This essay contains graphic discussion of gun violence, including suicide. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
I am writing this before the sun comes up, delaying my morning run until it’s daylight because there’s a bear loose in my rural New England neighborhood. He’s hungry—has destroyed a few chicken coops overnight in the last two weeks—and I won’t go out alone and unarmed until my neighbors are up and about; until the sunlight and morning activities have sent him back into his forest home. My landlords (my apartment is a segmented portion of a large Victorian) escort their dogs outside to pee after dark, with a gun in hand, and will do so until the bear issue has been resolved by the Wildlife authorities.
What I Know
First things first: nobody can claim I lack the personal experience or the authority of personal experience, grief, or loss to speak on this one.
I grew up in the rural South, among hunters, and used to hide in my bedroom as my father and uncles skinned animals they had killed. There were guns all over the place throughout my childhood, most of them loaded. I touched one without permission when I was six years old, at a neighbor’s house. The neighbor promptly grabbed a ping-pong paddle and spanked me (yes, poor white trash in the rural South still do that) and sent me home, where my parents compounded the punishment by sending me to cut a switch. (For the record, this is one of the handful of corporal punishment experiences in my life that I think was warranted; I recoiled from guns after.)
Readers of my discussion of suicide (How To Keep Breathing, No Matter How Much Things Suck) know that I found someone I loved after a gun suicide, and that I very nearly followed suit. I know what a human head looks like with a hole blasted through it. I know what color brains turns when splattered against a wall. I know what a body smells like when a gun has turned it into a corpse. And I know what gun oil tastes like.
I do not own a gun. As someone who lives with C-PTSD and regularly battles depression, I cannot be trusted to own a gun. If I ever live with a gun, it will be because I have married a man who is mentally stable and sound, lacking my issues, and he will keep it in a gun safe to which I do not have, and will never have, the code.
Guns are for killing, and they’re for killing in a particularly nasty, effective, grisly, horrifying manner.
What I Used To Think
Before COVID, I believed that America needed much stricter gun regulations. The argument that I found most convincing related to driving. One must pass a test, get a license, and purchase insurance coverage. The latter made the most sense to me. I saw it as a potential way to let the wisdom of the free market solve some of the problem: insurance companies are pretty good at calculating risk. One career path I considered was that of an actuary, and I know how intense the mathematical preparation is. Actuaries do in fact know things. I believed in the potential of rigorous mathematics to calculate risk and set rates appropriately, and thought this would go a long way towards addressing America’s gun violence problem. I believed this despite the fact that many areas of the US, including Washington DC and Chicago, have strict gun control regulations and sky-high gun violence anyway, thinking that some equivalent of being pulled over and having one’s license checked would eventually work to get illegal guns off the street. (Yes, I used to be quite naive; nay, stupid.)
What Happened
COVID happened, and I watched countries with intense gun control, like Australia, turn into totalitarian nightmares. Tweeps I had followed for years told me stories of being questioned by the police because they were outdoors exercising (you know, getting vitamin D and improving their fitness—two things that sharply limit COVID mortality risk) for a few minutes past their daily limit.
I watched prominent Australians whose principles I had formerly trusted turn into propagandists, pretending that a detainment camp was a combination health spa and porn set.
The experiences of people in Australia and the accounts out of Shanghai, including the Chinese government rounding up and murdering household pets to limit COVID risk, have made me cry more than once. Usually they just make me shiver, with gratitude.
This moral atrocity happened as a consequence of a respiratory illness with a survival rate well over 99%.
What I Think Now
I am so grateful for the fact that my fellow Americans are well and thoroughly armed. I wish that all Americans who are blessedly free from mental health issues would become safely, responsibly, and properly educated about gun safety—and then armed.
America is an enormous country, and the only way that our government could successfully lock us all down would involve hundreds of thousands of police officers, soldiers, and members of the National Guard, turning on their family, friends, and neighbors. This is extremely unlikely to happen, for which I give thanks. Without a centralized registry, there is no way to go about attempting to confiscate weapons before an authoritarian takeover attempt. Thank Yahweh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Buddha, Krishna, and anyone else who might be listening, or might have helped, that those of us, including me, who used to argue for such foolishness never got our way.
The purpose of a well-armed populace is for any authoritarian power—American or not—to be entirely sure that they’re prepared to make the day they impose their authoritarian rule the bloodiest day in human history. Short of that, they’d better not try it.
As my grandmother would have said, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, nobody ever will.
Why I’m Writing This Today
Everyone knows about the tragedy in Texas yesterday. There are no words that can properly capture the magnitude of the grief and horror or the depths of the trauma, no excuse possible for the perpetrator, and no way that it is, ever will be, or ever can be okay.
The problem of mass murder is complex and requires a multi-faceted approach. The killers are almost universally male, which is not a surprise: our culture has been demonizing masculinity and robbing young men of purpose for a long time. The mental health system is deplorable and getting worse, as our psychological organizations give themselves over to Wokeness and demonize aspects of traditional masculinity we desperately need more, not less of, including stoicism.
Our social ties are broken and they’re not being repaired. Crime is on the rise, as police are demonized and the political left calls to defund and abolish them.
Americans are more desperate than ever for the government to take care of them, including the post-tragedy cries for gun control laws (which, presumably, the “defund the police” types think would enforce themselves.)
Our society is deeply sick. We need to treat causes and not symptoms, and to take an approach of, like all good medicine, first doing no harm.
I don’t know what the answers are, but I am more certain than ever what the answer isn’t. It isn’t disarming the good people and leaving guns to be held only in the hands of people who are willing to break the law; nor is it arming only the people who meet with the approval of the same government from whose overreach they are intended to defend.
The children in Texas who died yesterday died for nothing. The brutal reality is that most humans die for nothing. We are mortal and we get the time that we get, no more and no less.
Their deaths are only special for the infamous manner in which their lives were taken and the years of which they were robbed, as well as the innocence in which their memories will be forever frozen in the minds and hearts of those who knew and loved them.
We all turn into memories, in the end. May theirs bring some comfort to their families.