#liquiddiamond

Where I grew up everyone had guns. I believe my childhood home had at least two handguns, three .22 rifles (one semi-automatic, and I don’t know if most people know what that means-- it means that it reloads the gun automatically as part of firing, not as a separate action), and at least two larger-caliber rifles (I know this one for sure, I’ve used it in re-enactments), plus an assortment of historic muskets, and a shotgun or two. Everyone hunts; deer are delicious and reproduce quickly and destroy crops. Every farmer has a nuisance permit. We used them to euthanize injured livestock, to destroy predators and pest animals on a working farm. (And gosh, there are a lot of people who are so upset at the thought of that, but-- you get a nuisance raccoon that comes in and one by one picks off every one of your laying hens despite your efforts to secure the coop? It’s worse animal cruelty to the poor hens to let it continue, regardless of the fact that those hens are your livelihood/ food source. And you show up at the pasture in the morning to feed your pigs, and sometime in the night one of the hogs must’ve stepped on one of the piglets and his back is broken and he’s crying? You have to put him out of his misery, and a gun is the only effective and safe way to do that. The vet will do the exact same thing you would, it is not more humane to make that poor suffering animal wait the two or three hours it’ll take for a vet to make a house call, or worse, traumatize the animal by shoving it into a car to go be killed by a vet when it’s never left the farm before. Farming is hard. You can’t make it easier.) 

They were one of many tools around the farm. I’ve always been terrified of guns, but I’m also terrified of tractors, and I learned to drive those, so at least I’d know. So I’ve learned to target-shoot, and it’s mildly entertaining, but it’s always been utilitarian for me. And I’m absolutely terrified of some mouthbreathing religious extremist taking offense at my lifestyle and coming into a place my friends and I go, and blowing us all away-- of course I’m terrified of that! And no, I don’t believe that if I had a gun I could stop a man like that, because I know I’m extremely hesitant to use one, and so I wouldn’t carry one if I had it. But that’s my decision. My sister doesn’t feel the same way; she’s getting her permit.

I’m not a man with a tiny penis. She’s not a man with a tiny penis. She doesn’t have a gun out of a desire for control over others. I can barely even stand to shoot the thing at a metal can full of water. (I do, and I don’t flinch, because it’s a tool I should know how to use, and I do.) 

And when I was a teenage girl, and knew I lived 25 minutes from the nearest police station, and a creepy breather got into the habit of calling our house, and since I went to a different high school than my sisters I was sometimes home alone, yes, I found it extremely reassuring that I knew where the handgun and the ammunition were kept (separately). I planned out my route through the house so I’d be able to grab both even if I was running away from someone. And if I couldn’t, well, downstairs in the office, the wall decoration is Dad’s collection of historic long guns, and for display purposes all the muskets have their bayonets fixed. He uses them for re-enactments, and it takes a minute and a half to load a single round, but a bayonet is just a big knife. 

When we first moved into our house, it had been vacant a long time (old farmhouse at the dead-end of an unpaved road ten miles out of town), and a lot of people were used to it being vacant and abandoned, and had used the place for parties-- and drug deals. When we first moved in, I was on the way and my sister was an infant. On weekend nights especially, for that first spring and summer they lived there, Dad always answered the door with a businesslike manner and a holstered pistol, because sometimes people didn’t want to accept that this great party/drug-dealing spot was now occupied, and attempted to argue the matter, especially if they had already been partying before they got here and thus weren’t in a great position for logic. The arguments always immediately ceased when they noticed the gun, because even a drunk can recognize what one of those is. And then they didn’t come back, and there was no more trouble. 

A lot of my family has gotten very bitter because of the rhetoric, and has entrenched themselves even more firmly in the pro-gun camp-- because the only arguments the opposition make are “no one should ever have guns anyway” and “anyone who has them is a loathsome creep”, basically-- and even a quite reasonable-looking post I read recently advanced the notion that you should only legally be able to store any guns you owned at a firing range, and I thought, that is *not* going to work out for literally anyone I know who has a gun. I don’t know anyone who keeps them just for pleasure target shooting. I know people do, but nobody I know.

And like. Sometimes people, who are not loathsome creeps or maniacs, *do* have guns. And we absolutely should legislate them some more, and we absolutely need to break the stranglehold of the NRA’s lobbyists, and we certainly don’t need to be encouraging angry young men to buy military-grade weapons (I threw up in my mouth when I read that publishing the make and model of guns used in mass shootings makes sales of that exact gun skyrocket every time)-- but on the other hand, telling everyone who owns a gun that they’re a disgusting sack of shit is not really the way to get that debate to go smoothly, you know? 

And very occasionally, people are like, “but we only mean the military weapons!” Listen. That’s not a hard-and-fast distinction. Almost every weapon my family owns is or was military-grade at some point. The one .22 rifle we have is a nice skeet-shooting gun that was my grandfather’s, and the only magazine that was ever made for it was a ten-round magazine. It’s now illegal to have more than a seven-round magazine under the NY SAFE act, but they sort of realized that the only magazines ever made for a lot of guns have ten rounds, and in fact basically no rifle ever has had a seven-round magazine for it ever manufactured. And so the actual, legal state of things in NY is that we can have that ten-round magazine for that gun, but we can only put seven bullets into it at once. That is not only ridiculous but also stupid and dangerous. Why would you do that. (Once you’ve put a bullet in, you can’t see it anymore; I always lose count, so I just load it until the spring doesn’t compress. Then I know there are ten, so I know when I am done firing that the gun is really truly clear, and the range is safe. Don’t fuck with how many bullets i have and make me get confused about whether my gun is loaded, that is really dangerous and stupid.)

I don’t want to get into the debate at all! I don’t live in the country anymore; I haven’t touched a gun in at least a year, probably longer. I don’t really care, for myself. But. It is awful to listen to people I agree with on so many other things call my family and friends disgusting horrible maniacs compensating for their whatever whatever. It makes me not want to even *think* about gun control. Because if I bring it up here, everyone wants to tell me how disgusting I am for not immediately condemning my family. And if I bring it up at home, my family wants to tell me how stupid everyone else I know is, and how ignorant, and then they start to get weird about zombies because the monolithic condemnation has pushed them into the bosom of the right-wing nutjobs, and it’s just-- it ruins a family reunion, y’know? (And my family are educated people, by the way-- a smattering of master’s degrees, real actual jobs, everyone at least has a bachelor’s, they’ve traveled a lot, they’re well-read-- these are not at all the people the stereotype is condemning. Which, by the way, is a classist and reductive stereotype.)