I’m really tired of capitulating to people, even within my own family, that try to talk about the second amendment. I’m tired of tailoring my arguments to suit them. “I don’t want there to be NO guns, I just don’t want people to have CERTAIN TYPES OF guns.”
No. Fuck it. I don’t want any guns. No more guns. Gather them up and sink them to the bottom of Lake Michigan for all I care. We can rename it Gun Lake, and anyone with an NRA bumper sticker can go and live around it, and mourn the loss of their precious death machines. Meanwhile, the rest of us will sit and mourn the victims of needless gun violence.
It disgusts me that we are the only nation in the world that believes that guns aren’t just something that we are legally allowed to have, but that we are somehow entitled to them. Like they are woven into our culture and our national identity so profoundly that they cannot ever be separated. If we lose our guns, we lose what makes us American.
Well, let me tell you something. If being American means having guns, and sitting by while I watch my community be blown away, if it means slowly watching my out and proud brothers and sisters creep back into the closet for fear of being the next name on a list read by Anderson Cooper, then I don’t want to be an American. And I know what saying that gets me. “Then go somewhere else then, if you can’t stand it here.” I would. I absolutely would. If I had the means and the ability, I would hop on the next plane to Norway and never come back.
Because we are doing something wrong here. And too many people are intentionally blind to that fact. That’s what being an American is; a blind confidence that everything that we do is right. And it will be our downfall.
