is no loner. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down—by force, if necessary—a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom...
MIKE “WOMPUS” NIEZNANY is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane from the combat wounds he received during his service...
...Nieznany is no loner. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down—by force, if necessary—a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom...
... What Nieznany represents is something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of more or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by social media and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.
America’s massive and mostly Republican gunrights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. “The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for,” says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law.
Both Democrats and Republicans are rapidly losing faith in the integrity of U.S. elections. Democrats worry that voter suppression and election interference from Republican state officials will deny millions of Americans their say at the polling booths. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll in early November reported that 55 percent of Democrats saw voter suppression as the biggest threat to U.S. elections. Republicans claim, contrary to the evidence, that Democrats have already manipulated vote counts through fraud to steal a presidential election. An October CNN poll found that more than three-quarters of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was fraudulent...
...Such a decision would more likely bring tens of millions of protesters and counterprotesters into the streets, especially around the U.S. Capitol and possibly many state capitols, plunging the country into chaos. Although many Democrats might be inclined to demonstrate, a larger percentage of Republican protesters would almost certainly be carrying guns. If the Supreme Court ruling, expected in mid-2022, on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen establishes an unrestricted right to carry a gun anywhere in the country, bringing firearms to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., could be perfectly legal. Says Winkler: “The Supreme Court may be close to issuing the ruling that leads to the overthrow of the U.S. government.”
America’s massive and mostly Republican gunrights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. “The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for,” says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law.
Both Democrats and Republicans are rapidly losing faith in the integrity of U.S. elections. Democrats worry that voter suppression and election interference from Republican state officials will deny millions of Americans their say at the polling booths. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll in early November reported that 55 percent of Democrats saw voter suppression as the biggest threat to U.S. elections. Republicans claim, contrary to the evidence, that Democrats have already manipulated vote counts through fraud to steal a presidential election. An October CNN poll found that more than three-quarters of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was fraudulent...
...Such a decision would more likely bring tens of millions of protesters and counterprotesters into the streets, especially around the U.S. Capitol and possibly many state capitols, plunging the country into chaos. Although many Democrats might be inclined to demonstrate, a larger percentage of Republican protesters would almost certainly be carrying guns. If the Supreme Court ruling, expected in mid-2022, on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen establishes an unrestricted right to carry a gun anywhere in the country, bringing firearms to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., could be perfectly legal. Says Winkler: “The Supreme Court may be close to issuing the ruling that leads to the overthrow of the U.S. government.”
[Already did. See news article below on right to carry arms in public.]
If armed violence erupts the 2024 elections, quelling it could fall to the U.S. military, which may be reluctant to take arms against U.S. citizens. In that case, the fate of the nation might well be decided by a simple fact: a big subset of one of the two parties has for years been systemically arming itself for this very reason...
... MANY REPUBLICANS ARE INCREASINGLY COMING TO see themselves less as citizens represented by the federal government, and more as tyrannized victims of that government. More than three-quarters of Republicans reported “low trust” in the federal government in a Grinnell College national poll in October; only a minority of Democrats agreed. From this point of view, peaceful elections will not save the day...
... Guns are becoming an essential part of the equation. “Americans are increasingly wielding guns in public spaces, roused by persons they politically oppose or public decisions with which they disagree,” concludes an August article in the Northwestern University Law Review. Guns were plentiful when hundreds of anti-COVID-precaution protesters gathered at the Michigan State Capitol in May 2020. Some of the armed protesters tried to enter the Capitol chamber.
If armed violence erupts the 2024 elections, quelling it could fall to the U.S. military, which may be reluctant to take arms against U.S. citizens. In that case, the fate of the nation might well be decided by a simple fact: a big subset of one of the two parties has for years been systemically arming itself for this very reason...
... MANY REPUBLICANS ARE INCREASINGLY COMING TO see themselves less as citizens represented by the federal government, and more as tyrannized victims of that government. More than three-quarters of Republicans reported “low trust” in the federal government in a Grinnell College national poll in October; only a minority of Democrats agreed. From this point of view, peaceful elections will not save the day...
... Guns are becoming an essential part of the equation. “Americans are increasingly wielding guns in public spaces, roused by persons they politically oppose or public decisions with which they disagree,” concludes an August article in the Northwestern University Law Review. Guns were plentiful when hundreds of anti-COVID-precaution protesters gathered at the Michigan State Capitol in May 2020. Some of the armed protesters tried to enter the Capitol chamber.
An October study from Everytown for Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) looked at 560 protests involving armed participants over an 18-month period through mid-2021, and found that a sixth of them turned violent, and some involved fatalities...
... Marjorie Taylor Greene, another prominent Republican popular with the rank and file, opined that the January 6 insurrectionists were simply doing what the Declaration of Independence tells true patriots to do, in that they were trying to "overthrow tyrants."... Greene and Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, have referred to some of the insurrectionists as "political prisoners."...
...Today Trump openly declares the January 6 rioters to be "great people." In October, he suggested that Republicans might not want to bother to vote in the 2022 or 2024 elections because of their concerns over fraud in the 2020 election. At the same time, he declared that he would achieve an "even more glorious victory in November of 2024." The notion that Republicans could turn their backs on voting booths while sweeping Trump to glory only makes sense if Trump envisions a path to taking power that doesn't require votes...
...author Rick Atkinson explains one major reason why America became the first British colony to succeed in winning freedom, where others had failed. "Unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples," he writes, "the Americans were heavily armed."...
...Today the many Republicans who have convinced themselves that they, too, must cast off a tyrannical government have plenty of guns. Americans own about 400 million guns... The vast majority of those guns belong to Republicans. Gallup found that half of all Republicans own guns, nearly three times the rate of gun ownership as among Democrats...
... Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were more than twice as likely to own a gun as their Democratic counterparts...
...In 2000, 60 percent of gun owners cited hunting as the reason they bought guns, according to a Gallup poll... But by 2016, 63 percent were saying they bought guns for self-defense. That shift was brought on by growing paranoia about street crime and mob violence, a fear constantly pumped up on Fox and other right-wing media...
... Over the past four years those fears have been blurring into anti-government, pro-Trump, and in some cases white-supremacist movements. "We've seen the flourishing of a different view of gun rights, one that focuses on the necessity of owning guns in order to fight a tyrannical government,"...
...The gun industry didn't create that conflation of gun ownership and an imminent patriotic armed uprising, but it has amplified it...
...Palmetto State Armory,... puts it this way on their website: "Our mission is to maximize freedom, not our profits. We want to sell as many AR-15 and AK-47 rifles as we can and put them into common use in America today," adding that doing so "safeguards the rights of the people against tyranny."...
...The National Rifle Association played a big role in pumping up the "own guns to protect America from leftist tyranny" theme. "If the violent left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods, or into our homes, they will be met with the resolve and the strength and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people," said NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in 2017. That same year, an NRA spokesperson railed against Trump's opponents, adding: "The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth." There wasn't much question about what that fist would be clenching...
...Trump himself hinted at the darkest of connections between gun ownership and taking down a Democrat-led government, proposing during his first presidential campaign that the "Second Amendment people" might be able to stop Hillary Clinton if she won...
How it might go down
[The article suggests several scenarios.A) Trump wins comfortably and resoundingly, by an overwhelming margin. In this outcome, Democrats might despair over their loss, but they are unlikely to protest an legitimate electoral win. This is the only scenario where violence is avoided.
B) Trump loses by any margin, and Republicans will declare the election fraudulent, and there will be a reprise of the Jan 6 2021 riot at the capital, but this time WITH GUNS (see article below).
C) If Trump wins but only by a small margin, Democrats can attribute the win to Republican laws and tactics to suppress Democratic votes, and massive protests will result.
D) If Trump loses, but on appeal, his loss is overturned by partisan (Republican/MAGA) state election officials, legislatures or governors, and protected by a Republican majority Congress or the Supreme Court, there will be protests again.
And if there are widespread protests from Democrats, their presence on the streets will bring out the Republican counterprotestors intent on protecting a Trump victory, or defend democracy against left wing socialist mobs. This happened with the counterprotest against the Black Lives Matters.
And if the police respond to the protest, they can be expected to respond strongly... against the Democrats. It was found that the police used force in Black Lives Matter protest more than half the time, but only a third of the time against right wing demonstrations. (Of course one confounding factor is that Black Lives Matter protests are implicitly or even explicitly a criticism against police practices. So...)
If things further escalates, then the National Guard and Military will be deployed, and only the President can deploy the military... by invoking the Insurrection Act.
The scenarios envisioned has both sides - Republican and Democrats - convinced of the illegitimacy of the other side's actions. What is asymmetric is that one side would be better armed.
The report ends on an ominous, pessimistic note: "we need a civil war."]
US Supreme Court says Americans have right to carry guns in public
23 JUN 2022
WASHINGTON (AFP, BLOOMBERG, REUTERS) - The US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday (June 23) that Americans have a fundamental right to carry firearms in public in a landmark decision that will prevent states from restricting people carrying guns.
The 6-3 ruling, with the court’s conservative justices in the majority and liberal justices in dissent and which comes as the country grapples with a shocking surge in gun crime, strikes down a New York law that required a person to prove they had legitimate self-defence needs to receive a gun permit.
“The Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defence outside the home,” said Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion.
“New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defence needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defence.”
Under the New York law’s “proper cause” requirement, applicants seeking an unrestricted concealed carry permits must convince a state firearms licensing officer of an actual, rather than speculative, need for self-defence.
Officials could also grant licenses restricted to certain activities, such as hunting or target practice.
New York’s governor Kathy Hochul said the ruling was “frightening” and strips away the state’s right to protect its citizens.
“This decision isn’t just reckless, it’s reprehensible,” she said. “This could place millions of New Yorkers in harm’s way.”
“We can have restrictions on speech – you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre but somehow there’s no restrictions allowed on the Second Amendment,” she said. “I’m sorry this dark day has come,” she added...
'Everybody wants to be segregated': Internal divisions in US hardening, warns Yale's Prof Amy Chua
Nirmal Ghosh
US Bureau Chief
6 JUN 2022
WASHINGTON - On good days, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua, 59, feels hopeful.
But on most days, she is a little worried about the future of the United States amid its hardening divisions.
"Everybody wants to be completely segregated now. So there are ethnic and racial divisions that are hardening," said Prof Chua...
... One huge factor, new in its intensity, is "the division between cosmopolitan elites... on the one hand (and) on the other hand, America's rural, working class, southern population, many of them white working class, but not entirely".
"The difference between these two groups now is so intense, that there is almost no intermarriage between them," she said...
... "And... if you're in a situation where the cosmopolitan coastal urban elites are not interacting or intermarrying with any of the rural, southern, working class whites, you start to get into a situation that (is) more like an ethnic divide."...
Internally, "it used to just be the minorities who felt threatened", Prof Chua added.
But "now you have whites feeling threatened".
"It used to be a just hugely majority white country that dominated everything politically, culturally, socially, economically," she said.
But "today… we are on the verge of an unprecedented situation, in which whites are about to lose their majority status at the national level for the first time in US history".
"There's a lot of debate about when that will happen… (and) if you look at our major cities, whites - non-Hispanic whites - are no longer a majority in many, many major cities.
"And… you could think that's something to be celebrated. But one result of that is that every group in the United States now feels threatened."
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