Even though I have never owned, shot, or even HANDLED a gun? I am 100% on board with this idea. My law school buddy (who was a fellow mainstream lefty but also a gun nut Yinzer) always said he wanted to start a left-wing militia.
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Should Liberals Start Arming Themselves?

The case for (and against) militias.
Jonathan V. Last
Feb 02, 2026
∙ Paid

(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages/ Shutterstock)

1. History

Today is part one of a two-part conversation about guns and the opposition movement. I want this conversation to be serious and not chest-thumping, because it’s complicated. And I’m going to start you off with the conclusion and then argue my way back into it. So here we go.
Recent American history shows that when citizens are well armed and organized, they get treated with more professionalism by law enforcement. This creates a paradox in which citizens attempting to resist a hostile federal agency enjoy more legal protections if they constitute an actual physical threat than if they do not.
Once you start following this path, the logic leads pretty inexorably to the conclusion that people resisting the Trump regime should (a) start arming themselves and (b) start organizing into community associations for mutual protection. Well-regulated militias, even.
And the best counterargument to this logic is that this moment of resistance against this regime is is not actually about power. It is, like the civil rights movement, a fundamentally Christian struggle.
That’s a lot to unpack, so let’s dive in.
We start in 2014 with Cliven Bundy.
Bundy was a rancher in Nevada and for twenty-one years he had been allowing his cattle to graze on federal land adjacent to his ranch. The federal government attempted to charge him grazing fees. Bundy refused to pay. It asked him to remove his cattle from its land. Bundy refused.
The government spent years trying to collect these fees and get the animals off its land, and Bundy kept refusing. He asserted that the government did not have the right to charge him and that his claim on the lands predated the governments because of his heritage. The government pursued its case through the courts and won. As a last resort, the court allowed the government to impound Bundy’s cattle as it roamed on federal lands. Think of it as putting a lien on his livestock.
As government agents were rounding up cattle—again, on federal lands—Bundy and some of his associates showed up. They were heavily armed. They demanded that the government agents stop and release the cattle they had apprehended. Instead of shooting Bundy and his confederates, the local sheriff negotiated with them and ultimately convinced the federal agents to give in to Bundy’s demands and release the cattle.
So much for “If you comply, you won’t die.”

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Bundy was not just shooting from the hip (so to speak). He had declared himself part of the “sovereign citizen” movement and enlisted the aid of various militia groups; these were the people who responded to his call and showed up with him to confront the government in April 2014.
I want to be very clear about what I mean when I say that Bundy and his confederates were organized. Here’s some contemporary reporting:

A [Bureau of Land Management] announcement that the [cattle] round-up was suspended failed to placate him. Behind a guard of militia, Bundy suggested his followers block a nearby interstate and demand the immediate release of all livestock.

“We’re about ready to take the country over with force!” Bundy said.

A tense, hour-long standoff then ensued at the mouth of Gold Butte, the preserve where the cattle were corralled.

Militiamen took position on a highway overpass, offering cover as horse-mounted wranglers led protesters to face off against heavily equipped BLM rangers and snipers. . . .

Deputy Chief Tom Roberts, of Las Vegas Metro, defused the situation by delivering the announcement that Cliven Bundy’s cattle would be returned within 30 minutes. Responding to [Ammon Bundy’s] demand that the BLM stand down, Roberts said: “I’m getting them out of here. That’s why I’m here.”

Local law enforcement saw it as their duty to get between Bundy’s armed protesters and federal law enforcement who were carrying out lawful orders and then convince the feds to give in to Bundy’s demands.
Here’s the local police describing their role:

“We were told, we’re going to go down there and we’re going to get between the BLM and the protesters. We were going, okay, we’ve been there before, but as we were driving up, it was like a movie set. It didn’t look real; people in the back of pickup trucks with rifles and shotguns,” [Sgt. Tom Jenkins of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department] said. “It was hard to grasp that at the beginning.”

Approximately 30 Metro officers stood between a crowd of 400 heavily armed, self- described militia and the federal employees who had gathered a few hundred head of Bundy’s cattle. As the crowd swelled and tempers flared, many in the crowd tried to goad the police, hurling taunts and insults.

“They had no respect for authority. Everything that you can think of to call a human being, animals, everything,” Jenkins said.

One person in the crowd even asked Jenkins if he was ready to die. . . .

Shuttling back and forth between the Bundy forces and BLM was Assistant Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who’d been left in charge by Sheriff Doug Gillespie. He was trying to keep everyone calm.

“The bottom line is, bloodshed over cattle, unacceptable. Nobody wanted to go in that direction,” Lombardo said.

But the police were to learn, some in the crowd did want to go in that direction. Even Lombardo was on the receiving end.

“It was a scary point in itself. They were in my face yelling profanities and pointing weapons. The Bundy son himself, that I was negotiating with, Dave, he did not do that, but all the associated people around him did do that,” Lombardo said.

How interesting that neither the local police nor the federal agents believed that their lives were threatened by “domestic terrorists” in this situation and that they had no choice but to start shooting.
Also notable: The law enforcement officials on the scene believed that “bloodshed over cattle” was unacceptable and that not every single law or command had to be immediately complied with before deploying deadly force.

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Here I should say that both local and federal law enforcement behaved admirably at the Bundy standoff. Having a shootout over cattle would have been unprofessional and not in the best interests of justice. Instead, law enforcement withdrew and allowed the legal process to take over. There were FBI investigations of individual militia members who had threatened federal agents at the scene and some charges were filed. Bundy himself ultimately faced criminal charges. In most of these trials, Bundy and his supporters got off. But them’s the breaks. Living by the rule of law means abiding court decisions which seem incorrect or unjust.
And whatever your views of Bundy, I’d suggest that this outcome—in which the feds backed off, the legal process took over, and Bundy won in court—was preferable to a shootout. This is how professional law enforcement is supposed to work.

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2. Michigan

Fast-forward six years to April 2020 in Michigan. Thousands of protesters angry about the state’s COVID policies gathered at the capitol building in Lansing. Many of these protesters were heavily armed. After milling about on the capitol grounds for several hours, hundreds of them made their way inside the building and attempted to force their way onto the floor of the state senate. They were blocked by members of the state police.
There was shouting and confrontation, though nothing like what we would see in Washington seven months later. Here’s some video to give you a sense of the situation:

You may recall the images of masked militia members with long guns stalking the halls of the state capitol and then standing in the gallery looking down at legislators. Later, it would be alleged that at least two of the militia members at the protest had wanted to abduct the governor.
But again: Law enforcement officers apparently did not feel threatened by any of this behavior. They remained calm and professional. They de-escalated the situation and allowed the legal system to go to work after the fact, as videos were examined and investigators were able to identify individual legal infractions.
This was professional law enforcement at its best. As was the work of the Capitol Police in Washington on January 6, 2021.

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3. Protesting While Unarmed

The problem is that we don’t always get that same level of professionalism when citizens are unarmed—or when they are lightly armed but alone. Compare the killing of Renee Good or the execution of Alex Pretti with how law enforcement treated the Bundy militia or the armed Michigan protesters and it’s striking. It’s almost as though when citizens pose no threat to law enforcement, LEOs are liberated to be as unprofessional as they like.
It is easy to name any number of cases from recent years in which law enforcement deployed deadly force against citizens who posed no threat: Not just Pretti and Good, but Philando Castile, George Floyd, Eric Garner—the list goes on and on. But try to name an incident in which heavily armed and organized citizens were treated with less than polite deference by law enforcement in the middle of a standoff. I can come up with Ruby Ridge and the Waco siege back in the early ‘90s. That’s about it. And in each of those cases, the armed citizens were not protestors, but criminals who were actively threatening government agents.

So when you look at Minneapolis, isn’t the answer that people resisting the actions of the government ought to arm and organize themselves to the extent that Minnesota law permits? That by meeting DHS agents on the street with a display of force, they are likely to get the most professional version of DHS behavior?
I don’t want you to answer this question. Not yet. Because tomorrow, in part two, we’re going to talk about the difference between sectarian power struggles and confrontations about moral legitimacy. But I’ll tip my hand now, just to give you a taste.
If the confrontation between the Trump regime and Minneapolis was merely a tribal power struggle, then it would be proper—wise, even—for the citizens of Minneapolis to arm and organize. Even if doing so risked further escalation.
But that’s not what’s happening. This is a fight over moral legitimacy. It is a uniquely Christian moment. And the people of Minneapolis are with Jesus standing against Caesar.
I know. It’s a lot. But don’t react to this yet. See you tomorrow.