So they named the one death from the shooting the other day but the leftists are getting antsy something’s up that they’re not naming the resident (and running him as “a homeowner”)

After ventilating the traffic blockers with a .45 he was shot by a rifle (presumably an AR). Which means that some of the protestors were, in fact, armed, even organized into armed roles. And while “bringing a gun to confront some old lady leftists” sounds extreme, “bringing a gun to confront an organized, armed antigovernment band” might be more sympathetic even in Portland, and in the world beyond “the reason we have guns is to shoot pinkos if they try to take over the neighborhood” is a pretty basic rightist theme.

So my guess at how this gets used in the current Portland environment is it gets used to power an effort against armed political activity. When you march around with guns to claim the streets for cursing the established order people who live established lives along those streets take it as a hostile act against them and resist you – with guns – and people end up shot.

This’ll also get spun as usable against rightist “chuds”, the establishment saying “actually no you don’t protect you, we protect you”.

The left will of course be split by the triune possibilities:

• People who insist on maintaining armed operations – I know exactly who’s gonna end up on this side, it’s “investigative journalist” Robert Evans. The thing is, 2 years on and reduced from the 2020 Justice Center protests only to the most hardcore lifestylers, after 2 years of the public opinion pendulum being pushed back to “order”, if you insist on showily mounting armed radical displays as a thumb in the eye that’s on you, they don’t even have to use “less-lethal” tools against you
• Continuing compliantly unarmed, in an environment where being armed has been established as insufficient to ward off lethal attacks. The Indian independence movement and mid-20th century American racial “civil rights movement” employed strategies of nonviolent resistance that accepted some casualties would be taken unavenged. I think this required broad support bases drawing on wrap-around communities of distinct identities with high morale and a reasonable expectation of eventual triumph, and do not expect that can be replicated here
• Seeking police protection, turning to permitted marches and events and operating within government constraints whose permissibility is determined within a formal and nominally precedent-bound system of law