It’s About Guns

I remember being terrified that I was going to get shot to death in a bathroom when Trump was elected, because I live in America. While in general, I want to focus on my art and silly pop culture nonsense with this site, I have to talk about this. The most recent school shooting happened in Nashville, my home town, and the reaction to this event is truly maddening. Like most “political” issues in this country these days, it’s not really about politics, it’s about human rights.

The big thing with this particular school shooting, a phrase I have to say because America keeps having mass shootings in schools, is that the shooter was trans. Since the political right in this country is currently in a frenzy over trans people existing, a bunch of GOP lawmakers and conservative voices have taken this opportunity to claim that trans people are all potential mass shooters. And what’s really wild for me about this is that their sadly, absurdly predictable reaction happened so quickly, like the same day. We couldn’t even have a day of people mourning a tragedy visited upon children and teachers before the conversation became about how dangerous trans people are. I didn’t mean wild like “unbelievable” there, more like a wild rage. They already had their opinions and their headlines at the ready, like they always do, and they don’t even think they need to pretend to respect the actual victims enough to give them a day to be sad.

And like…I don’t want to get into all the details about this event, or how and why it happened. It’s a tragic event that we’re still learning about, and so right now we should mourn. I also don’t want to address specific statements about this event. We all already know what the game is, and for some reason, despite the obvious, we’re expected to pretend like it’s something else. The GOP hates trans people, so they’re trying to legislate away our rights. I’m not in the mood to explain this statement, because it’s an objective description of their actions. I’m not playing the game where I waste my breath debunking nonsense lies about pedophilia and “the ideology of transgenderism” that they claim to be against so they can act like it’s not bigotry. It’s the doublespeak and lies I want to talk about. It’s always incredibly surreal to listen to anything Tucker Carlson says because he’s just describing himself or the conservative movement at large, but he replaces the subjects with “Democrats” and “diversity.” That’s typically how it goes with Republican politicians and pundits. They describe their political enemies and targets of bigotry as the most vile things they can think of, and accuse them of doing the most disgusting things imaginable, as a pretense for doing all those things themselves to their enemies. The hypocrisy isn’t a bug, it’s the selling point: If you can stomach their weird, warped reality, you get to attack any minority group you don’t like without hesitation, and actively attack democracy to “protect your way of life.” They don’t have any ideas to address problems in the world, they just have people and things they dislike.

It always comes down to two things: Money and power. While our history books uphold religious outsiders wanting freedom for their way of life as the origin of this country, the bulk of people who colonized the land and named it America were English people who didn’t have enough opportunity to advance. Second sons and lower class debtors. They wanted to move somewhere they could make more money and have more influence in society, and since they didn’t want that dream to die, they set up the systems of power to maintain their wealth and status. It’s why the modern concept of race was invented here after the most successful slave rebellion was carried out by a joint group of enslaved black people and white former indentured servants. The introduction of legal categories for race and the ensuing invention of new racial myths kept the majority from overthrowing the ruling class, with disproportionate pressure that manifests their cruelty and hatred. It’s the same basic system in place today, evolved and adapted to evade the forces of justice that have, at times and with great struggle, created upheaval. And of course, this applies to more than race; blue use to be a girl color and pink a boy color, because all gender norms are arbitrary and are used to keep people in line.

Looking at mass shooting in particular, the solution is obvious: Ban assault weapons at the least, and institute other gun control measures. While there are definitely things we can and should do to address the causes of violence that we know to exist, an immediate and obvious solution to the problem of people being able to carry out mass shootings is to remove their ability to get ahold of weapons no one should own.  Why haven’t we done it, despite a majority of the country supporting such a move? The gun lobby. In the early Nineteenth Century, gun manufacturers wanted to make more money than they could only selling guns to the military, so they started an ad campaign to convince civilians that owning guns was some sacred American tradition. And of course, the guns people were buying at the time were being used to slaughter indigenous people to steal their land and keep black people down. There wasn’t then and isn’t now a market for owning a gun as a novelty or for some other innocuous civilian use; they’re weapons that are exclusively effective at killing people, so they are primarily bought to kill people, which requires people it’s ok to kill. This twin drive for profit and bigotry created a monster that now regularly murders children and claims “that’s the price for freedom.” I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of people invoking freedom as some blood magic we have to regularly sacrifice poor, marginalized, and otherwise vulnerable people to maintain. Freedom actually is free, tyranny has a cost.

We get so bogged down in all of these debates out of necessity, because we have to counter what these opponents to progress and decency are saying. Yet that keeps us from addressing more basic ideas that are fundamental to the conversation. For instance, guns don’t actually protect you from harm. No weapon does. As a martial artist, I spent my childhood practicing through scenarios to determine what I would do to defend myself or others from different kinds of attacks. The biggest lesson of all is that you’re never safe in an attack. You can hurt the other person until they can’t hurt you back, but you can’t prevent harm or its possibility from befalling you or others during an attack. No amount of martial arts skills you learn changes that, no amount of blades and sticks can change that, no amount of guns can change that. I realize this may seem like a pedantic point, but I bring it up because the base justification for owning guns, as I’ve always heard it, is to protect yourself from harm. They are not forcefield generators. They’re weapons that let you dish out injury, pain, and death of your own. I get that sometimes, if you’re life is on the line, you may have to take another life to survive, but that’s not protection from harm. You’ll still get hurt, people will still get hurt. And guns have a speed and recklessness that make them especially dangerous, by design. Giving more people guns in a society that’s increasingly isolated and insecure, while the champions of guns promote incendiary and bigoted conspiracy theories against minorities, doesn’t and can’t make us safer. It can only increase harm.

The stated reason for why we can’t get rid of guns is that owning guns is a right. So let’s talk about that for a second. The Founding Fathers, if we’re still using them as a guidepost for what laws we should pass today, like clowns, didn’t envision the second amendment to be about individual gun ownership. They put the words “well-regulated militia” as early in the text as possible so we would know that’s what it was about. It’s what they wrote as their thoughts on the subject. The idea that we have this right is a recent invention, and it wasn’t put into legal effect until 2006, entirely out of whole cloth for partisan reasons. Beyond that, there’s the basic logical observation that your right to own a gun doesn’t specify what kinds of guns you can own, how easily you can obtain them, or give you license to use guns without consequence. Gun control measures don’t infringe on your gun ownership rights, because you can still own them; all these pro-murder laws, like Stand Your Ground, don’t expand gun rights. More importantly, though, your right to own a gun because you, for some reason, believe it’s important, is less important a right than mine to exist as the person I am. It’s less important than everyone’s basic right to safety. The whole play-act about gun rights is a way to obfuscate the point and pretend that gun ownership is as sacred as our basic human rights to water, food, shelter, and expression. It’s not.

Actual human rights are under attack right now, being carried out by the same people who defend the right to own guns. I am nonbinary, and I live in Tennessee, where this mass shooting took place. The recent drag show ban will take effect here this weekend. It’s a truly terrible law, in intent, effect, and basic construction. Sidenote, remember how the Stonewall Riots were about the police trying to shut down a drag show because they were transphobes, and that kickstarted the modern queer rights movement, which is now being attacked by way of drag shows? So yeah, this law is meant to give license to the state to harass and abuse any queer person they see. And I do mean anyone. Part of the law allows the police to go after anyone they perceive to be crossdressing in a public space where children could be. It’s a vague, broad law meant to criminalize trans and nonconforming people for existing. I’m a little nervous about going to work or the movies going forward, but like I said before, that’s the cost of a tyrannical society. So is the stress of seeing people justify this obvious bigoted trash while defending the right to mow down classrooms of children, especially now that they’re connecting the two ideas directly. We’re not potential mass shooters, nor are we extreme for wanting to be treated like humans. It is extreme to blame literally everything except guns for gun violence. It’s extreme to use theoretical, abstract children as a bludgeon to beat down queer people (including actual children).

Like I said, this isn’t about politics. There’s no political debate on the best response to mass shootings, there’s just people who suggest that we do literally anything and people who say doing literally anything would be evil. There’s no debate on queer rights in this country (not that there should be), just queer people, their allies, and the majority of the country who think we should be treated like humans and people who want to get rid of us one way or another. A political debate, as I’m sure, like me, you’ve forgotten due to lack of exposure, is a debate between two potential responses to a challenge. We don’t have that because instead, we have fascists and useless corporate centrists, and we’re constantly being tugged between ever greater fascism and things not getting any worse for the moment. Things can change, we have that power. I’m not an activist or anything, so I don’t have a roadmap to give you. What I can say is to never be afraid to tell these fascists who they are, and never be afraid to be yourself out there. It’s hard, but if you can put even a little bit of light, hope, courage, and defiance into the world, it’ll be a better place.