Protesters....

I didn't say it was legal, I just said it was better.
I don't advocate violence but where I live we've been dealing with anti-logging protesters for decades. We have ways of doing things that get our point across and you won't be watching them on the NEWS AT 11.
One thing we've learned is not to make ourselves part of the story. The majority of the protesters would like nothing better than to catch a driver doing something illegal and dangerous. They want that. They thrive on that.
We had a bunch of tree huggers chain themselves to the big iron gate that goes across our private haul road. We asked them politely to unlock themselves and allow us to access our property. They refused.
We simply opened the gates with the protesters still chained to them. That scuffed them up a little but not too bad.
We sent the first wave of trucks and loggers through the gate. Then we closed the gate, still dragging the tree huggers across the road.
Dragging them back and forth across the asphalt shredded their clothes so when we opened the gates a second time and then closed them again they begin to develop a pretty good case of road rash.
They lost their taste for protest after that. They unchained themselves from our gate, limped over to their VW bus, and left.
We didn't have any problem with protesters after that.

 

I doubt seriously if your average vegan/animal lover/ stuck-in-the -sixties wannabe hippy champion for social justice will be packing a gun.
They don't like guns, remember?
He's more apt to wail away on you with an organically grown zucchinni and I don't think Attack with Vegetable qualifies as a situation requiring deadly force to defend.

 

Maybe. Maybe not. We never saw a cop afterward and nobody ever called about it.
Nobody got killed and it never made the papers or the tv news.
There were four young people from out of the area who were treated at the local emergency room for road rash but they refused to give any information.