> So, the fear of the outcome of an armed attack stopped the government's actions?

Yes I already agreed it was a valid example...?

> That means no convictions.

The charges for showing up with guns and shit were dropped. The $1,000,000 fines and the grazing injunction were not dropped, still apply, and had due process in arriving at them. The grazing is and has been all along a properly categorized crime (or misdemeanor or tort or whatever the technical category is). The gun play is not.

So making the government not bother to enforce the illegal grazing penalties is a man standing up against the People and the Rule of Law.

People thwarting the rule of law and due process is absolutely a backfire. Or are you "pretty sure" the founders meant for rule of law to not be a thing either, but just didn't get the time to write that down either?

> LAPD literally bunkered down.

So did people in the Battle of Britain during every bomb sortie, which the allies then proceeded to win. So what? Bunkering down during hot spots =/= backing down or quitting or running away or losing. So what? They absolutely did not, according to your own source, stay bunkered down the whole time. it is mentioned only infrequently in narrow situations in the timeline.

> They put up barriers around precincts, stopped patrolling, and turned the city over to everyone else.

If only your own source backed you up on that, cool fanfiction though. What it actually says was that not only were police continuing to work, but they were airlifting in MORE police from surrounding areas up to and through the same period of time that the national guard were arriving.

Your own source also talks about all kinds of PATROLS in different areas of the city up to the same point in the timeline as the national guard, and those patrols being reinforced, and what they were up to and so on.

The hell are you talking about, seriously?

> I notice in all of our conversation so far, you haven't mentioned breathing, shitting, or eating.

I would if I was writing a summary medical/anatomy textbook 😂 The equivalent of the federalist papers and/or constitution and/or declaration of independence and other founding documents, specifically all about laying out the foundational principles.

And I would mention breathing dozens of times, if I furthermore had a chapter on the lungs specifically and what exactly the lungs were for, which is the equivalent of having essays on the second amendment and what exactly its purpose was and what balance was struck, etc.

> Then people started dying. Then they fought back.

At which point they reduced their chance of success by 50% versus not fighting back and remaining peaceful. Correct.

> The peaceful part depended on the actions of the government.

No... Them CHOOSING to fight back depended on THEM.

> Or are you suggesting you should continue to peacefully protest amidst incoming machine gun fire?

Yes, I have ELI5'ed this multiple times. If you want to have double the chance of success, that is exactly correct. Remain non violent. Do you want to have double the chance of success? Or not? (In case you're unaware, by the way, "running away" from a gun currently shooting at you is non-violent.)

And if you get 3.5% of the population in on it as well, your chance of success goes to around 100%

> simply keep shooting peaceful protestors with machine guns until they stop protesting

They DON'T "stop protesting" when you shoot them a lot. They protest MORE. Your industries start shutting down from strikes, your treasure stops flowing in. The protestors swell from outrage making recruitment easy as hell for them, and they now outnumber your henchmen by 40:1 instead of 10:1. Then next month 100:1 if you keep shooting more... your own guys start defecting because whoops! You shot your own lieutenant's cousin yesterday. Oopsie, he went to the protestors. And the whole rest of the world meanwhile joins them in protesting and begins to sanction you back to the stone age...

Your question is inherently leading in that you wrote into it an incorrect assumption that "you can make people stop by shooting them". No. You can't. Your assumed premise is simply wrong, according to all examples from modern history.

> What's to stop you? International sympathy?

Yes, that and domestic sympathy causing them to recruit +5 people locally for every one you shoot. As we see from a wide array of examples throughout modern history.

> Like how it's working with Putin and the Chinese government who are "hosting" large numbers of ethnic minorities who would "peacefully protest" if they didn't expect to get killed anyway....

They don't have 3.5% of the population, remember the TWO extremely simple rules I told you? Peaceful + 3.5%...

Uyghurs for example only number about 12 million people, out of 1,400 million Chinese overall... even if they organized at unprecedented levels and an incredible half of their number got out and protested at once, that'd be less than 1/2 of 1% of China.

Jews were about 0.5% of Germany in 1933

Armenians were about 4% of Turkey in 1915 (but it has to be people joined to the cause and actually protesting, you obviously won't get 88% of your group out protesting right out of the gate)

> Sounds like a real winner.

Yes. Correct. Unironically yes. The data shows it is a winner 2x more often than violence is. The data happening to conflict with your angry monkey brain telling you "monkey revenge! ooh ooh monkey smash!" does not make the data wrong, sorry.