aurora

Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably my favorite writer working right now, and with regards to the massacre in Aurora, CO (where, weirdly, I used to live when I was about 4 years old), he wrote this, in response to the argument that an armed audience member could have decreased the casualty rate:

It's worth considering the wisdom of waging a shoot-out in a crowded theater with a mad-man in body-armor. More than that, we should consider the import of the the argument's implication--a fully, and heavily, armed citizenry. If we all are going to agree to be armed, surely I don't want my arms to be inferior to the arms of my potential adversaries--a category including virtually any other citizen. The Aurora shooter was evidently in full body-armor. I need to upgrade to hand-grenades. And so we arrive at a kind of personal arms race, and we arrive at a world with minimal trust in the state's ability to deploy violence on our behalf--a distrust of the authorities whom we pay to protect us, a cynicism which says those authorities are beyond reform, and that only through this personal arms race, can a person sleep at night.

And too we are left with the deeply held belief that, somehow, we can always outgun those who would do us harm, or at least our end can come at the place of our choosing. Now we are cousined to immortality. Now we are chin-level with our various Gods.

It's worth considering what we mean by a safer society, and whether it can be secured through a cold war of all against all. It's worth asking if the world really needs more George Zimmermans.

there's a kind of circular logic to the pro-gun argument: there are guns, therefore my enemy may have guns, therefore i must have guns, therefore we must have guns, therefore my enemy may have guns, etc. it's an unbreakable circuit.

guns are for shooting other people. as long as they're manufactured and sold here, people will be shot and killed here with them. this is indisputible. as i mentioned several posts ago, those numbers are around 10,000 per year in the united states. i'm extremely unimpressed by the "freedom" argument in favor of owning firearms; if you're a gunowner, your freedom to carry that gun comes at the cost of 10,000 of your fellow citizens surrendering their freedom in the most permanent possible way. if we're talking about shopkeepers, or people working in dangerous occupations (bounty hunters, say), the gun is obviously a tool that one hopes to never have to use. on the other side of the spectrum, as TNC pointed out, there are the George Zimmermans.

perhaps I'm safe from being accidentally targeted by the likes of Zimmerman. i'm white. but i'm not asshole enough to believe i'm the only person in this country affected by these laws. if i were a black man, and i saw this, i'd feel threatened. maybe buying a gun would help me feel less so. maybe I'd start to see Zimmermans everywhere, and chase one down with my new gun, if he looked threatening to me.

i'm not sure how or why this all started, but i'm pretty sure how it ends.