“Is bloodshed on the horizon?”

That’s the question Stephon Lemons asks when he covered an open carry protest from several aligned left-wing activist groups in Phoenix (AZ) over the weekend.

Since you don’t every day see groups of left-wingers totin’ semi-automatic rifles, strolling down the sidewalk, I figured I would follow them and record this odd phenomenon via Facebook Live.

Earlier, the spokeswoman told me that someone with the Brown Berets might talk with me, but she later came up as I was recording the group with my iPhone, and told me the Brown Berets were keeping it zipped as well.

She also asked me to stop filming. And I told her I wasn’t going to do that, because we were on public property.

As I walked next to them, we would encounter obstacles, like parked cars, and so forth, and I mostly would go around the other side of the obstacle, and then catch back up with the group.

But at one point, I walked next to a dude in a yellow headscarf, whom I’d tried to talk with before, and I brushed against him, unintentionally.

I didn’t think much of it, as the sidewalk is only so big, but he apparently took offense, because in retaliation, he walked backwards into me, pushing me aside.

This is the sort of thing that I would normally expect from the right-wing militia-types, but, in reality, the group was little more than an ad hoc left-wing militia. So I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Like their right-wing counterparts, most of these guys don’t exactly reek of competence or experience, and that should be of concern to all of us. Well-trained people are predictable. It’s fear-filled amateurs like the SKS-toting nimrod from Meal Team Six that start squeezing of rounds into crowds when they hear a car backfire.

Lemon notes in his article the 1979 Greensboro massacre, in which the KKK and American Nazi Party shot up a march of the Communist Workers Party. I personally don’t think it will go down like that.

Instead, we’ll possibly see a bunch of left wing clowns and a bunch of right wing clowns square off and get into a shouting match, and then someone hiding in the back is going to crank off a round, just as they did on April 19, 1775 on Lexington Green. That’s going to trigger a panic, and then it’s probably going to devolve into a free-for-all, in which police officers trying to keep the peace between the groups will be caught in the crossfire.

I suspect we’d see a dozen people wounded by gunfire in such a scenario, with probably twice that number trampled or otherwise injured trying to flee the area.

At this time, I think it will likely be an isolated incident, not a modern “shot heard ’round the world.” It takes a lot to trigger a civil war. I don’t think we’re there yet, and hope we will never be.