Our Guns, and How We've Used Them

America as a country is one built on freedom. The ideals of equality, fairness, and full autonomy of an individual. I can easily argue that the only thing that has changed since our country's inception, is who gets to be an individual.

This country has considered it a necessity to codify a right of its citizens to act against a government that did not have its best interest in mind. The wording of the second amendment is a bit confusing given historical context. The phrasing “to bear arms” would at the time be indistinguishable from the words “to take up arms”.

We are a country born of a revolt (for questionable reasons), the ability to act in one's own best interest when your country fails to do so would be hypocritical to leave out. Fairly impressive insight of a bunch of white men from a time famously lacking insight.

(You’re angry in this one)

I don’t give a shit, kids are dead again. Take the day off if you’re uncomfy talking about it.

What remains hypocritical of the white men of today, is that that very right is being misconstrued against the best interest of its people. But even that wording feels inadequate, these people know exactly what they’re doing despite being regularly too stupid to find better ways of hiding it.

It's intellectually dishonest to state that the founding fathers would have felt any particular way about our personal control of weapons they never could have conceived of. Even more so considering they themselves only intended the constitution to be temporary, later replaced with a more thoughtful document, some even thought we should have a new one every 20 years so that the people of one era would not have control over another, generational tyranny they called it. Maybe the most incredible thing about these men is the very trait that our current leaders lack, the understanding that the world would outgrow them.

Our country has implemented gun control in the past, but even this was not done with any kind of benevolence. The Black Panthers, union workers, indigineous tribes, all of these groups sought to exercise their right to protect themselves against a government who would do them ill, and only against these people were laws created to limit access to weaponry.

Angela Davis’s quote easily comes to mind

“There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.”

She herself was a Black Panther. This quote was in response to an interviewer asking her why the group needed to resort to such violence if they claimed they were looking out for the safety of their community. This reporter was white, and also an idiot who knew exactly what they were doing.

The argument that violence is never the answer ignores entirely the people who, since time began, have won their innate human rights from the hands of oppressors through violence. The people who faced endless and powerful violence against them by oppressors who would face no accountability for their terrible acts. Violence is an entirely acceptable tool for oppressed people, and an entirely logical response when facing violence against yourself.

Still, despite their cause being the very sort this right was given for, this power was denied them, because they weren’t the people it was written for.

We live in a state where a white man with a criminal record can carry an AR-15, a police officer in a corrupt system can walk about untrained with military artillery, but a black child with a water pistol poses grave danger.

I live in Chicago, and I grew up in one of these very stereotypically red states where semi-automatics can be bought at Walmart, maybe it’s just because this comes so unfortunately unsurprisingly soon after the announcement that women’s rights are being stripped back supposedly for the best interest of children, but i’m so tired.

I have only ever lived in a world where being killed in school or at the grocery store was a probability. I have exclusively navigated life with that knowledge ever-present in my mind, and to date i’ve only ever heard this state of affairs defended by the very demographic most statistically likely to commit these acts.

We've had more mass shootings in America this year than we have had days in this year. And yet the long standing joke from The Onion is how commonly we go through each and every one of these points. Nothing I have written here is news to anyone, not one word of it brings any kind of revelation, but it is with the full context given here throw in the face of every confused conservative that I have ever had the misfortune of interacting with, when I tell them I have never in my life been proud to be an American.

(I was just going to say, you have every right to be angry.)