You can dismiss the particulars of this pretty quickly. Wisconsin teachers, for example, have given back hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several years and personally capped their pay. All public employees in the state agreed to pension and health care concessions. Public-sector pay is lower than private-sector pay for similar jobs. You can go down the line.

But let’s focus on the image of public employees putting a machine gun to the head of local officials.

There have been a lot of attempts at false equivalencies (the last Republican Vice Presidential candidate of the United States is exactly the same as a random Daily Kos diarist) and a lot of attempts to explain away incendiary political rhetoric with a wave of the hand and something like “both sides do it.” But the responses above on their own refute this. They resort to the pretty common rhetoric of demonization to make their points. I have no interest in censoring their speech, but I sure want to highlight it.