>>9615091
>"If your branding snafu gets Trump re-elected. There is no table to get to."
@GrimKim
"Seattle’s CHAZ is being protected by armed community patrols who guard the zone’s makeshift borders and act as a deterrent for the white supremacists sending threats. I spoke with @PugetSoundJBGC about firearm safety & community defense in a cop-free zone"
==Meet the Gun Club Patrolling Seattle’s Leftist Utopia''
Though everyone from Trump to local cops have expressed fear about the idea of anti-brutality activists being armed, they say it’s essential to ward off dangerous extremists.
Seattle’s bustling Capitol Hill neighborhood has long been a hotbed of gentrification, but right now, the streets surrounding Cal Anderson Park are undergoing a different kind of transformation.
Over the past several days of its remarkable existence, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) has captured radical imaginations across the country, and struck fear into the hearts of conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits (including the president). Also known as the Seattle Autonomous Zone, the six blocks surrounding Seattle’s now-abandoned East Precinct have become a virtually cop-free space, populated instead by a diverse congregation of activists and community members who have turned it into a bastion of radical care and artistic expression.
Last week, the area resembled a warzone, as Seattle police fired tear gas canisters into the crowd and choked out the neighborhood. Now, there is a community garden, a harm reduction clinic, a free food co-op, and artwork everywhere—and local businesses are on board. As Vixen, a Seattle resident who has been participating in the protests and declined to give a last name, told The Daily Beast from a quiet spot behind the barricades, “This place has gone from being filled with explosions and tear gas to being a place of healing.”
Comparisons have predictably been drawn between CHAZ and the Occupy movement, but in the place also known as Free Capitol Hill, there is one crucial distance: this time, some of the protesters are armed.
Leftist gun clubs have been on the rise, and organizations like the Socialist Rifle Association—of which, full disclosure, I am a member—Huey P. Newton Gun Club, Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club, and other chapters of the John Brown Gun Club have successfully introduced the issue of gun rights and firearms education into the broader leftist discourse. In Seattle, John Brown members have generally been showing up on an individual basis, rather than as part of a coordinated campaign. But as Nick—the group’s towering spokesperson, who like other members requested his full name be withheld given law enforcement’s fixation on left-wing activists—told The Daily Beast, the group was also tapped to provide a security escort for “some very prominent black voices who were doing speeches here at the Autonomous Zone” following the events of last Sunday evening.
That was when a man armed with a Glock (with taped-on extended magazines) drove into a crowd of protesters, and shot a civilian named Daniel Gregory in the arm. According to Nick and local news reports, the driver then ran over to the police, where he was taken into custody.
“It’s not like our club is going force-to-force against the police; that's not what we do,”he told The Daily Beast.
Their second, and arguably more important, goal, they say, is to ensure that everyone who is carrying inside CHAZ is doing so safely and responsibly, and ideally with community buy-in. According to Nick, members have been joined out on patrol by other armed locals, a hodgepodge of “random community members, affinity groups, [and] antifa that aren’t labeled with a specific group” who have reportedly been helping to fill in gaps in the barricades. The PSJBC’s approach, as they describe it, is heavily focused on de-escalation, and they’ve been leaning on that training as various tensions have surfaced.
“That’s kind of the world we live in, right? We have people who are disciplined with firearms, and people who get into firearms who don't have that discipline, so when we see it, we’re not policing people; the best we can do is educate people,” Nick said. “Other people are carrying and we want to make sure that people are carrying safely, so we’re also discussing whether we can do trainings for people here.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/seattles-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-chaz-has-armed-guards
Cough....(pic related)
“It’s not like our club is going force-to-force against the police; that's not what we do,”he told The Daily Beast.