Deutsche Welle report on “The Arming of the American Left”

Is American law enforcement "blind in the right eye"? Can guns be lucky charms?

Deutsche Welle News¹ presents a report with a melodramatic title, “The Arming of the American Left.” It’s a report on the Socialist Rifle Association in the US:

It’s a topic that could easily lead down some deep rabbit holes.

It’s a long-standing reality in the United States that far-right groups like the Ku Klux Klan can advocate, plan, and organize for violent criminal and terrorist acts and even for armed insurrection (See January 6, 2021) without arousing anything like the alarm among law-enforcement bodies that anything similar on the left or among racial minorities provokes.

Even under the Obama-Biden Administration, that tendency of law-enforcement and politicians who back them all too uncritically to be “blind in the right eye” when it comes to rightwing political violence was unfortunately very clear in the ludicrous political reaction in 2009 to Daryl Johnson’s very accurate and prescient warning about the danger of far-right violence - including the danger to law-enforcement officers - was actively disregarded.

Republican politicians and conservative pundits reacted with outrage and demanded a retraction. The report was politically motivated and unfairly demonized conservative views, they argued. “Americans are not the enemy. The terrorists are,” the head of the American Legion, a veterans group, wrote.

The head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publicly apologized. The small team of domestic terrorism analysts who had produced the report was disbanded, and analysts were reassigned to study Muslim extremism, according to Daryl Johnson, the career federal intelligence analyst who had led the team. By the next year, Johnson says, he had been forced out of the DHS altogether.²

This ridiculous response was one of the most consequential mistakes of the Obama Administration.

In the Deutsche Welle report above, the Socialist Rifle Association spokespeople are careful to talk about how their mission is to prepare people for self-defense against violence from the Trumpista right.

It’s a very safe bet that most American law-enforcement agencies are strongly inclined to treat an overtly left group like this as far more threatning than far-right groups who are explicitly calling for political violence in an immediate sense. (Not to be cynical, but it really wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some paid informant encouraged them to do this interview to nudge more police departments to try to dig up dirt on them. Although they don’t advocate anything at all illegal in it.)

Take the example of antifa activist Michael Forest Reinoehl, who was a suspect in having killed a pro-Trump demonstrator, whose life ended with what looks awfully like a summary execution by police.

Reinoehl did have a loaded .380 pistol on him when he was killed, but it was found inside his right front pants pocket. Despite that, investigators insist that, based on law enforcement and witness statements, they believe Reinoehl fired the round, was shot by police, and put his gun inside his pants pocket.

Those investigators could not find the bullet Reinoehl allegedly shot at police.

“While it is very plausible and it does match up with the statements, we were not able to find the actual round from (Reinoehl’s pistol) to definitively say, ‘absolutely’ that he fired from that car,” Simper told OPB. “Based on our investigation, based on the witness statements, the casing in the car and officers statements, it is highly likely.”

Four law enforcement officers fired their weapons at Reinoehl that day, killing him. Simper said the officers fired 40 rounds.

The shooting followed a series of tense political protests in Northwest cities, and got the attention of then-President Trump and former Attorney General William Barr. Both men praised the law enforcement response.³ [my emphasis]

That reminded me of this Bruce Springsteen’s song about 40+1 shots, which he obviously meant as a criticism of arbitrary murder by police, based on an actual incident of a young Black man killed by New York police.⁴

Trump’s own words about Reinoehl death pretty much straight-out described it as an extra-judicial execution, though of course Trump constantly shoots off his mouth with whatever pops into his head at the moment without concern with the factual accuracy of what he’s saying:

Trump bragged about Reinoehl’s killing at a rally in North Carolina on Thursday, getting cheers for a description that sounded like a summary execution by the state.

“We sent in the U.S. marshals, took 15 minutes and it was over,” Trump said. “They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him, and 15 minutes, that ended.”

Who “they” referred to was up for some debate. Some people thought Trump was referencing the U.S. Marshals Service, which would suggest he was saying that members of law enforcement wanted to kill Reinoehl and had no plans to arrest him. Others said it appeared that Trump was referencing the Portland Police Department, a comment that disparages members of law enforcement as cowardly.⁵ [my emphasis]

Guns for Self-Defense: Fantasy vs. reality

Reinoehl had claimed before he was gunned down that he had shot a far-right Patriot Prayer activist in self-defense, which of course is what the far-right guns cult touts constantly as a justification for unlimited gun proliferation in the US. Obviously, Reinoehl never got the chance to make that case in court.

Four things in this context need to be kept in mind:

1. It is legal in the United States to use weapons in self-defense.

2. Anyone organizing armed groups for insurrectionary purposes will probably claim they are doing so in self-defense.

3. No government can be expected to voluntarily allow the organization of armed insurrectionary forces against itself, but …

4. Governments and ruling political parties can and do use paramilitary formations to support themselves, including backing a self-coup/auto-coup attempt, as we saw in the January 6 effort by Trump to overthrow his own government.

On the last point, Vladimir Putin has been experiencing in recent days with the Wagner Group how tricky those paramilitaries can sometimes be.⁶

But with the massive proliferation of small arms inside the US, often among people poorly trained or completely untrained on how to use them, it’s particularly important to stress that using guns (or any weapons for that matter) for self-defense carries serious responsibilities with it. Starting with knowing how to use them.

Whether we’re talking about a pistol, a shotgun, or pepper-spray, for a weapon to be useful in self-defense it has to be in the hand of the person who needs it at the moment they need it. Having a pistol in your car, legally or otherwise, and knowing how to use it, are not going to help you in a situation where you’re walking on the street and a mugger pulls a gun on you. In that case, the gun in your car has exactly the same protective value as a rabbit’s foot or other lucky charm.

A classic imagined scenario for individual armed self-defense with guns is the burglar breaking into your house during the middle of the night. But the weapon-in-the-hand requirement applies here, too. The former San Jose chief of police Joe McNamara did a book back in 1984 advising individuals how to protect themselves against crime.⁷ Obviously, present-day concerns like social media safety weren’t around yet in 1984. But some of the practical considerations he raised still apply.

For self-defense with guns, he warned (grimly) that to defend oneself against with a gun, you have to be prepared to point a gun at someone and kill them with it. Because in most such self-defense situations, the person being surprised by an attacker will need to be prepared to aim at the attacker’s torso and be prepared to pull the trigger and kill another person with it.

In practice, both military and police training focus heavily on making sure that their trainees can do that. He cautioned against the image in films and TV where the cop pulls a gun and the bad guys immediately stop and raise their hands. Because in the middle-of-the-night-burglary scenario where the resident jumps out of bed and grabs their weapon, if the burglar is actually armed then he’s also likely to be more prepared to shoot than the just-awakened homeowner.

(In any case, the more typical home burglaries involve people casing the house and breaking in when they see no one is home. So very few actual burglaries are actually thwarted by the plucky homeowner shooting the bad guys to death.)

But that self-defense scenario also means that the resident has to have the gun easily available, well-maintained and either pre-loaded or able to be loaded very quickly. And that raises all sorts of issues about protecting both children and adult members of the household against getting the gun and shooting themselves or someone else, either by carelessness or in anger or in suicide.

And being able to use a weapon reliably means training regularly to use it in a self-defense situation. Which is not the same as bird- or deer hunting. An effective burglar alarm will be far more practical for most everybody.

In any case, the better response to an in-home break-in while the residents are there would be to get everyone out of the house and calling the police to reinforce the message of the burglar alarm.

One last thing. The NRA started back in the 1990s encouraging people to brag about the guns they own. The idea was to reinforce owning a gun as an individual right to personal property, as well as making the idea itself more popular. But when it comes to home safety, that’s about as dumbass a piece of advice as it gets. Weapons are a prime target for burglaries because they can be relatively easily fenced. Shooting off your mouth to everyone you come into contact with about your awesome gun collection increases your chances of being burglarized.

Three conclusions from all this

1. Take political violence seriously.

2. Take personal self-defense seriously.

3. Don’t do stupid stuff.

1. How America's left is preparing for escalating violence. DW [Deutsche Welle] News YouTube channel 05/26/2023. (Accessed: 2023-31-05).

2. Beckett, Lois (2019): 'Blood on their hands': the intelligence officer whose warning over white supremacy was ignored. The Guardian 08/08/2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/07/white-supremacist-terrorism-intelligence-analyst> (Accessed: 2023-11-06).

3. Wilson, Conrad (2021): Investigators complete review of federal police shooting that killed wanted Portland activist. Oregon Public Broadcasting 03/31/2021. <https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/31/investigation-federal-police-shooting-wanted-portland-activist/> (Accessed: 2023-11-06).

4. Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - American Skin (41 Shots) (Live in New York City). Bruce Springsteen YouTube channel 10/03/2009. (Accessed: 2023-23-06).

5. Reilly, Ryan (2023): Trump Boasts About U.S. Marshals Killing ‘Antifa’ Suspect. Huffpost 10/15/2020. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-antifa-execution-us-marshals_n_5f8893d5c5b6f53fff099b85> (Accessed: 2023-11-06).

6. McCarthy, Simone (2023): Putin vows to punish ‘armed uprising’ by Wagner militia as Russia is plunged into crisis. CNN 06/24/2023. <https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/23/europe/russia-mod-wagner-yevgeny-prigozhin-intl/index.html> (Accessed: 2023-24-06).

7. McNamara, Joseph (1984): Safe and Sane: The Sensible Way to Protect Yourself, Your Loved Ones, Your Property and Possessions. New York: Putnam Publishing Group.