opinion contributor
Imagine armed protesters and militias “patrolling” a crowd, intimidating bystanders and chanting about conspiracy theories about vaccines and false claims of voter fraud in the last election.
It wasn’t long ago that we would have thought this implausible, yet this describes what happened in September, when extremists gathered at the state Capitol for an event dubbed the “Liberty Revolution.”
The mix of misinformation, extremism and guns has sadly become common across the country. What’s worse: in Arizona, thanks to the state’s lax gun laws, none of this conduct is regulated or prohibited.
We must not accept armed protests as the new normal.
Seeing the concerning number of armed protests throughout 2020, Everytown for Gun Safety partnered with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project to launch a first-of-its-kind report on armed demonstrations in the United States.
Through ongoing monitoring, the project has identified more than 30,000 demonstrations between January 2020 and October 2021, more than 600 of which involved the presence of one or more armed individuals. They include high-profile events like the siege on the U.S. Capitol, but also hundreds of events that barely made the nightly news, including 17 in Arizona.
The vast majority of demonstrations nationwide were peaceful, and while armed demonstrations represent a small proportion of the total, our findings are clear: Armed demonstrations...
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