Conrad Shaw
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

My impression of the militia is that, indeed, most of them did their best to be professional, and in their minds they were using the second amendment to protect the first. There were outliers, too. There was one spewing pretty hateful and racist stuff, clearly on the side of the supremacists, and a couple of the more professional ones said something about giving him a talking to later.

However, even if they all had been professional in demeanor, their presence did not give me comfort at all. Quite the opposite. These guys could instantly turn a brawl into a massacre. The thing that terrified me is that they are not authorized law-enforcers, and that nobody could really know their affiliation, and what’s more, they looked like a a cross between national guard, white supremacists, and a biker gang, but armed with assault rifles. What if someone on either side had been crazy enough to throw more than a punch or a pepper spray water balloon at the rally? What if somebody, on either side, pulled a gun? There were open carry people on both sides. I imagine these protectors would have sprung into action and shot that person to protect us all. But what happens when an unauthorized military force that looks like a biker gang, skull patches and goatees and all, starts opening fire in the middle of a rally full of open carry practitioners who don’t know where the militiamen stand, politically speaking. Let’s just say Deia and I were ready to sprint the hell out of there if anything happened. We felt we were taking a huge risk. I could go on about gun laws, but I won’t here. Let’s just say the whole “give good guys guns to shoot the bad guys” line of thinking turns out to be pretty damn scary when you’re standing in the middle of a very bizarre and diverse crowd of gun-wielders trying to decide who’s good and bad.

I really do believe in the good intentions of most of the militiamen, but I think they are extremely foolhardy and dangerous intentions, spurred on by that same delusional superhero mentality that I wrote about in the paper. I think the day of the rally could have gone much worse, much earlier on. It could have been a blood bath. I’m glad they weren’t at the scene of the car attack for the same reason. I think they would’ve shot and killed Fields on the spot, and I think some of the counter-protesters would’ve drawn and fired, too, in the panic. The police weren’t even there yet to either add to the fray or somehow stop it.

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    Conrad Shaw

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    Writer, UBI researcher, Actor, Filmmaker, Lapsed Engineer

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