The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?

I’m pretty sure that that’s something that the average person just does not understand. As both an anarchist and a proponent of civilian firearm ownership, I’ve seen and participated in many discussions with people saying that “there’s no way you can fight the government, they have tanks/bombers/nukes/etc”. Like they think the government is just going to do precision drone strikes on all the insurgents and then it’ll be over. The inevitability of “collateral damage” doesn’t occur to them, and they have no idea how insurgencies work.

People on NCD probably do know better, but some have picked a side, and confirmation bias takes over from there.