Article: "Never break your perimeter and let yourself get surrounded – three different protests edition"

From the Gun Free Zone blog. The videos used as exemplars are of the guy in Dallas that was severely beaten after confronting rioters with only a machete, the old guy in Salt Lake who decided to play Legolas and was beaten and his car burned, and two Chicago police officers that got knocked down and dragged by some of the so-called "peaceful protesters".

     I'm reminded of a section from Space Viking by H. Beam Piper:

     The police stood motionless, at parade rest; the mob surged closer. When they were fifty yards away, the blocks of People's Watchmen ran forward, then spread out until they formed a line six deep across the entire front; other blocks, from the rear, pushed the ordinary demonstrators aside and took their place. Hating them more every second, Trask grudged approval of a smart and disciplined maneuver. How long, he wondered, had they been drilling in that sort of tactics? Without stopping, they continued their advance on the police, who had now shifted their stance.  

     "SPACE VI-KING—GO HOME! SPACE VI-KING—GO HOME!" 

     "Fire!" he heard himself yelling. "Don't let them get any closer, fire now!"  

      They had nothing to fire with; they had only truncheons, no better weapons than the knobbed swagger-sticks of the People's Watchmen. They simply disappeared, after a brief flurry of blows, and the Makann storm-troopers continued their advance.  

     And that was that. The gates of the Palace were shut; the mob, behind a front of Makann People's Watchmen, surged up to them and stopped. The loud-speakers bellowed on, reiterating their four-word chant.  

     "Those police were murdered," he said. "They were murdered by the man who ordered them out there unarmed."  

     "That would be Count Naydnayr, the Minister of Security," somebody said.  

     "Then he's the one you want to hang for it."  

     "What else would you have done?" Crown Prince Edvard challenged. 

     "Put up about fifty combat cars. Drawn a deadline, and opened machine-gun fire as soon as the mob crossed it, and kept on firing till the survivors turned tail and ran. Then sent out more cars, and shot everybody wearing a People's Watchmen uniform, all over town. Inside forty-eight hours, there'd be no People's Welfare party, and no Zaspar Makann either."  

     The Crown Prince's face stiffened. "That may be the way you do things in the Sword-Worlds, Prince Trask. It's not the way we do things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty of shedding the blood of its people."  

     He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn't, the people would end by shedding theirs. Instead, he said softly:  

     "I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in."