Don’t mistake awareness for comfort. We catch a lot of heat for our ridiculous levels of gun violence, but living around that many guns, in a nation where cops, ICE, and counter-protestors armed with assault rifles are just looking for an excuse to unload, you learn how far to push without causing a situation where strays are flying into the crowd. At Defund the Police and Pride we’ve had jacked up pick-ups filled with armed red necks roll coal and brandish on us in full view of the cops; nothing happened. At BLM one of them popped a shot off to spook the crowd; caught, claimed he accidentally turned the safety off, no charges. How many videos are there of monster trucks plowing into crowds? Plus, the new tactic is to show up covered in cameras, incite a fight, play victim, get the protestor arrested. Our courts are theirs and our prison system is egregiously punitive. And don’t doubt that a lot of us protesting are legally carrying. You really don’t want to see an American protest turn into a shootout, and the closer it gets to becoming one the more cautious we are about setting it off without a safety plan.