Just Another Day In Gunmerica

Steve M. on how Gunmerica has worked for decades:

 

To the members of the gun community, the danger to democracy is a feature, not a bug. Gun absolutists don't want to live in a society where people who disagree with them -- on guns or on most other issues -- wield enough power to enact laws they don't like. Outside of blue states and big cities, gun absolutists have democracy right where they want it: Large majorities of Americans support tighter restrictions on gun ownership, but the vast majority of white people always vote Republican, so it's next to impossible to tighten gun laws.

Gun absolutists want some citizens to be intimidated. They say they just want criminals to be fearful (as well as the government), but they know that many of the people they detest are unlikely to own guns, and the power inequality is precisely what they're after. They want liberals and LGBTQ people and feminists to feel like second-class citizens. They want the option of intimidating protesters they disagree with, in a potentially deadly version of the hecklers' veto. And, obviously, they want to scare off anyone who might support laws making it harder to obtain and brandish weapons. Hey, what do you think "Try That in a Small Town" was all about? It sure as hell wasn't about democracy or upholding the First Amendment right to protest.

It's possible to imagine a society in which everyone lives the way gunners say they want everyone to live -- every law-abiding citizen across the political spectrum might accept our gun culture as unchangeable and might decide that it's necessary to own weapons, and to wear them in public at all times wherever that's legal. Liberals might reluctantly do this. Feminists and queers might do this. In theory, even gun control advocates might do this, telling themselves that while an extremely armed society is bad, it's clear that we already live in one, and until that changes, it's suicidal to go unarmed.

But the gunners wouldn't like that. They like the advantage they have over the rest of us. They enjoy our fear.

 

Adding, if you're Black or brown, owning a gun gets you killed even faster. Police don't bother to check if you're a law-abiding citizen practicing your Constitutional Second Amendment rights for home ownership of a firearm, legal concealed carry, or god forbid, open carry. You'd get executed on the spot.

 

Firearms are a privilege afforded to white Americans only. Everyone else gets murdered. This is why I don't own a firearm. It would make no positive difference to increase my survivability rate as a Black man in America, and in fact it would massively increase my odds of being shot and killed by law enforcement. 

Nobody with a firearm would ever see a Black civilian as a "good guy with a gun". Ever. A group of armed Black people practicing open carry in an open carry state would be butchered by police.

Think about that really hard.

In Republican red state America, in 2023, your rights are solely determined by your race (and gender, when we talk about women also being second-class status.) Your "inalienable" rights are provisional depending on the situation and person, and that includes the right to bear arms.

Spare me the whining about your Second Amendment rights, and talk about mine for once.