First Draft

One of my earliest memories is of a dead deer.

I think it was a deer. Might have been an elk.

Anyway, big dead animal. Hanging suspended from the garage ceiling, its blood draining into a bucket below.

Smelled pretty bad. My mom wasn’t thrilled. That was the spot, after all, where she was supposed to park her car, and my dad killed this critter, dragged it home, and was now preparing it to be made into sausages. Stew meat. Salami.

Plus a taxidermy head, to be mounted on the wall in the living room.

Dad had bagged this thing and we were gonna use every inch of it, because that’s what you do with something you kill. You eat it, or wear it, but you sure as hell don’t waste it. You respect it, and the process by which it arrived in your driveway, your freezer, your belly. Somebody earned that.

I thought about that deer watching hundreds of assclowns parade around downtown Richmond, VA comparing extremely mild firearms regulations to Jim Crow laws, heaving their camo-coated butts up and down the streets in front of the statehouse wearing riot shields against, I dunno, a run on the Applebees salad bar or something.

It was the kind of protest where the organizers had to beg people not to wear Nazi shit or carry Confederate flags, lest someone come to the conclusion that a big group of pasty pantloads in MAGA paraphernalia was in some way racist. Some people, of course, brought Confederate stuff anyway. Others just went the “racially tinged” route and stuck to teabagging.

And they’re all so exhausting. These fucking toolsheds, pointing loaded weapons in the air and at each other, with the trigger discipline of 8-year-olds in a video arcade, in their Kevlar vests with the plates all removed so they could stuff snacks and water bottles in the pockets. The tactical vests on the service dogs. The night vision goggles in broad daylight. The way the ammo belts stretched and strained.

I saw a lot of people calling this stuff cosplay. Calling this international exhibition of braggadocio and dumbassery cosplay is insulting to cosplayers, who generally a) care about the accuracy of their costumes b) wear custom gear that fits them c) make sure their weapons are clean.

Then there was all the yelling about tyranny. Just fucking … just stop. The American Revolution was not a reaction to wife-beaters being denied their fourth Glock. Crispus Attucks and co. did not die so that you could open fire on the wicker reindeer in the Christmas section at Menards.

Those guys were fighting the entire British Army with four sticks and a bucket of snowballs, you don’t get to put on their clothes, not when you duck and cover every time somebody in your cube farm makes microwave popcorn. Samuel Maverick called, and he said your mom has musket balls.

But back to the dead deer at the beginning of this post.

You see, back when I was growing up, the guys who went hunting and ate what they killed mocked the kind of urban cowboys whose trophies all had powder burns. Buy some deer meat from a guy, that’s fine, but sit in a tree drinking beer all day waiting for a buck to wander underneath so you can shoot down on it, or worse, go to a “preserve” where you can kill it in a cage, like screw you, pal. Work for your supper.

Hunting for food and shooting for sport were presumed to be actual pursuits, engaged in deliberately. You go to the range or some deserted area to practice. You have a rifle for deer, handgun for bear or mountain lion when you’re camping. You lock them up away from your kids. You sure as shit don’t keep them loaded. And you don’t jaw on all day in public about what guns you have and where. That’s a good way to get robbed, or worse.

At some point in the past 30 years these guys who knew how to handle their weapons made common cause with a whole bunch of other people, who were loud and scared and stupid. The latter group weren’t into shooting for food or for fun. They were into it because it was life and death, them or the brown hordes, and in order not to die, they had to arm themselves however they saw fit. As was their inalienable right.

When people who actually did deal in life and death, like officers of the law or members of the military, pointed out that their weapons were subject to processes and procedures, the people who saw a buck to be made lobbying legislators ginned up the usual phony “savages coming to steal your white women and children” nonsense and suddenly everyone who wasn’t a member of the NRA was a wine-sipping communist puss.

That we can’t see that it was about money, that people benefited from this fear and rage and it sure as shit wasn’t the ordinary hunters and sportsmen, will never fail to make me crazy. As much as I make fun of those guys up there, those angry morons, they’re only buying the bullshit. The NRA and gun manufacturers and the GOP are shoveling it, and they don’t even have the tiny shriveled sack to stand on the street for it.

They leave that to the men and women who, really, should be home with their kill, making salami.

A.

How fucking dare you: 

Federal agencies will receive $25 million from Congress to study gun violence in a government spending deal reached by House and Senate negotiators — a major win for Democrats who have long pushed for dedicated funding to research the issue, a source told The Hill.

“Democrats have broken the ban on funding for the first time in decades,” the source said.

The deal includes $12.5 million each for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health to study gun violence and ways to prevent it.

It’s the first time in more than 20 years that Congress has appropriated money for gun violence research.

How dare you mark the anniversary of Sandy Hook, as so many people did last week, by posting variations on this stupid garbage trash?

How dare you yell at “Congress” to act when what you need is Republicans to act?

I am so sick of hearing that there’s no difference between the parties, that they’re both beholden to the same people, that it’s all corporatist money and control and so we might as well elect a fascist to teach the normies to suffer. I am so sick of people shrugging off this, that or the other reports of shootings and tragedies with “well yeah, what do you expect,” as if humans didn’t design this system and are helpless to change it.

THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT. They want us to think change is impossible. They want us not to notice it’s happening every single day, all around us, as one person by one person decides they’ve had enough. Seven years ago Moms Demand was a frickin’ Facebook group. How dare you tell them it’s over? If they’re not tired ain’t nobody gets to be tired.

Twenty-five million is nothing, of course. It should be the size of the budget of the U.S. military or at least what we spend keeping Trump and his grifter family safe; it should be whatever the doctors say they need. But it’s not nothing and it’s not the end and you have to wedge a crowbar in the door before you can bust it open.

This happened because people elected Democrats. Not just leftists; boring old milquetoast Joe-Biden-esque people who aren’t tough enough on the banks and say stupid shit on the regular, who give Trump more judges than he deserves and disappoint us every single day. This happened because people voted in people with a basic desire to KEEP OUR CHILDREN ALIVE so how dare you say there’s no difference?

There are real differences, and they matter, and they’re going to matter more as this year drags on, and I just don’t want to hear it, about your feelings, when this is what’s on the table. Stop being so scared and stop thinking it masks the fear, your “it’s over, there’s no point” bullshit.

I get you say that kind of thing so you don’t have to fight. I deeply, deeply get it, and I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t MATTER. You’re dead at the end of this either way, why do you think proving your intelligence and superiority over your fellow live-children enthusiasts are important? Get the fuck out there and embarrass yourself and invest in people who aren’t everything you want, because this is what can happen.

Twenty years, and then a break. How dare you count this out.

A.

A reminder that your nihilism is embarrassing: 

The activists’ progress was often slow. The group launched a campaign against Kroger and Walmart in 2014; one ad ran in national newspapers and on billboards in Kroger’s home city of Cincinnati showing a girl holding an ice-cream cone in a Kroger store next to a man with a rifle, pointing out that only the girl was violating the store’s policy. They gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions. But both stores were unwilling to change. “I went and met with their executives in 2015,” says Watts. “And it was very clear that they would not consider changing their policy. But we just kept the pressure on. And then after the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, we began conversations again with Walmart executives and gave them counsel on policies that would make their store safer.” After Walmart announced its new policy—including, beyond the new open-carry policy, a plan to stop selling ammunition—the group pivoted to pressure Kroger, which made its announcement the next day.

This is how work gets done. I get that it’s not as Capra-film inspiring as someone rising on the Senate floor and saying I HAVE HEREBY CHANGED MY MIND and then we all applaud and cry and the law is changed and no one dies anymore, but this is how the work gets done. In living rooms. In grocery stores. Day after grinding day.

It’s slow and it’s miserable and you lose more often than you win and you risk looking just RIDICULOUS, but if you don’t care how much of a ridiculous miserable loser you are, if you’re not afraid of how long it’ll take, if you see the passage of time not as proof that you’ve lost but as a record of how long you stayed standing, you will change the goddamn ridiculous miserable motherfucking loser WORLD.

What has happened with Moms Demand and Everytown is what happens when you just stop believing that despair is the only option, when you stop expecting the avalanche and start chucking rocks. It’s so EASY to tune out the horrors of the world. It’s so EASY, most of the time, to convince yourself to do nothing because there’s nothing you can do.

But then comes the hour between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. When you can’t sleep, and you realize that none of us get out of this alive, that none of us are in this for peace, that “there was nothing I could do” isn’t an answer but an excuse and not a good one, that you are literally presented with a hundred thousand things a day that are chances and if you pass them by you are doing something, and that something isn’t good. When that hour comes, you’ve got to answer for what you’ve done with every minute, and let’s be honest, most of us can’t.

You can face that and dig even deeper into your despair or you can pick up an axe and get to work. Or you can send out that horrible tweet again about how Sandy Hook was the end. I’m not telling you how to live your life, but these women are making it harder to lie to yourself that nothing will change and that’s really quite something, now isn’t it.

A.

Even today. Even now things are being done:

Gun control activist groups, already in D.C. for a leadership conference, converged on the Capitol after news of today’s mass shooting in El Paso. ABC7’s @KatieKyros has live coverage from the protest. pic.twitter.com/yi4hsRMz85

— ABC 7 News – WJLA (@ABC7News) August 4, 2019

I saw it again, this stupid dumbass tweet being shared by people I respect, and I can’t tell you how angry it makes me on behalf of the people who are fighting and working and busting their asses every day to change this. I can’t tell you how angry I am to see them — us — erased. That we haven’t won the war doesn’t mean we’re not fighting it. Stop saying it’s over.

That’s WHAT THEY WANT. Good God, do we really have to point this out? Now, today, in 2019, do we really have to point out that all anybody who’s trying to get you to lie down is trying to do is get you to lie down? Stop making it easy for them with your goddamn fucking sophomore year cynicism.

Hope isn’t a plan, goes the criticism, but guess what? Despair isn’t either.

Despair isn’t a plan and it isn’t an excuse and it doesn’t make you look one iota smarter than anybody currently out in the fucking streets. It doesn’t even HELP, good god, have you tried sitting with that feeling, all it does is poison your mind and rot your heart from the inside.

Get up, make some phone calls, get out there, feel foolish, and lose lose lose lose lose until you die if you have to but don’t just sit there talking to yourself about how nobody could ever do anything to change anything and it’s all hopeless, God, it’s so small and sad and gross.

People are fighting. Even now. Even after 24 hours and another 30 dead and do you HEAR yourselves, saying there’s no point. What if it was you and yours tomorrow? Would there have been a point to fighting, today?

A.

Is there a right this doesn’t trample on? 

A company called ZeroEyes out of Philadelphia markets a system to police departments that can detect when a person is entering a given facility carrying a gun. It integrates with any number of closed-circuit surveillance systems.  But machine learning algorithms don’t just come out of a box knowing how to recognize a firearm any more than a drug dog arrives from the breeder knowing the difference between marijuana and oregano. To teach the algorithm, a team from the company shows up on location and proceeds to stage mock attacks. Slowly, the algorithm begins to learn what a gun looks like in that specific setting, depending on light, angles, and other conditions. They’re currently working with New York City Schools and have a contract with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, but are not yet deployed to the border, said Kenny Gregory, a software engineer at the company.

We’ll stage mock attacks on schoolkids, shoot teachers and call it a training exercise. We’ll further stigmatize the mentally ill, suggest that everybody with a diagnosis is just a murderer in waiting. We’ll make people carry bulletproof backpacks and put dogs and guards on every train. We’ll create fucking PRE-CRIME SOFTWARE in order to watch people every second of every day.

We will do all of that, to avoid doing the one thing that might make a difference.

While some polls show that 70 percent of Americans support stricter gun laws, that number is far lower, about 31 percent, among conservatives. And so the political debate, while fiery, has stalled. Gun-detection algorithms that alert security personnel when an armed person arrives might reduce the number of victims — though likely not as much as if there were no armed shooter in the first place.

Because of the gerrymandered stranglehold the dying GOP and the fascist NRA have on our discourse, we have to have fucking mind-reading algorithms tell us if someone’s carrying a gun because literally anyone might be carrying a gun.

Let us never underestimate our willingness to avoid solving a goddamn problem. Do we really not see how stupid this sounds?

A.