The inconvenience of being racist

Growing up as an airhead, oblivious to the forces in the world around me, I never realized how much my life overlapped with the era of the great civil rights movements until years later. I was a toddler when we got orders to Brownsville, Texas, for my father's first ship command, and moved steadily northward from 1960 to 1965, landing on mid-coast Maine for my father's second ship command.

In Maryland from 1960 or '61 to 1964, there must have been signs of segregation somewhere, but I didn't run into them. In fact, I remember a Black family in our church and school system. I had no idea how ground-breaking that was. Particularly socially inept, I wasn't mingling well with "my own people," let alone exploring across racial lines. I was still just figuring out toilet discipline and the proper way to dispose of boogers.

There were Black sections of town in Annapolis. I just figured they preferred it there. My own family lived in a weird little rental neighborhood called Rogers Heights. Our finances were artificially strained for the first ten years of my life because my parents were unable to unload the first house they'd bought, in an area of Connecticut they wouldn't live in again for another thirty years. The house did sell eventually, which bumped us up a few notches in the middle class from then on.

In all of our travels, from one duty station to the next, or to make regular visits to my grandparents and the cousins who lived in their vicinity, we just piled into the station wagon and went. Motels might be kind of nice or a little weird, but nothing interfered with our passage beyond the usual risks of travel by car.

Thanks to the Internet and social media, we get to see story after story of famous people who stood up for their Black companions looking for rooms and meals in various contexts during the long era of open and legalized segregation. Travel in white supremacist America placed challenges in front of Black and other minority citizens and visitors that could go far beyond mere inconvenience.

The white people who began to push back on segregation could have retreated if the situation escalated to violence. Only when white activists ventured into the deep South to mess with the foundations of political repression did they fall victim to racist murderers themselves. The movement never hinged on one specific act of white resistance. It built on each and all of them. In the case of entertainers and sports figures, the white celebrities used the leverage of their marketability to force the issue on behalf of Black colleagues. The conflict was much more dire in the trenches of voter registration and integration of general public spaces.

Everyone benefitted from the diminishment of segregation. I would say the end of it, but we know that it didn't end. Racists don't stop being racist when they no longer have as much legal right to express it openly and by force. But the freedom to mingle if you so choose and the convenience to travel in whatever racial mix you happen to collect makes your life simpler.

Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that racism and labor rights were entwined. He presented a threat to the economic order that went well beyond just free movement through the infrastructure of society. Aside from the uber-wealthy, we all benefit from dropping racial and ethnic concerns and talking instead about the division and distribution of resources and the fruits of our labors. The ownership class wants you talking about anything but that. They want you embracing the inconvenience of segregation again. Segregation cements a class structure that benefits the people on top no matter how they got there.

In the old world from which the Americas were colonized, aristocracy led to money -- until it didn't, as the 19th and 20th centuries converged, but that's another story. In the Americas, particularly the one the United States refers to as America, money conferred aristocracy. Fortunes were made, exploiting the land and imported labor, and conning the indigenous people with treaty after broken treaty.

Right now, the top job in the US government is occupied by an actual criminal, a convicted felon with a long history of fraud, wage theft, and bad debts. All signs indicate massive insider trading by the chief executive, his family, his cabinet, and many other elected officials. The corruption and bribery are off the charts, to the outrage of some and the admiration of others. The racism is just bait to keep a passionate minority of segregationists voting Republican. We're all getting screwed by the corruption and incompetence of the party in power.

I don't have Black friends, only Black acquaintances, and I've never been in a romantic relationship with a Black person, but I refuse to let the government tell me who I can associate with. It goes beyond me, to every citizen. I don't want this to be a country where race or political party become more important than human rights and full participatory citizen government. Anything less is just an unnecessary pain in the ass. The people who look back on the period of segregation as some kind of golden age are either idiots or calculating greedheads using bigots as a reliable voting bloc oblivious to the underlying financial motives.

I've written before about how democracy is itself a pain in the ass of a different kind. Government by the people requires that the people, generation after generation, pay attention to what their supposed representatives are doing. All government invites corruption, because officials have power as well as responsibility. Power is a drug. Responsibility is a burden. Which one sounds more attractive? But our only hope at some measure of control over corruption rests in the democratic process at some level.

James Madison believed that educated voters were essential to a thriving democratic republic. He wasn't wrong, although he overestimated the American thirst for education. By the time I came along, school was something to endure until you either dropped out or graduated and got down to the fun part, earning as much money as you could, to spend on self indulgence.

The government had been controlling our information since the Second World War, because of national security concerns. Students succeeded in the social settings of school in various ways, peaking at different times: the high school quarterback and the head cheerleader who went no further afterward; the brainy kid who went to an Ivy League college; the ones who became lawyers or doctors; the vast rabble who just found jobs of some kind and lived their lives while The Government operated in the background. Depending on your era, you might have had to perform mandatory military service, but the Vietnam War finally ended that. Little by little, government got turned into a separate entity, or so it seemed. Our grubby little hands didn't have to be pried off of the levers of power. We just let go.

To meet our constitutional responsibility, adult citizens need to think of ourselves as pre-legislators. The function of the system needs to occupy more of our time than we would like it to. Democracy in this country, or probably any country, has never received the attention that it should. The business of being human  is so much more compelling, and generally easier to connect with.

The citizens of the privileged majority have known intellectually that we have freedoms and powers legally guaranteed, but we leave them sitting, for the most part. The First Amendment protects the press and free expression in general. Provocative shit-stirrers troll the public to remind us that they can. The Second Amendment facilitates the gun industry and enables individuals to amass ridiculous arsenals of killing hardware to remind us that they can. All well and good, but the corporate press has decided to be more corporate than journalistic, and the arsenals will not stop moneyed interests from skewing financial policy to direct more and more wealth their way.

In November, remember that districts don't vote. People do. We don't have the luxury of more than two parties, and only one party is making the slightest effort to maintain and expand the progress we made toward a freer and more convenient society before conservatives started cranking us back the other way beginning in 1981 and ratcheting up steadily to the present crisis.

Sorry, can't help you until just the right person is killed

 The street execution of Alex Pretti has galvanized resistance to the regime's overreach from both the right and the left. This surge has added to the criticism from right and left against the regime from its first swings of the wrecking ball in Jan. 20, 2025, and merged them into calls for actual removal of at least some of the malicious, incompetent toadies placed at the head of every cabinet department.

Is it a general human thing or just an American thing that an untenable situation can persist and grow, causing harm and death until it reaches a tipping point that triggers a wave of repudiation? It takes a certain level of infection to activate a society's immune system. Just the right people have to die.

It's hard to care about people you don't know. It's even hard to care about people you do know, when acknowledging them puts you in danger. How well do you know them?

Human sacrifices pile up, each one perhaps bringing a few more recruits to whatever cause is in play. The crisis we face now is no game. And it clearly goes way beyond brown people. Some of you may recall that some of us were saying that, back while there was still time to vote against the thunderous asshole now devastating the United States from its highest office. Ah well, water under the bridge...with the corpses of the fallen floating on it.

Comfortable people won't surrender comfort. People in precarious circumstances don't want to drop into a worse predicament. People in power do their best to keep the masses divided, distracted, and weak. But eventually, the right person is killed to break the tenuous stability of the oppressor.

In the current crisis, it has taken something like the death of Alex Pretti to alert masses of complacent white men that their oppressor isn't just DEI policies and quota hires, or women with the audacity to want to live as fully free and equal citizens. Sure, from their point of view it is all of those things, but now it's also a government trying to limit the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. Surprise! It wasn't the Democrats after all.

Don't be fooled that the complaints from the right indicate any softening of their traditional prejudices. Much of the objection to the regime from the right focused on how the regime hadn't been as odious as they promised to be. Hard right candidates are being primaried from even farther right. The problem will remain long after the visible pustule in the White House has been lanced and drained. In the meantime, however, the enemy of my enemy is temporarily convenient. A classic case of "right answer for the wrong reason," but the right answer nonetheless. We just have to be mindful that the next candidate the right puts forward will be trying to advance a lot of the same agenda without the conspicuous, proud offensiveness of the current reality TV cast.

The murder of US citizens

Customs and Border Patrol has murdered a law-abiding American citizen exercising his First and Second Amendment rights. News and video of the cold-blooded street execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, Jan. 24 spread rapidly. The blatant criminality of the federal agents was obvious. The regime is trying very hard to provoke a resister to open fire on a federal agent. Resisters are resisting the temptation to jettison public sympathy by a foolish act of violence.

In a country of 340 million people, odds are it won't happen to you. Right around here, we have no large concentration of targets for ICE and CBP. People with empathy and a broader world view are speaking up and demonstrating, much to the amusement of the more conservative individuals who believe that if it isn't happening right in front of them it's someone else's problem. The Puritan heritage adds, aloud or silently, that those people probably brought it on themselves in some way, too. In any case, no point getting all het up over something that probably will never affect you directly.

Won't it, though?

In our business, we cater to a lot of visitors who come to play around the lake when it's thawed, and on the snow in our legendary winters. We also serve the locals. This winter, the customers we've seen have been very normal. They exhibit a normal level of cheerfulness, engage in only normal amounts of chiseling for discounts, and buy at the price levels we commonly expect. However, we wait hours, or even days, between them. Something is suppressing demand. Beyond our narrow interests, the town itself has seemed unusually quiet.

The business presents a scrupulously apolitical front, although upper management is lifelong Republican. Their more politically connected relatives opposed the current occupant of the Oval Office in his first bid for it in 2016. I don't know if they had rolled over by 2020. One of them told me that they did not vote for the current occupant in his 2024 bid, when the state of New Hampshire as a whole went for Kamala Harris.

Down here in the labor pool, I have opposed the conservatives for decades. I don't know where my only co-worker stands, because I don't want to complicate our working relationship. I don't get the sense that he's a fan of the regime. Even just for practical purposes, the destructive rampage of DOGE and the continued smash and grab that has followed have made life more difficult for everyone, by hobbling useful agencies like the National Weather Service. The people I spend time with the most are not the kind to protest, ever. Bitch and grumble, yes. The founders of the shop used to growl all the time about chiseling rich people, but always voted with the rich people's political candidates. I don't see that changing.

As I travel through the semi-rural, heavily wooded suburbia that this once genuinely rural area has become, I see a few shrines to the authoritarian, racist regime, a smaller number of outright public displays of opposition, and mile after mile of noncommittal anonymity.

It's been mostly lousy weather for winter recreation, as the drought makes even downhill ski areas have to worry about having enough water. I don't know how their attendance numbers have been, but I do know that I have seen very little weekend traffic on Route 16. It was a little heavy southbound on Martin Luther King Day, as whoever had accumulated at the ski areas up north all drained south at more or less the same time. In "normal" years, they would have surged in together in more of a cohesive parade. That did not happen this year.

It's hard to watch the news of what's happening in Minnesota, and what happened in Portland, OR, and Los Angeles over the summer as well as the Blackhawk raid on the apartment building in Chicago. The goons have arrived in Portland, Maine, now, where they are faring no better than they have in any other city they've tried to victimize. They may be doing worse. I read one post from a local describing how the immigrant and minority residents are not clustered into contiguous neighborhoods, forcing the goons "federal agents" to have to hunt around for them individually. And resistance groups had already organized many of the mitigation tactics that evolved in Minneapolis, sheltering and supporting targeted groups from having to travel around on daily errands that would expose them to abduction.

If it isn't happening right around you, it can be very hard to imagine it being real. That's no excuse for letting heroic resisters get gunned down, but the isolation from the hot zones of confrontation also limits what a person can do to help. We can send money, hold vigils, contact our elected officials, write op-ed pieces, join bridge brigades that try to raise awareness of the problem. That creates its own problem, as people unaffected by the brutality grow weary of the constant calls to do something, when "something" remains pretty nebulous. 

What would a general strike look like around here where employment is dispersed over a wide area dotted with genuinely small businesses, mostly oriented in winter toward meeting tangible needs of the locals? Maybe a few people from around the general area believed strongly enough in the cult to go to DC for Jan. 6, 2021, but even if their fervor has reversed, and they have turned against their god-king, the kinds of event opportunities offered to them don't appeal to their "storm the fortress" and "hang Mike Pence" sensibilities.

I don't have the kind of snappy answer that appeals to the general public. I don't even have a succinct, policy-nerd answer. I'm not really that great a policy nerd, being rather like the pitchfork and torch crowd when it comes to direct action. So I hang back and wait for cooler heads to lay out the more effective long-term strategy and tactics.

Guns are like sex

Republicans in New Hampshire have generally been producing the kind of legislation they produce everywhere else, encroaching on women's rights, gutting public education, chatting about returning to segregated schools, playing games with the tax laws to create the illusion that they're lowering property taxes when they're just shifting the burden to a different column in the ledger... the usual crap. However, they have introduced a bill that favors a controversial position of my own: firearms education.

We live in a country where there are already more guns than people. They're here. We have a whole amendment to the Constitution dedicated to preserving the right of ownership for ordinary citizens. It's been stretched way out of shape to help the firearms industry move vast amounts of merchandise, but the principle unfortunately continues to make sense in our primitive species. Any person should have the right to be armed.

Many of us, myself included, have not prioritized personal weaponry. I mean, I have a couple of firearms, and I've gone to the range as few times, but I can think of a lot of reasons not to be armed. Plus it's expensive and time consuming to become competent and remain in practice. You might think it's as simple as pulling the little lever thingy and whatever you're aiming at troubles you no more, but the device itself requires attentive care and maintenance. Your skills require regular range time. Ammunition itself isn't cheap. If you want more advanced tactical skills, that's another whole layer of training. That's also beyond the scope of what the Republicans and I propose is a good idea.

Here's the thing: guns are a part of the fabric of our society. Refusing to teach young people how they work and how to handle them is the same as insisting on abstinence-only sex education. You can be comprehensively educated about sex and decide to abstain. There are a lot of good reasons to abstain. There are also reasons to participate over a wide range of styles. Deciding from a place of ignorance is never a good idea. So is just learning it on the street.

Educating everyone robs the knowledge of its insider power for the people who had already sought it out. Giving everyone a functional base of exposure to the technology and terminology means that arguments against use have more strength. The aficionados can't sneer at your lack of technical vocabulary. Sure, there will always be higher levels of immersion, and changing slang to try to evade the outer circles. But no one will be completely outside the circle.

Obviously, the teachers have to be well screened, but that's true anyway. And the curriculum has to be scrupulously neutral. So the text of the bill may allow for or even nudge toward a pro-gun bias, and that's not good. But the basic idea is sound.

Guns are widely available. They will remain pretty accessible in this country unless there are some drastic -- and probably undesirable -- changes in government. Sure, we need to tighten up access quite a bit, but it's decades too late to make them all go away.

Even now, Second Amendment folks on the "left" are coming out in response to ICE atrocities, to indicate that the stakes for the front line agents might be higher than the happy hooligans anticipated. It's not a great development, but it does demonstrate that the Bill of Rights cuts both ways.

Levels of training on both sides probably span a range from utter noobs to ex-military or law enforcement. If actual fighting broke out, it would be a mess. That's true of fighting in general. The mess gets worse as the use of weapons increases. But one thing that could cut through the gunslinger fantasies would be actual education. It gives everyone a basic informed vocabulary. It sets a baseline standard for what everyone knows about the uses, dangers, rights, and responsibilities inherent in having and using a gun.

Next, institute my plan for driver education that requires anyone getting a license for the first time to have to use a bicycle for transportation for a full year, whether it's 12 continuous months (impractical with our winters) or just a total of 12 months collected over no more than a three-year period.

Why the 2A crowd ain't shooting:

 There are two main reasons that the patriots of the Second Amendment aren't picking off the shock troops that the current regime is sending into selected communities to pound them into submission.

First, they have generally voted reliably Republican, which means accepting if not endorsing all party policies. This includes racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and Christian nationalism. So they sense victory, not a threat. For many of them, ICE is a dream job.

Second, they probably know better. Opening fire on this government would just invite a devastating counter-offensive. It would justify the claims of the regime, that there's an insurrection. It would tilt public sympathy in favor of "law and order" even when that actually represents a further assault on the Bill of Rights. Wars are only entertaining at a distance.

The widespread ownership of guns in this country contributes to the virtual impossibility that the government could actually occupy the country as a whole against its will. If the entire military supported a government crackdown, they could devastate large areas, but would still have to deal with unconventional warfare until the resistance got bored with it. Anything short of full military cooperation leads to a paramilitary force like ICE as the regime's goon squad. They can be brutal and lethal in a limited area, but can't hold it for the long term.

If combat becomes the norm, certain places will turn into battle zones, while others remain physically untouched, albeit economically devastated. All the while, China and Russia will observe, smiling, while running psyops to fan the flames, and funding insurgents to keep them interested.

Safety depends on consent

A piece on NPR this morning about Squirrel Hill and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting mentioned that it was a "safe" neighborhood.

The devotees of armed force like to remind the rest of us that no place is safe. And they are right. Unless you are in some super-fortified safe room -- in which you are a prisoner of fear -- you may encounter an evil person any time, anywhere. But the odds are better in some places than in others.

I lived in a safe neighborhood in West Annapolis in the 1980s. Just a few doors up the street, someone was murdered in their home. As I recall, that was a spousal murder. It was still a murder. A couple of years later, on a slightly sketchier residential street in Edgewater, the guy next door wigged out on PCP and fired off a few rounds at something imaginary before sprinting up the street stripping his clothes off. Years before that, in Coral Gables, Florida, I found a .32 slug from our crazy neighbor flattened against the wall of our house. She was a drinker, who kept the pistol at the head of her bed. Good thing the houses in that neighborhood had thick masonry walls. We never heard a shot. She could have done it any time, even before we moved in. Just another day.

Mass shootings and ideologically motivated murder have increased in this country since the mid 20th Century, adding to the ongoing death toll that merely stems from the ugly side of human nature. Our own citizens subscribe to enough homicidal ideologies to supply us with atrocities that require no invaders or sneaky terrorists from abroad. We rate the safety of a neighborhood on its record of crime and violence. But ideological violence leaps over the local customs between neighbors, the consensual agreement to live and let live.

Safety depends on consent. The residents of a place agree that they will work with and around each other without resorting to forceful confrontation. They will respect each other's boundaries. In the best cases, they will enjoy the experience and expanded point of view brought to them by a diverse population. But even lacking a diverse population of residents, people can cultivate a peaceful attitude if enough of them choose to do so.

All this is for nothing, the armed and dangerous crowd tells us. The only path to peace is through the threat of mutually assured destruction or by eradicating everyone who holds an opposing viewpoint. Anything less is cowardly.

For decades now, the promoters of an armed society have been telling us that anyone must be prepared for a gunfight. As the rhetoric creates an ever more paranoid and volatile population, their prophecy fulfills itself. I see armed men all the time, just going about their lives: shopping, gassing up the truck, serving on town boards, with at least one gun visible. With permitless concealed carry, they could have a couple more tucked in various crevices on their person. A couple of weeks ago it was a scrawny young dude with a 12-pack of beer under one arm, and a handgun bigger than his skinny thigh almost pulling his jeans down as he climbed into his truck.

The Second Amendment cancels out the First, if the threat of armed response is what makes people shut up and ignore each other's behavior. Flip the bird at someone who drives like a sociopath and you may find out just how much of a sociopath he is. It was always true. Anyone might have a gun, regardless of the laws. But the more we enable and encourage the idea that deadly force is normal, the more of it we will see. Deadly force may be a last resort, but feel free to hop right to it with only the briefest glance at other options on your way by. Homicidal ideology plus an arsenal of firearms leads you right to Squirrel Hill, or a grocery store in Kentucky. It breaches the agreement of safety wherever it arrives.

Every time I've considered carrying a gun I've decided that it would probably make a situation worse rather than better. Because we do not yet live in an actual war zone, by the time you know that deadly force is justified you have probably already lost that battle. Our stereotypical movie cowboys of the mythical old west weren't fighting off muggers. They were calling each other out in duels. Or the sodbusters were engaged in guerrilla warfare with the ranchers. Or the gang of outlaws would sweep down on the town, where the brave sheriff and his deputies would pick them off. In every case, the participants knew that they were in a defined conflict. It was right there in the fictional script.

The racists and antisemites in this country who want to eliminate people they deem undesirable are eager to define the conflict and declare war. They have no use for conventions of safety. Perhaps they would feel differently if they were immersed in a lengthy conflict that destroyed a lot of property and killed a lot of their friends, but you'll never convince them of that by imagination alone. They imagine glorious victory and rivers of blood from their enemies. The same optimism has ushered in every war since the first pre-human picked up a stick and showed his tribe-mates how great it was to bust heads.

That first war led to the proliferation of sticks. A secret weapon is only a secret until you use it. Then everybody wants one. And no one imagines themselves on the receiving end of it. That reality sets in later, when the glorious conflict turns into a quagmire. And people start to yearn for peace, rest, and safety.

AR-15s and stuff like that

I just got a commission to work on some drawings for political advertising. The first assignment was easy: it supported environmental science. The second one is extremely hard, and it may make or break my chances to draw for hire for any other installments in the campaign. This is a bummer, because overall I support the "progressive" policies that this group espouses.

The second target of the ad campaign is gun control, notably the control of so-called assault weapons.

Let me be clear. I don't like the proliferation of guns. I find the point of view that we have to be ready to kill each other at a moment's notice extremely depressing. I deplore the use of semi-automatic, militarily-styled weapons as fetish objects, and particularly their use to slaughter crowds of what we call innocent people. That being said, I hear the arguments of the pro-gun contingent, that murderers use a much greater variety of weapons than the "assault" category, and that militarily styled weapons in responsible hands are just a different style of projectile thrower, better for some uses and worse for others.

AR-15s are kind of like the pit bull of guns. People get cranked up over a breed of dog which might or might not be more prone to take someone's face off or mutilate someone else's family pet, and out come all the pit bull devotees with their stories of loving canine companions who live in homes full of happy children. We have a mass shooting and the voices rise again to ban the weapon. Other voices shout back about mental health care. Supporters of the particular piece of killing hardware make their points again about the total acceptability of the tool itself, and the Constitutional amendment that guarantees every citizen's right to have as many as they can afford.

I also hear the arguments specifically aimed at restricting militarily-styled rifles. Militarily styled weapons feed into a fantasy that does not have animals as its targets. Armies don't fight deer. They don't even fight grizzlies and mountain lions. They don't fight coyotes, peccaries, groundhogs, or raccoons. Armies of humans aim high-capacity, automatic rifles at each other to kill each other. The purpose of a military weapon is to put a round or rounds through the flesh and bone of an adversary who would be just as happy to reciprocate.

How much does form follow function? Much of the sinister looks of a militarily-styled weapon grow from the design requirements to make it do what it does with the least amount of undesirable feedback to the shooter. These include recoil, heat, and muzzle rise. Even a silencer and flash suppressor have actual uses during certain hunting conditions.

All that being said, when I looked at a half-dozen "best deer rifle" lists, nothing with military styling headed any of them. The "best" deer rifles were bolt-action, with a capacity of about three shots. Militarily styled weapons did appear in every list, but as an option for the shooter already so inclined. If you want that style of rifle, reviewers have checked out a few choices. If the militarily-styled rife is your preference, you'll then want to accessorize it to make it work better for you.

This does not answer why the militarily-styled rifle is your choice. People are attracted to some weird stuff, that's for sure. However, lots of people like things that aren't used to kill. It's the killing part that moves the gun hobby from harmless diversion to political firestorm. It's what motivates people to take a position inspired by the perfectly valid desire to go about their daily lives without wondering when they might be caught in a hail of lead.

I'm left with an approaching deadline and a nuanced situation I'm asked to depict in a simple manner. So I'll do the drawing and take the check, but I guarantee that it will not have the desired effect except on readers who were already inclined to agree. As much as I support the Parkland survivors, I see this election turning on other issues. Some people I know who are Republicans who don't particularly care for religious people or hunters will still vote the party on the basis of other issues, or they won't vote at all. And the real participants in the debate will continue to throw statistics and Constitutional interpretations at each other in an endless war that no one wins.

Fundraising opportunity

Thinking of suicide?

You’ll probably use a gun.

Whether your problems are medical, financial, mental, emotional, or you’re just tired of living, you can seek the quick and effective release of a bullet without government interference, thanks to the US Constitution and the tireless efforts of the National Rifle Association to secure the rights of gun owners and users. It’s your life, and your right. So why not show your gratitude with a bequest to the NRA? For far less than the cost of an inadequate retirement account, you can buy a nice handgun AND have plenty left over to show us some love and help future gun owners to secure their liberty. Remember us in your will. Mention us in your note, and we’ll send your family a lovely walnut box for your ashes. Donations above $10,000 qualify for a solid pine coffin, if you choose not to be cremated. See our website for details.

Could have been produced by the
National Rifle Association of America 11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax, VA 22030
But it wasn’t really.

Thoughts, prayers, and argument

Another lone gunman has raised the bar yet again for mass shootings in the USA.

My employer's son was at Virginia Tech in 2007. He just missed being in one of the classrooms where that shooter struck. Ten years later, he lives and works in Las Vegas. He dodged these bullets, too. But I wonder how the world looks to a young person whose life has already been closely invaded by unhinged murderers not once but twice.

Along with normalizing virulent bigotry in the name of free speech, we have normalized personal violence. America was settled at gunpoint. The wave of white people moved westward, hunting, gathering, and subduing the natives as it went. A gun was a tool, like an ax or a plow. The gun was woven into our national identity here far more than anywhere else. It is as American as the flag, and more widely worshipped.

Popular fiction has long celebrated heroes who can handle a shootin' iron. From tall tales around the camp fire to pulp fiction to radio, movies, and television, we admire the man who says little while his gun barks a sharp response to the impertinence of evil. And our super villains push the arms race. Deadly combat is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage.

Actually, singing solo, unaccompanied, on a stage in front of a large audience is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage. This probably explains the greater popularity of gunplay.

I'm sure that watching people drop before your hail of lead is very satisfying. Many of these killers have already accepted that this will be the last thing they do. Good luck figuring out how to detect those tendencies in a free-range population.

Here in the Land of the Free, we must be careful when we tell people what they cannot do or own. But how many times do we have to see someone misuse a high-capacity weapon before we acknowledge that the tool itself is part of the problem?

When I first got a handgun, I had the weirdest flood of thoughts. I looked at it and saw all the ways in which it could inflict suffering. I could shoot someone else. I could shoot myself. I could shoot an animal. I could put a bullet hole in anything I could hit. I did not buy the gun. My first wife already owned it. It was never enough gun for her, it was just the gun she could afford at the time. She left it behind when she left me.

The idea of inflicting suffering repelled me, I'm happy to say. But we are primitive creatures who have killed since before the invention of language. In all those years, some of us have clearly enjoyed it more than others. That willingness to push things to the ultimate extreme lives inside all of us. It's controlled in some, and unbridled in others.

My gun-worshipping friends repeat over and over that humans are dangerous creatures, and that access to weapons is all that will save the good ones from the bad ones. Sometimes, people get killed who don't deserve it. That's an unfortunate side effect. To the gun believer, it reinforces their contention that everyone should be armed, in order to participate fully in the exchange of lead when it inevitably breaks out.

That sounds incredibly bleak to me. It may be true, but it's sad. Any family picnic in a park, any public entertainment, any convergence of people whatsoever, may be interrupted by a murderer. Get used to it. It's the will of the people and the intent of our founders.

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the other forms that had been tried. Granted, a majority could vote to give their government strong police powers, and agree that only trained professionals in the government's service should be allowed to have the most powerful weapons. But we already voted to let the wealthy have all the money, and now they're using it to crush ordinary citizens. In other words, a free society needs to pay attention and stay in control of the people's government to keep the power from being misused.

I wonder if it can be done. How do you keep everyone informed at all times about the actions of all the public officials at all levels of government, in real time? The internet? That hacker-infested, troll-plagued repository of convincing disinformation? What else ya got?

I wish I had an answer. A lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes tied. That concept has been attributed to a number of famous people, but its origin matters far less than its validity. Especially now, a lie can travel at the speed of light. So can the truth, but a good lie sounds convincing, and a great lie can cast doubt on the truth.

And then there's opinion. An opinion may turn out to be true. It may sound so attractive that its supporters treat it as true, regardless. All this competes for attention in a busy world where increasing numbers of strivers struggle to stay alive and feel like it's worth something. We are asked to make quick decisions about policies with far-reaching consequences. We are represented by elected officials that most of us don't fully trust, because we don't have time to keep track of all the influences  on them.

Broad-brush government haters and conspiracy theorists simplify their lives by condemning the whole thing. It's rotten, they all stink, destroy it all. Maybe they scale it back to certain departments and party affiliations, but a nihilist view of government in general is the foundation of both anarchy and tyranny.

By now I'm sure that someone has already posted the opinion that the tragedy in Las Vegas could have been contained with much lower losses if trained individuals in the crowd, openly and legally carrying their own automatic weapons, had been allowed to identify the target and pin him down with return fire. If we really live in a land where outbreaks of gunplay need to be tolerated, we all need not just weapons, but combat training as well. The best remedy for bad speech is more speech. The best remedy for bad gun use is super-precise, heroically competent, instant retaliation. That would obviate the need for heavily armed police forces and eliminate the lag time between calling 911 and the actual arrival of help.

When you're writing the script, you get to pick who wins. Reality is seldom so courteous.

Police misconduct further complicates any simplistic prescription. Armored vehicles and extensive arsenals present quite a temptation. As we learn from many reports of misbehavior ranging from mildly questionable to outright heinous in both law enforcement and the armed forces, some who serve are gratifying a personal urge to dominate more than a lofty calling to protect. Anarchy or tyranny will serve their purposes equally well.

Anyone with a heart feels wounded when we hear of a murder, mass or otherwise. Naturally, those inclined to care will offer warm words at the very least. Those inclined to celebrate violence will exult. There will be a lot of opinions and statistics back and forth. Thoughts, prayers, and argument will create a jumble of noise that will fade to the usual grumble until the next time.

Your Right to Bear Arms

Gun ownership says, "I need, want and deserve to control the power of instant death." This is true whether your possession is legal or not.

 Because United States citizens are afforded the unusual constitutional protection of their right to control the power of instant death, they are free to arm themselves against whatever need to commit homicide they might anticipate. For instance, some unsanctioned possessor of the power of instant death, or an attacker bent on causing them pain might confront them. Second Amendment fans also like to point out that the federal government might get too big for its boots and need to be shot out of them. What if fascists or commies took over and started rounding up undesirables? Ha! I'd like to see them try while I've got old Betsy in my warm, live hands. We have a moral obligation to go down fighting.

Then there are the undesirables themselves. They could form groups and start disturbing the peace. Armed bands could begin to roam the landscape, falling on the homesteads of staunch normal people to raid and pillage. This could happen. It could. Combine the epidemic of homelessness with desperate ideologies constantly recruiting and it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to radicalize a whole bunch of hobos and issue them assault weapons. Why has no one thought of this before?

And what if Muslims try to impose their Sharia law and displace the Biblical law that good Christians want to place over us?

I don't debate any of the arguments in favor of gun ownership. Constitution says you can have them. Go get some. An apocalypse has to hit sometime. And personal crises won't arrive on a known schedule. If you want to be able to blast an attacker back against the far wall with a rain of hot lead, you have to have the tools in reach.

Let's just be honest. Get tee shirts, bumper stickers, embroidered jackets and other regalia that say, "I need, want, and deserve to control the power of instant death." Make sure that is in the front of everyone's mind when they discuss guns and gun control. That's all that really needs to be in anyone's mind when considering firearms. Sure, you can shoot for sport and for fun, perforating paper and plinking at cans and bottles, but that's not why humans invented guns. Guns are the power of instant death. And that is a fundamental human right.

The militia next door

Self-styled patriots have seized a federal government building in Oregon to protest land use regulations they feel represent federal overreach. They're heavily armed and promising to defend themselves with deadly force if the government starts any trouble.

The substance of their grievance is not important. But it got me wondering what it might be like if they'd done it in the woods behind me, rather than in a small structure grandly and misleadingly described by the media as "a federal building."

Consensus among the many experts who fill social media and chat rooms, is that the authorities should simply turn off the water and electricity to the building and ignore the militia men until they give up and go home to hydrate and thaw out. But what if they didn't?

I imagined a patrol of armed men trooping out of the woods to request or requisition supplies from me.

My first move would be to politely refuse them any aid. They got themselves into this, they can put up with the hardships until they figure out how to get themselves out.

In response, they would probably claim to be a revolutionary army and say they would commandeer whatever they needed from me, an enemy combatant branded by my obvious sympathy to the tyrannical central government. Or they might go looking for better luck at a neighbor's house, but let's say my house is the only one convenient to their little revolution fantasy camp.

My next move might be to display, or even use, a weapon in response to their threat of physical force. Or I might already have called in law enforcement to do their job protecting peaceful citizens from armed hooligans.

This is a watershed. If I engage the militia in a firefight, I am acting more like they say they act, taking the law into my own hands to serve a higher cause. The fact that I am using my Second Amendment right to bear arms to shoot at them as they exercise theirs to try to coerce me puts us both strangely on both sides of the law at once. As the aggressors, they are more wrong than I am, but once the firefight starts it comes down to skill and accuracy, no matter who might be "right."

If law enforcement shows up and shots are exchanged, we have another skirmish for the militia set to add to their list of federal acts of tyranny. Remember Waco! Remember Ruby Ridge! Tyrants and Patriots! Win or lose, they've picked up another piece of propaganda to use later.

Once citizens decide that the threat or use of deadly force is acceptable as a routine part of conflict resolution, in accordance with the holy scripture of the United States Constitution, we make government law enforcement agencies an instrument of tyranny and vigilantes the real arbiters of dispute. The money we save on taxes that used to fund law enforcement can be spent on armament, personal fortifications, medical supplies and funerals.

Any quick skim of news outlets turns up plenty of misbehavior by law enforcement personnel as well as trouble made by gun-worshiping freedom fighters. You can't point at either side and say they're the bad guys or the good guys. All you can say is that they are incapable of expressing themselves in a less destructive way. You can be in the cross hairs or the cross fire, but either way you're neither free nor safe. The enemy of freedom is violence, no matter who instigates it.