First, confession time: I got too defensive.
I let anons piss me off (and derail any actual point I was trying to make) to the point that I opened the door for a lot of people who had literally no idea what they were talking about to chime in on an issue that doesn’t matter anyway.
And now people think I’m not, like, 100% for gun control? I am, but we have gun control. Or, I should add, what laughingly passes for gun control in the US. This is why the idea of government conspiracies are completely laughable to me. The government has no fuckin’ clue how many illegal weapons there are in the US. They can’t do shit about them. And while they can’t do shit about the unbelievable amount of illegal weapons in this country, is your first priority to get them to lock down on the legal weapons?
Here’s the thing. I sympathize with people who are completely anti-gun. I get it. In a sense, I am too. In a perfect world, there’d be no need for them. If I could snap my fingers right now and remove every gun from the face of the Earth, I would, except for one small detail.
I can go into my garage and built a gun.
If you think I’m joking, then you don’t know shit about how they work.
I can find surplus 12 gauge ammo (or reload, because I have a reloading kit and you can always get gunpowder) and, literally, make a shotgun in probably 2-3 hours with minimal moving parts and fast manual reloads.
So I get all the idealized speech about how guns are evil. I agree! To a point. Guns make it easier (still not easier than bombs, which are also easier to make) for bad guys to kill a lot of people at once. This is true. I also sell guns to elderly (and not to elderly) women and a vast variety of PoC, because we live in a white supremacist, rape culture upholding society. All these people who have all these problems with guns don’t ever seem to consider the fact that, if you take them away, you take them away from people who aren’t felons while you leave criminals with guns. Until you find a way to deal with the illegal weapons (which are, again, innumerable) the legal weapons have to stay.
Also: the government has them, I’m going to have them. That’s how it is. It’s slightly fucking hilarious to me that people who previously were ok with me explaining that non-violent resistance is white supremacist and rape culture bullshit are suddenly having a huge issue with me being real about what tools may be utilized during the violent resistance. Guns are a tool of both white supremacists and rapists, both of which tend to buy them illegally and (because illegal weapons are generally deserialized and untraceable) aren’t afraid to murder somebody with them. They’re also the tool of the police.
You want to further restrict people from buying them for self-defense?
I don’t get that. All of this makes perfect ideological sense until you apply it with common sense to America. Of course other countries with gun bans have less gun crime. They’re not America. They don’t have millions of untraceable, illegal firearms. This country was built on guns and enslavement and when enslavement really went out, guns really came in. And you can oppose them all you want but, in opposing them, 99% of people who do so can’t fathom the fact that they’re opposing the people who actually use them for hunting or self-defense and not the plethora of people who are using them to murder people with.
You have to understand how this shit works on a very basic level before you try to talk about it. That’s the point. I’ve been to court and testified for the commonwealth of Virginia and put people in jail over gun violations, multiple times. I’ve never sold a gun to anybody who’s made death threats against politicians (turned people down over it, though) or anyone who’s gone on later to commit a crime with one. And most of the people who are completely anti-gun have never even shot or held one, and I understand the fear of guns (especially among women and PoC, who are most endangered by the existence of illegal ones) but I have major issues with white men trying to regulate how difficult it is for woman and PoC (so especially WoC) to buy guns legally when it’s already up to any firearms dealer to deny a person who wants to buy a firearm when your race and gender are already on the forms you have to fill out to buy one.
It’s not cut and dry. This isn’t a perfect world. You can advocate non-violent resistance until your throat is bleeding but if you quit at the point that it really matters then I’m not sure what your point was in the first place. You can idealize this world (especially this country) as much as you’d like but that doesn’t mean that the world or this country will mold to your idea of it. The vast majority of people I see talking about gun control are so incredibly inept when it comes to how guns work, how easy it is to make them, how easy it is to buy one illegally (and how hard it is to buy one legally) that it’s just getting hard to take people seriously at this point.
And one last thing. When a Black man (or MoC in general) shoots somebody, it’s hit fault. The end. Those horrible violent PoC.
When a white man shoots somebody, we always start talking about gun control. Not white entitlement. Not male entitlement. No privilege. He was having a rough time and the gun practically made him do it.
Nevermind that he had an apartment full of bombs, or anything.
I’m not going to get with that double standard, and I’m not going to answer questions until they come from somebody who has an iota of understanding in this issue or an actual solution instead of reverting to the fucking Garden of Eden lions laying with lambs bullshit that has always pushed for non-violent solutions to oppressive violence.
