I need to prepare you. I may lose some of you on this one, but I’m coming clean, because I have started a journey that has been incredibly revealing and not just a little unsettling.
I’m a gun owner. I’m going to tell you why I decided to buy one and what I discovered in the process that has made me feel that it is a very justifiable position.
Let me start out by saying I am the same liberal snowflake you have been reading about all along on this blog. Nothing has changed. I have not suddenly morphed into a no-holds barred 2A extremist. As laws change, as they are doing here in my state of Virginia, I will happily comply with them. It is important to me that you understand that, as the contingent that finds the 2nd Amendment far more important than the 1st are very likely not to comply with these changes when they inevitably come with the collapse of the Republican party.
So what brought me to that decision to purchase a deadly weapon? I’ll tell ya.
As I look around the landscape and see the brandishing of weapons in public spaces by people that already seem unhinged, it occurred to me how unhinged they are about to become. If this is not just a phase that America is passing through, like a hundred horrific justifications that have come before and allowed to pass after a brief moment of indignation, that watching treason being revealed from the occupant of the highest office in the land is actually a breaking point for the American public and if that indeed leads to the much anticipated Blue tsunami sweeping away the President, the Senate GOP blockade and myriad state and local down ballots, these weekend woodland patriots will not accept it. They will not comply.
Hyperbole? I don’t think so, not for a moment. We have seen the Boogaloo Boys creating mayhem during the protests, starting looting and arson and all the way up to murder of police in Northern California. We have seen the storming of state capitols by maskless militias armed to the teeth as law enforcement did nothing, even as they screamed at the police mere inches from their faces. This entire post could be documenting these various events, but I’ll mention just one more. The Bundy’s. Remember them? They were so outraged by what they saw as Federal overreach they took over a government wildlife refuge in Oregon. Robert Finicum stated that he was willing to die over this breech and he went out and proved it, drawing a weapon as he was surrounded by FBI.
In 2012, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano declared that white supremacist lone wolves posed the greatest risk of domestic terrorism in the country, and that military personnel were being targeted by right wing extremist groups for recruitment as their training made them uniquely suited to the task. She wound up having to withdraw the report because there were veterans that were very offended by the report, though it had been thoroughly documented and not found wanting in any way. She was vilified for reporting what was irrefutable. Crucified. Right wing violence has outpaced anything Muslims have committed in the country every year but one since 2000, and in 2001 they were not domestic terrorists. Her statistics were not fabricated.
The Sikh temple shooter was one example, and he had been tracked for his extremist views for a decade. Far right-wing and crushingly stupid, he slaughtered members of a religion well known as one of the most peaceful in the world, mistaking them for Muslim, because, you know, beards and weird hats. Wade Michael Page became radicalized while in the Army, much as Timothy McVeigh had.
I have been aware of this for most of my life. I have known many men who spent time in the military and upon leaving the service lived the rest of their lives thinking this was the proper way to live, that the problems in the country would be solved if we all lived in a black and white world with clear and obvious moral imperatives. Regimentation, order, one way to do things and serious consequences if you don’t tow the line. My first wife’s dad was one of these. He had been a Marine and it had been the happiest time of his life. His separation from the Corps was his greatest tragedy. When she was growing up, the family was limited to two squares of toilet paper per visit to the commode. After that, other examples just seem redundant. She never told me how it was enforced, but I can’t help but think there were procedures in place for that as well. He beat her unmercifully as punishment for her childhood deviations from proper behavior. Living in a democracy was torture for him. He never made the connection that the military is a nation’s necessary evil, the evidence that global humanity has failed, historically. It was never meant to be a lifestyle held up on a pedestal as a way for all people to proceed with their lives. It is a cruel reality in an unsafe world that at best allows the majority to live as if hatred was not a norm and conquest not a perennial human imperative. Serving in the United States military meant fighting for the rights of people they could never understand, never support and never accept. That just wasn’t how military life works. There is one way. You conform to it or there are serious consequences. When you leave, the world looks very strange and dangerous, and some will try to fix it.
As we have seen all across the country, in every corner, police officers have revealed that some unknown percentage of them are horrifically racist, and it isn’t just the ones that are killing black people on the street or in their homes. Those are the ones that are caught on tape. Last week we heard police officers of long standing in Wilmington, NC looking forward to what they saw as the oncoming civil war. Officer Michael Piner said to his fellow veteran officers that he was ready. He was planning on buying assault rifles. “We are just going to go out and start slaughtering them fucking n***ers” he said to his fellow veteran officers. “I can’t wait, God I can’t wait!” These dangerous and deranged centurions forgot they had the police car cams on.
I then did a little research. Nationally law enforcement draws between 16-17% of its force from those with military experience. This is a bit disturbing even if you take any systemic racism out of the equation. While ostensibly the police are there to “protect and serve”, the military’s mission is nothing of the kind. Without passing judgment on this fact, a military mission is more aptly summarized as “seek and destroy” and they are highly trained to do just that. That training is not simply teaching the physical necessities that entails, by hand or weaponry, but trains the psychological capability to carry out the assignment. Your average suburban dad would need some mental manipulation to aim a high powered weapon at another man and pull the trigger. The military has very specific techniques to train a man or woman to have that capability. They have to. Success on a battlefield is dependent on it.
At the end of an enlistment or a career in the military, there is no required reversal of this process as soldiers matriculate back into society, and many of them are drawn to law enforcement. Nothing else is remotely like what they have just left, and what has made them valuable in the military often finds a home in a new uniform. Toughness and conformity are valued in law enforcement and they learned how to be that, and their influence within that community can be far greater than the 16 or 17% would indicate.
In the event of a “lone wolf” attack, the police can be depended on to act swiftly and definitively, but we have seen how perpetrators of right wing crime are treated if they are fortunate enough to survive. Dylan Roof got a hamburger. When white supremacist protesters gathered en masse in Charlottesville, local officials found no justification to disperse a very angry mob carrying torches and threatening anyone in their way. That was allowed to happen. The same happened in the Michigan capitol.
So with all that, I don’t feel safe anymore. When Trump loses in November, the extreme right wing will have watched their savior crucified. That is not a cute analogy, it is the most accurate description of how they see this man that I can come up with. They have never had an advocate like him since Andrew Johnson and they see him as the “one”. He will reinstate the white man as supreme, use law and order as a cudgel against all brown people of any race and not whisper it but shout it from the mountaintop. He is not ashamed, so they don’t have to be either, and they aren’t.
But they will be extremely pissed when he loses as they face an existential threat to what they see as, with some legitimacy, the American Way, the white way, and they are heavily, heavily armed. That story in just a minute.
So I decided that this country is going to be unbelievably dangerous in just a matter of a few months. Little brush fires of racist right wing violence have already broken out, and California can tell you how quickly those fires can become something that can not be controlled. Innocent people lose their homes in a sudden mighty wind. Where historically I have never worried about such things, being white and feeling pretty well protected, in the case of violence that we have no precedent for since the labor riots of the turn of the century, I no longer feel protected. The labor movement found that out. They were crushed, gunned down by police as well as private corporate security firms that were essentially The Barons personal militias, operating with impunity outside regulated law enforcement, confident that they would face no consequences. Overwhelmingly they were right.
So I took it upon myself not to go down without a fight, as I don’t see who will defend me otherwise.
I will not make this into gun porn and tell you all about my new acquisitions. What I bought is not the point. What happened in the process of purchasing a firearm is, and it revealed things that made me feel more than justified.
I walked into Bass Pro Shops having discovered online that they had one of the guns that I had decided that I wanted. I went in and they did indeed have the weapon of choice, and after hearing myself say “I’ll take it” ten minutes later I was out the door with the weapon and on my way home.
Though I have owned weapons a very long time ago, having gotten rid of them at the birth of my child, they had no way of knowing that. Proudly sporting no criminal record or recorded insanity, it was the simplest thing in the world for someone with no exposure or experience with a deadly force to walk through a crowded parking lot with a brand spanking new one.
There was an enormous line of people behind me waiting less than six feet apart to be next at the handgun counter. They would wait over an hour to get to the counter. There were very few weapons left to choose from when they finally got to the counter. Most of the inventory was gone. It was the same everywhere. About half of the people in this store that celebrates family and the great outdoors were wearing masks. Half.
They were out of ammunition for my selected piece, so I went down the road to Greentop Outdoors, another big box great outdoors merchant. Nothing. I could not load my new gun. I mentioned it to a man who was looking also. He also wore no mask, but assured me everything would be fine as long as everyone “…knew how to vote in November”. He had complete confidence that I would be an ally in this regard, since I was looking for ammo after all. It was like he was in an environment that if he used the “n” word he would be on safe ground, no need to look around. I said “I think I do know how to vote, but I think we are going to be in opposite foxholes.” The look on his face was utter shock. He didn’t say a word. He was stupefied into silence. He never imagined that the snowflakes were getting armed. He literally couldn’t speak. It was strangely satisfying.
Finding ammunition locally proved impossible. My next step was to look online. That should take care of it. They can ship that right to your door, like buying a cute blouse from Amazon. But all the blouses were gone. Nationally. Once in awhile you could find some, but frequently it was being auctioned and the prices were insane, the fever so great that people were paying any price. This was not the norm. Ammo was usually quite easy to get ahold of, but not now. It occurred to me that people were stockpiling ammunition, like the great toilet paper shortage. Irrationality had created a demand that far exceeded the supply, and the casual sportsman or hobbyist marksman was losing his avocation to grandmothers and conspiracy dads who were spending college funds on bullets.
I spent a great deal of time, which I seem to have a lot of, researching online. What weapon to get, why, how to use it better than I had in the past, with more skill and greater care. While doing so I ran into AR-15 ads. I had never considered getting such a weapon, but it was compelling to see what that was all about, what made them so prized, so fetishized. I found out they could be purchased brand new for as little as $500 and going up to $3000 and more. Close to a mile range in practiced hands. Order now!
Well, apparently people had done just that, as there were none of them available anywhere across the country. No matter the price range they were all out of stock everywhere across the United States. The $500 gun was now listed at $750, but it didn’t matter anyway. They had all been purchased.
America is all sold out of AR-15s.
The lingering feeling that I had been overreacting in my desire to have a weapon was now gone, replaced with a renewed determination to get ammunition. I would pay too much too, and be happy about it.
The next step seemed obvious.
I have little concern that I will be the victim of a home invasion. I live on an upper floor condo and the locks on my door are fairly stout. I’m probably OK, though if anyone ever actually reads my blog I could become a target, but that seems like a very long shot as I don’t promote my work and only you few loyal friends ever see it, and none of you see me as anything but basically rational. No, I’m not at a very high risk at home. But the street could become something very different. If you are in a liberal state or commonwealth you might see this as paranoia, an overreaction to what is largely a political conversation. Here in Richmond, VA, the capital of the Confederacy, it seems much more real to me. People with AR-15s slung over their shoulders are diligently cleaning Confederate monuments that have been covered in protest graffiti. It’s different here. The street is where it is going to go down.
Next was my concealed carry permit.
A brief internet search showed me the path to be able to stealthily carry a deadly weapon wherever I wanted to, with very few restrictions, one notably hypocritical one being government buildings. If I was part of a gun organization that met regularly I was in like flint. Well, I wasn’t. What was next? Take a concealed carry course at an authorized location. Expensive and hard to find a slot. They were all sold out too.
But wait, this would work. You could take a class on line and get your certificate that way. Fifty bucks. That wasn’t insurmountable, let me look into that. I found one that seemed credible and I signed up for it. An hour later my certificate was churning out of my printer. I had passed! The course had taken me 40 minutes. You are provided the opportunity to take a practice exam before taking the final. You had to get 80%. It was exceptionally easy. I felt ready for the final exam, so forged ahead. The final exam was exactly the same exam as the practice one, and the answers were in precisely the same order. Had I failed it, I could immediately take it again. And again.
I passed. The certificate was crisp and official looking. I felt empowered, ready to face any bad guy on the street.
I had yet to have fired my weapon.
Went to the Circuit Court, another $50 and a brief application and pending my background check I will be another good guy with a gun.
They are all around you. The industry that has developed serving this demographic is vast, the variety of legitimately ingenious ways of carrying weaponry undetected is stunning.
I am torn.
My reasons for going down this road seem justifiable to me, and painfully sad. I hope this becomes just a very fun hobby, as I actually do enjoy the challenge of target practice. At Phillips Exeter Academy I had shot rifles at the range hidden in the basement of one of the venerable edifices of the country’s elite. I pray I look back at my reaction to what I see as an existential moment for the country as ridiculous, a condemnation of my own weakening psychology. I could lament my loss of faith in humanity, but that would be a lie. You can’t lose what you never had. It simply feels like a culmination of something that has always been building, yearning to break free. I have decided that if I am to be a victim, I will not be a helpless one. I fantasize that if I ever actually reveal my weapon from the hidden reaches of whatever clever hiding place I settle on that I am able to help you or your local surrogate survive a horrible moment that we, all us snowflakes, thought was impossible, ridiculous, an overreach.
I wish I still felt that anarchy was impossible, but I don’t.
Maybe you think that makes me just part of the problem, and maybe you’re right. But I see it differently. The problem is now an ingrained part of what America is. The weekend warriors are the same guys that are salivating over the prospect of a race war sitting in their police cars in Wilmington. They are excited, and the polls tell us they are a hefty percentage of the population. This isn’t a couple of yahoos that can be laughed off as silly cartoons. This is an army of yahoos organizing and coalescing after centuries of official encouragement. Here in Richmond we have an exquisite boulevard, beautifully manicured and nationally acknowledged for its grace, an elegant path that leads to the heart of the city that is dedicated to the high ranking officers of the Confederacy and to the Lost Cause itself. We have the Edmund Pettus bridge, named after another Confederate general who became Alabama’s Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and later its senator. His name welcomes all visitors to Selma today.
These people haven’t grown out of nowhere. They have been groomed, cultivated to a set of beliefs that have defined our country since its inception. That kind of indoctrination is very difficult to dislodge. It would seem insane to think any other way if you grew up being encouraged in your bigotry in a thousand heavy-handed ways and a million more subtle ones. It isn’t an unfortunate error of our ways. It’s the truth for them, taught in their schools, their churches, their homes and truth will be defended.
And they are excited about the opportunity. Some of them are the people I am expected to protect me. It has always been so down my way. Law enforcement was permeated by the Klan during the civil rights movement, the courts as well. Justice was largely dependent on federal charges, as the locals defined the term differently. The police chief and his deputy that turned the three organizers over to lawless murderers in Meridian, MS in 1964 were Klan, and it was not a big secret. There was no need for it to be. The community was proud of its peacekeepers. They were doing one heck of a job.
Am I crazy? I suppose that’s possible. Do crazy people know they are crazy? I don’t feel crazy. I feel like my eyes are open and I only lament that I don’t have another pair covering my blind spot. What separates me from those I am preparing to defend myself against?
I’m not excited. I’m not salivating at the chance to find someone I can make pay. I am lamenting what I see as a sober reaction to coming realities. I will happily comply with new laws as they are rolled out, support the efforts of my country to evolve to a higher and greater good. My country is not my enemy as long as it continues to try to evolve, to live up to its potential, its purpose of serving the people, all of the people. As long as it strives to “…establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…” I will remain an ally of the state. Who wouldn’t fight for those values?
Surprisingly, millions of us, and they are about to be very, very angry.