This is an effect of slowly giving up rights over the years.
They probably are, but militias planning anti-government behavior don't tend to post to social media, and such groups tend to get banned or shadowbanned by social media anyway.
They are largely suburban and rural whites. Police overreach largely impacts suburban and urban minorities. They aren't necessarily racist, they just don't see the impact.
The political right has always (at least in my 30 years of paying attention) had a strong authoritarian tilt as well.
Regarding the gun owners, my intuition is that they would be more privacy minded than the average American, but I didn't find any information on a quick search.
(An aside: Posting a similar wonder as you just did recently got me permbanned from Twitter after 12 years of daily use and ~10k followers. You're apparently not even allowed ask questions about guns and cops in the same sentence over there, even if it's not your own guns you're asking about. No response whatsoever to support/appeal inquiries. It's toast.)
The other team, they make noises about human rights and equal protection, but have no practical means to induce the police to comply, due to decades of having voted in those states to deny themselves even optional/opt-in access to the types of weapons the police carry in every single police vehicle just meters from them on a daily basis.
Meaningful nonviolent physical resistance in most of the more populated places in the US is thus now totally infeasible, as we have learned in places like Ferguson or New York City as the police are significantly better armed than any group that they wish to subdue, legally or illegally. (For a long time I thought this was a new development until eventually learning about Kent State when I was in my mid 20s.)
For example, during the 2008 RNC in New York just before W's second term, the NYPD were able to illegally imprison several thousand peaceful political protesters for a whole weekend in temporary concentration camps with total impunity due to this physical power imbalance, which resulted a few years later in an amazing $800M civil rights violation settlement (paid for out of tax money, of course; none of the police who orchestrated the illegal mass kidnapping suffered any negative consequences).
At higher levels, both "sides" are fully in agreement about the total commitment to continuous war and widespread illegal domestic surveillance. It seems that there are absolutely zero available political choices for "no widespread unchecked surveillance, no forever war" in the US any longer.
...and so the problem continues unabated.
Yes, there are lots of gun owners whose beliefs are pro authoritarian.
There are also lots of gun owners who are more anti-establishment.
We don’t have two or three monolithic groups in this country, although it seems many people would like to portray it that way for whatever reason.
We have an insanely diverse patchwork of non-exclusive groupings and categories with a wild array of beliefs, customs, and behaviors.
You might want to fact check your data there. W’s second term started several years before 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Republican_National_Conve...
I'm happy to send it to you personally; shoot me a mail.
If I ever get any sort of confirmation from Twitter that that's what caused the suspension, I am going to print some shirts for myself that say "Banned from Twitter for wondering why the Americans no longer shoot at the concentration camp guards."
Asking questions or wondering about why domestic terrorism and/or anti-government actions are or are not occurring during large developing political events involving militaries and unprecedented economic hardships is not “inciting violence”, it is a discussion of the political situation in a country.
It’s censorship of peaceful, political discussion.
Turns out, I wasn’t even entirely off base. The very thing I was asking about is a real phenomenon:
For the record, to be absolutely unambiguous: I did not threaten anyone.
Twitter rarely bans people for literally no reason, and it's typically safe to assume something happened to trigger it, even if unintentional.
I agree, I could be totally wrong. Hence my hedging language
I'm a European myself but it sounds like everything America was set up on the hope of avoiding. What about all those people who advocate gun rights? Why aren't they up on arms, either metaphorically or even literally, about this?