Firearms and Masks at Protests

As the risks to personal safety, political violence, job loss, and government repression increase in activism spaces some of the tools of personal and community safety have to change. Understanding these changes may help with the discomfort of seeing your friends and neighbors taking steps that you may not have considered taking yourself or that elicit strong feelings of unfamiliarity, shock, or negative associations with people on the other side of the political spectrum.

Protecting our identities in public spaces helps to keep ourselves from being doxxed, which is a common threat to activists that can affect their work, family life, and personal safety. Masking also can allow us to blend into similarly dressed blocs of activists when joined by others using the same tactics and tools. We are volunteer community members serving at the request of organizers and hold only the power we can create. As such, we do not have the legal backing of state forces to protect us and we cannot count on being treated without discrimination under the law, often because we are working to expose injustices in how the law itself is applied. ICE is an organization empowered by our federal government to take away our rights.

We also would like to remind folks that masking for COVID or other health issues is something more should consider doing generally, and especially in large gatherings. You will meet us in less dangerous contexts without these protective measures and quickly learn that we are your neighbors, teachers, coworkers, and fellow potential victims of fascist violence instead of the perpetrators of it. We mask to protect ourselves NOT to hide from accountability. Despite their growing necessity, we understand that discomfort around masked individuals will not immediately disappear. If you feel discomfort, we encourage you to examine how your previous experiences and identities may influence your response. Participation in political work that does not elicit potentially hostile detractors and/or your own personal privileges may have or continue to insulate you from harm. 

Are your local police professional? Unbiased? Well trained in deescalation as well as use of force? Will they be if you have to protest them or the political system they have volunteered to defend? Even if you have the mythical perfect police department can you count on them being right where you need them, exactly when issues arise? It is a scary realization that these systems fail, sometimes intentionally and with explicit bias against community members trying to make changes towards a better, more equal society. So how do we keep ourselves and each other safe? We as people that believe the most literal options are often the best and with the threats of firearm, vehicle, and group based political violence that means firearms. Each event will have different needs based on the style of action, venue, and previous experiences or specific threats. When the situation has multiple threatening factors and necessitates a very visible and large-scale response, organizers may ask for open carry and specifically open carry of long guns such as AR15s. These firearms are in common use, easily trained with, and capable of defending spaces from larger and more varied threats such as vehicle ramming attacks or groups of aggressors. The highly visible nature of these types of firearms can and often do prevent aggressors from feeling confident enough to instigate violence in the first place. It is appropriate and expected to vet the people entering your space offering safety especially in an armed capacity, armed community defense is something that should be discussed beforehand and set up to meet the specific scale of the event. We encourage anyone with concerns about the presence of firearms at political events to study the history of violence done to unarmed activists, learn more personally about safe firearm use, and to talk to their neighbors that do or have benefitted from this work to hear about their experiences and perspectives.

Things are changing, we have to change with them. The time of hoping someone else will fix our problems is over. The need to count on each other instead of the systems that are incompetent or outright hostile to us is only going to increase as the struggle for the new world to be born moves into the time of monsters. You are worth defending, you deserve to be safe, if you cannot keep yourself safe yet, call on your neighbors to help. We know it's scary that it has come to this, we know it can be unfamiliar, but keep fighting. We have a new world to win, and we're so glad you want to see it too.