Buy a gun, and learn how to use it. This is good advice even if you don't believe it's necessary.
Kids used to be taught gun safety in public school. Public schools used to have indoor ranges (I've seen one with my own eyes).
When someone learns gun safety, they are less likely to accidentally shoot themselves or someone else if they come across one.
The problem is that this normalizes the behavior, something that a specific political sect (coincidentally overlapping heavily with those employed in education) desperately wants to avoid.
Because it isn't emasculating - it's very much empowering - and anyone who has ever fired a gun or read a history book written in the last 200 years can't be deluded into thinking otherwise.
In other words, make gun ownership normal, understood, and uncool.
This presumes that this is actually the (an) issue.
> In other words, make gun ownership normal, understood, and uncool.
Normal is the issue: you can't subjugate a widely-armed population.
If you survive the initial encounter, you're on the run and an enemy of the state?
One of the reasons that doesn't happen in America is because the protestors would promptly shoot back and there would be a rapid formation of a militia. Hard to do that when you don't have guns.
In particular, the largest protests against American elections (in my life at least) have been populated by almost-certainly unarmed protesters.
And there are many other countries with strict gun laws (i.e. not the US) where police don't fire upon crowds for any reason.
I know that hasn't been much in evidence lately, and I know that American humans are no more special than any other humans.
But we're starting from a very different place than, e.g., Tanzania.
I predict reversion to the mean, not revolution. (It can be argued that what we're seeing right now is the reversion to the mean, which is a whole different cart of apples.)
It really, really is the biggest reason it doesn't happen.
I won't argue that there will not be isolated incidents of horror (too late). I argue that the practice will not take hold and become normalized.
If a new Kent State happens, I depend on Americans to respond immensely and swiftly again. I'd prefer a catalyzing event without loss of life, of course.
Was it? An American political culture dominated by Christians and war hawks paranoid about the influence of "cultural marxism" in academia and whipped up into a moral panic about the "degeneracy" of feminism and homosexuality, with pervasive censorship of criticism of American foreign policy and the deployment of militarized police in the streets doesn't seem very different than what we have now.
>If a new Kent State happens, I depend on Americans to respond immensely and swiftly again.
I think you deeply misunderstand which side of the fence American gun owners and militias tend to be on and just how normalized the rhetoric and expectation of violence has already gotten. If a new Kent State happens they'll say "that was for Charlie Kirk" and dance in the streets.
I do still believe that the whole is less than the sum of the parts, though. The batshit crazy doesn't have critical mass generally, but certainly does in some areas. If things get ugly, I expect it to be localized and temporary. I hope to be right. :-/