Note, I'm neither American, nor heavily in that scene. I'm merely signal boosting what I feel is important information countering lib propaganda.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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I don’t see any explanation of why he was trying to blend in with the crowd while injured and hiding his weapon in his backpack. Why didn’t he work with the protest group to get on their protection detail.
Please do not victim blame. People act strange when being shot at sometimes. He was within his rights to carry and not work with official organizations.
He raised his firearm at the crowd and ran towards them when he was ordered to drop his weapon. He's not victim, he's an idiot at best, and a terrorist at worst.
You keep repeating these narratives, but youre just damaging your ien credibility.
Now im thinking '_cryptagion' agreed with me, i should probably double check my sources.
I'm a random person on the internet. I don't have any credibility, anymore than you do. And if you believe something on the internet just because someone you think has credibility said it, then you're just giving up your free will to someone else.
True. And i lie about everything that isnt sarcasm.
No im saying if you agree, it's reason to doubt.
How do you think people work?
How do you think this 'free will' works?
Do you think everyone's as dishonest as you?
What do you think 'credibility' is?
What do you think is going on with this wacky 'internet' thing?
Are you still butthurt over me tossing a ban at you for being an anti-genAI chud? You gotta get over petty stuff like that.
LOL that was you? App i use didn't say.
Okay, so, i no longer think you're malicious or being paid.
Watch the video, he never raised his rifle at the crowd
It didn't really look like he raised his weapon towards the crowd. He had it lowered until they either started yelling or shooting, hard to tell from the video, he only raised it into a running stance. It was still pointed mostly sideways.
I thought the video would be a slam dunk against him, but it just looks like he panicked when the shooting started and ran away.
Are we certain that this is the case? I cannot find video evidence and I am not inclined to believe the sources I have read.
Hexbear has the video. He absolutely run towards the crowd, and it looks like he ducks and starts raising the rifle.
While people are pointing guns at him, and potentially already shooting him. Anyone would panic in that situation. Fact of the matter is that he was perfectly peaceful until someone escalated massively.
That situation is one of his own creation. He wasn’t marching with his weapon, he hid it and only pulled it out in the middle.
Come on, man, you can’t tell me that that isn’t incredibly suspicious. If I saw someone do that at a protest, I would shoot them too. I’m not saying that the peacekeeper didn’t fuck up, he didn’t check his background, but his actions were definitely reasonable, given the situation.
I think their only mistake is going to a lib march when plenty of anarchists warned others to stay far away from it. I also think what you're doing is victim blaming.
Except he isn't a victim. He made a conscious choice to do something that a reasonable person would use force to stop. He wasn't "peacefully" walking, like the OP suggests. He went behind a wall and reappeared with a long rifle. That's the kind of thing right-wing terrorists would do.
I'm not going to enable your victim blaming. Disengage.
He ducks after you hear a round get fired. If someone is shooting at me, I run the fuck away and duck.
And he pulled the rifle towards his chest (not raising it) to stay balanced so he can run the fuck away from the guy who actually was shooting at him.
OK, let's put him aside totally for a moment. I want to know if you would leave a protest, grab a weapon you had hidden, and return to the protest?
I think hidden has a strong implication is that he didn't want it seen.
It sounds like it was in a bag, which to me is a valid way to carry a heavy item until he got to where he was going to practice the completely legal and allowed open-carry.
It's like saying my laptop is hidden because I keep it in my backpack and take it out when I get to a coffee shop.
Can you share it with the class? I couldn't find it on Hexbear or through a web search.
https://hexbear.net/post/5279995
??? All I see is him ducking and running after presumedly getting shot at. Who wouldn't do that? Gonna wait for more evidence before I take such a hard stance like you have man sheesh.
Yeah he’s obviously lying, he’s saying things happened then providing video that completely counters what he said. It’s just low effort rage bait.
Thanks.
I watched it several times in slow-mo. Seems to me like Arturo was walking towards the crowd before the peacekeeper fired, but he started running after the first shot in response to the shot. Looks like the barrel is down until shooting starts, at which point it goes up like 30° but still pointed at the ground. Video is quite blurry, from a distance, and doesn't show the lead-up or aftermath of the shooting.
Utah is an open-carry state and it doesn't seem like he was doing anything other than walking towards the protest with a gun, which is legal and expected behavior in that state.
But IMO Arturo is innocent until proven guilty, and if anything this is evidence that suggests his innocence.
This is correct. That said if you open carry you do so knowing any slight move can result in you being seen as threatening. It's a logical result of being armed and masked at a protest where a large part of the issue being protested is ice using unlawful force and authority while armed, masked and without any indicator that they are in fact police.
It's not victim blaming and it's not shooter advocating it's just saying this was both wildly foreseeable and incredibly unnecessary.
It’s perfectly legal behavior to open carry at a protest. But walking behind a wall and pulling out a gun? That’s definitely not expected behavior. You can’t tell me you would expect that at a protest.
It’s also not legal or expected behavior to hide your weapon after you are involved in a shooting and try to blend in with a crowd. That’s not legal anywhere in the US.
Concealed carry is legal in SLC. If you’re carrying a concealed weapon at a peaceful protest and you realize that the “peacekeepers” are armed, you might want to be obviously also armed to deter escalation (as we’ve seen advised on lemmy a bunch lately). However, pulling a weapon out of your bag in the middle of a crowd is almost certainly going to scare someone, so it’s probably best to go off to the side, unpack it out of sight, and rejoin the group afterwards.
I’m not a gun owner, but this seems like a totally reasonable course of action to me. Am I missing something?
Making it reasonable to shoot someone who does this. That's literally self defense, even if they fucked it up and shot someone else.
But he didn’t, he went off to the side behind a wall, right?
Those were your words, not mine. In fact, I think it's much more suspicious to hide and then pull out the weapon than it is to do it surrounded by people.
I was saying that it’s reasonable to go behind the wall, because doing it in the middle of a crowd could scare someone. Why do you think it’s more suspicious to hide? It’s a pretty big gun, I imagine the process of removing it from his bag would either take serious gymnastics or involve the gun at some point having up to a 30 degree angle from the ground.
Why do I think hiding a gun at a protest, then sneaking away to pull it out is suspicious? Is that a serious question? Because I would think the answer would be pretty obvious.
Also, I'm curious what your thoughts were on his actions when you first read about the shooting at the protest versus now, and how that compares to your thoughts on the actions of the guy who assassinated the two democrats were when you first heard about it, vs now.
Did your opinion of the accused in either event change at all? If so, what new bit of information made you change your mind? Because the only new bit of information about this particular guy and what he did is that he's allegedly a leftist. It seems to me, reading this thread, that that's all it took for a lot of leftists to suddenly be very OK with what he did, and calling him the victim.
It’s honestly not. Can we go through the steps? Concealed carry is legal in SLC protests (and guns are scary and crowds are excitable, so there’s no need to raise alarm unnecessarily), peacefully and openly carrying weapons at a protest is a strategy to deter escalation of violence (and once you see the peacekeepers are armed, the benefit gained by not having a visible weapon around is gone), and dropping out of the crowd to do it lowers the likelihood of someone getting spooked during the unpacking. Those are the three parts of the situation I see from my perspective, which one(s) do you find problematic/which would you describe differently?
I’m pretty sure I read about it for the first time in this post, so I can’t help you there, but I was thinking it sounded iffy until I watched the video. The video makes him look totally unsuspicious to me.
I don’t think my thoughts on the assassin have changed (he’s seemed like a maga monster the whole time)- did I miss something about that?
OK, let's do a little make believe here then. The same question, but you know for certain the person coming out of the alley is a right-wing MAGA chud. Does your answer change?
You mean I know they have committed politically motivated violence before or I know they’re a trump supporter?
The first one definitely changes my opinion. The second one doesn’t necessarily, it depends on how they handle themselves (most trump supporters I know are gun people, and there are way more wannabe tough guy trump supporters than there are people who commit political violence). The video doesn’t show something that looks like the rifleman is violent.
Ok, that’s actually what I wanted to hear. But keep in mind that, at the time this happened, the MAGA dude who assassinated two democrats was still at large, and the police had announced he intended to target the No Kings protests. On top of that, the fact that almost everyone expected (rightfully so, since it happened in several places), that there would be right-wing violence against protesters.
There were credible threats against the protests, and he still chose to show up with a concealed weapon, knowing both police and protestors would be on edge and fearful of their own safety. And so many people are now willing to just overlook that. That’s seriously problematic behavior.
?? I didn't see that? Is that what the cops said? Did anyone else say that?
Again where does this come from? Would be suspicious if verifiable.
Yes, witnesses who were there. He did not have the gun, he left the protest route and returned with the gun. Somehow, that gun got into his hands in the middle of the protest.
This video shows him when he was caught. Another protestor noticed the gun in the backpack, said something, and a second protestor bravely snatched the bag away from him and alerted the police.
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lbz1vf/someone_noticed_a_rifle_in_the_backpack_of_an_slc/
You're saying this with a lot of confidence you just shouldn't have here. Something's up, maybe memtal illness, maybe panic, maybe conspiracy, but something.
So, when you first heard of someone being shot at the protest, your first thought was "Something's up, maybe memtal illness, maybe panic, maybe conspiracy, but something"? Or is that your opinion now that he's allegedly a leftist?
Because if it's the latter, then how is that different than what MAGA does for right-wing terrorism? How is it different than what they are doing right now for a man who assassinated two democrats?
Something was off in the first descriptions.
Than the guy who purchased data on his targets walked in with a disguise, killed them, killed their dog, and posted a manifesto about it?
I guess it's not.
Which you didn't know about him when the first reports about it came out either. Before this person was thought to be a leftist, there was a lot of condemnation of his actions. But now that he's a friendly, that condemnation has suddenly vanished. That's the sort of mental gymnastics MAG is known for. Why are people suddenly bending over backwards giving him the benefit of the doubt, when everyone wasn't the day it happened?
I literally said it's not different!
And yes, my anarchist senses were tingling on the first reports here. I just knew.
Yeah, you caught me. Im the mystical anthropomorphized fuhrer-principle-but-real-and-for-anarchists.
This comes across as sarcasm to me, the way you phrased it. If that's not the case, then sorry for the misunderstanding.
No, no; totally the same. I was agreeing with you.
Really?