Today I learned that one of my author friends was injured while out selling her books at a street fair. Someone did a drive-by, and a bullet and shattered glass ricocheted into her eye. From what it sounds like, she’s not going to have vision in that eye, and seeing as how she’s already on her second surgery today, there’s clearly going to be a long and exhausting recovery period.
Of course I contributed to the GoFundMe campaign for her, but let’s face it: it’s farcical that a GoFundMe for a gun violence victim should even be a thing. We’ve really lost the plot in America.
Being married to someone in law enforcement means I’m living pretty close to the end of my rope about gun violence to begin with. On Monday, there were three homicides in Austin, one of those a murder-suicide. (Husband shoots wife, shoots self, of course.)
Also this week: a man beat up his wife then took off in his vehicle with an absolute arsenal of assault rifles and ammunition. This is also a familiar story because we hear it weekly: man commits violence against a woman in his life, takes off and commits a mass shooting. Over and over and over again, to the point where the FBI is like, “Okay, violence against women might be an early indicator of a possible mass shooter.”
Thankfully, APD was able to intercept the man on the road and extricate him from his car, though there’s a part of me that wishes he had given them a reason to take him out, to not clog up the courts or give the DA a chance to kick him back out on the street again in a few weeks or months, so he can go terrorize his partner some more.
And isn’t that weird? I’m so sick of gun violence that I want the cops to shoot a guy without giving him a fair trial. That’s obviously not my higher self speaking. That’s the tired and terrorized version of me. Or perhaps it’s the realistic version of me, who has seen the way the local DA has let his anti-police sentiment fester into a pro-criminal stance that means violent criminals are part of a catch-and-release program that involves an ankle monitor and near guaranteed recidivism. The only question becomes when will they kill someone?
Listen, I don’t know where the line should be drawn for “owning too many guns and too much ammunition,” but maybe we could try to find a place between zero legal guns and dozens of assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition? Perhaps we could just give it a good old-fashioned try???
There’s no one thing we can do to eliminate gun violence, and when some people hear that, they give up considering solutions altogether.
But there are so many things we can try that could lower it. If you can’t see the benefit of lowering preventable deaths unless you eliminate them completely, maybe you’re just an idiot. I dunno. That’s where I’m at with it. If you think lowering the rate of deaths from guns by 20% (which equals 4,000 people in the US in 2022) isn’t worth a little bit of effort and teamwork, then you clearly have not been personally effected by gun violence.
People who have lost a loved one to guns tend to believe that 1 death is too many. They would move heaven and earth to go back and stop that 1 death from taking place.
And yet so many people allow roughly 20,000 to slide by each year while entitled, misogynistic individuals stockpile weapons to use against us at their whim.
Your child’s baseball game. A visit to the zoo. A movie theater. A day at the park. A street fair. A mass shooter gets to take his pick of these locations to vent his frustration. And we give that a stamp of approval every day we don’t speak out against this madness, and every time we vote for politicians with anything but an F rating from the NRA.
You know who the NRA sides with? It’s not my friend who lost her eye.
It’s the man who beat his wife and loaded up his car with a goddamn war arsenal. That’s whose rights the NRA cares about.
How much clearer could it be that the gun lobby are the bad guys here?
“But what about a gun to defend ourselves against people with guns?”
Listen, I’m not anti-gun. I’m married to law enforcement, so of course we own guns.
But did you know that you only have two hands? That’s right. If you’re facing down an intruder, you can only use two guns at a time, max. Realistically, you probably just want to use one at a time for better aim. And a handgun or shotgun will do.
Anyone using an assault rifle for home defense clearly does not care about their neighbors’ safety. Talk about goddamn stray bullets.
So, frankly, fuck the macho Rambo fantasy that someone might break into your home and all that Call of Duty will have prepared you to take them on in a prolonged fire fight.
Men holding onto that hero fantasy are most of what’s blocking us from actually protecting people from guns. Grow up! You’re not going to be reloading against a cartel hitman or anything. If someone wants to shoot you dead, they can do that with the way this country works. Seriously, they can make it happen. If someone comes into your home, it’s likely to rob you, and the sound of a shotgun racking is probably enough to scare them away. Statistically, the best thing you can do to keep your home safe is to own a dog. And keep a car parked in your driveway. No guns needed!
My husband tried to show me how to reload one of the guns, and I told him, “I will never be in a situation where I have to reload.” If it gets to that point, I am humble enough to know I am not the person for the moment. And 99.999% of people are not.
So I’m ready to accept that some people can own some guns. I’m okay with that. But could we maybe get real about what constitutes rational “home defense”?
A lot of the violence is perpetuated by people who legally should not own guns. But unfortunately, we give guns out to people so easily and with zero steps to ensure those guns are properly secured that it’s very easy to steal a gun.
In the first year and a half of covid, when everyone was rushing out to buy guns because virus (??), and domestic violence was soaring, Austin saw over 1,000 gun lefts. There are 1,000 guns floating around in the hands of people who should not have them, many of them felons, and many of them teenagers. Those guns are passed around and almost impossible to track. Though we do know that they’re responsible for many of the murders in Austin in the last few years.
So, already we could consider:
- Accepting that not every gun should be available to the public because not every gun is reasonable home defense.
- Limiting the number of guns a person can own (yes, this means registering weapons).
- Requiring every gun purchase to include a gun safe and training for safe keeping (you wouldn’t believe how many idiots keep their guns in unlocked vehicles).
Would each of these things cut down on some deaths? Of course! Is any of this explicitly forbidden by the Second Amendment? Nope! Would this eliminate gun deaths entirely? Definitely not. But it’s progress.
And there’s so many more steps that we could take, that most of the population is ready to take, and that don’t infringe upon whatever Second Amendment rights the majority of Americans care about.
Speaking of the Second Amendment, here’s some real talk: There are not enough guns for anyone to own to take on the US government. Have y’all seen our military budget? Have you seen the toys that we’ve funded with our tax dollars? You really think anything you can buy legally or even on the black market is going to defend you against a goddamn military drone? And they have a lot of drones. A lot.
The ship has long since sailed on any of the arms we might bear doing jack or shit against our government. Give up the childish fantasy, please. If the government wants to bomb your house, they can just do it. The threat from the government is not coming in the form of warfare, it’s coming in the slow stripping of personhood that we’re seeing day in and day out. It’s coming in the book banning, etc. etc. etc.
Too many people harbor not a fear that they’ll one day need to violently defend their family against the government but a fantasy of it. These people have so defined their manhood by what violence they can commit that they’re craving the opportunity to show it off in a way that makes them feel like a hero. And if they can’t find a way to do that, then many of them will take villain instead.
Meanwhile, the real danger to their family, statistically speaking, is them.
Misogyny is a violent world-wide pandemic, to be sure, but I don’t think Americans realize just how tainted the waters we’re swimming in are in comparison to most of the western world. It’s bad. Like, really, really bad. I cannot stress how psychologically unhinged it is to care so much about another person’s body and what they do with it. Neither can I express how extreme and dangerous the everyday enforcement of the gender binary has become for everyone. We’ve been slow-boiled in it these last few years, and we’ve lost sight of how little we used to care about imposing this control on others.
I don’t have any hope left that society will address misogyny in any meaningful way while I’m still living, but the problem does live at the heart of gun violence, and there’s no way to eradicate gun violence in a major way without addressing misogyny. However, that’s a discussion for another time. I’ll let the FBI’s analysis of the link between violence against women and mass shootings do most of the heavy lifting in this post.
There are so many small things we could do to lower the rate of bullets entering the human body or intimate partners living in fear of such a thing happening if they speak out or leave. So, so many.
But until we acknowledge that we don’t so much have a fear problem blocking steps forward as much as we have a violent male fantasy problem, we’ll keep running up against the same exhausting, bad-faith, irrelevant arguments against stopping the deaths in the name of “freedom.”
Never mind anyone’s freedom to go to the store or a street fair without the subconscious fear of being shot by a stranger.