Gun Runner

It takes only a cursory look at the news of the past few years to see a horrible trend and that is one of (mostly)White homeowners taking the Stand Your Ground and Castle Defense to the limits of the law and opening fire at every imagined threat. While I am sure there are always instances where someone who wanted to do ill to someone has been met by someone who had the will, training, and firepower to stop them. 

Swell. 

Great. 

Good guy with a gun. 

It’s a neat story but it’s more of a fairytale than a reality because what we are seeing are people who are empowered to feel as if they have the right to kill someone if they perceive they are threatened. 

These people have been told, preached to really, for years that THEY are coming for them. 

That people of color, of differing sexuality, differing identity, differing religion, differing nationality, and even just differing politics are out to get them. These people will take their jobs, their guns, their homes, their gods, their children, and they will do it all with impunity. 

Someone has to stop them. 

Then you take those people who have been listening to TV pundits, shock radio hosts, bloggers, podcasters, and politicians tell them this and then when they see someone at their door who isn’t like them they are willing to shoot first and figure the rest out later. 

They then frown and kick the ground and say – but I was scared. 

Scared with a gun in their hand. 

So scared they fire through doors, or without knowing anything about the person at their door or on their property. 

They become like toddlers or teens who act without thought. 

Who don’t think about what happens when the bullets leave the gun. 

Oh, maybe they think they’ll be a hero, like Kyle Rittenhouse, seen as fighting back against the mongrels that will tear this nation apart. Odds are though they don’t even think that far. 

They just act and assume that they’ll be fine. 

Many of them live in states that tell them they’re fine. 

Hey, they shouldn’t have been on your land. 

They shouldn’t have made the mistake of pulling into your driveway. 

They shouldn’t have made the mistake of going to the wrong home. 

They shouldn’t have thought that in America you can ask a fellow citizen for help and not fear for your life. 

I live in an area where the downtown district of the central city is like many cities, seen as lawless and dangerous. 

While it has had its crime in the past, and still has its moments, its downtown isn’t necessarily safer or more dangerous than anywhere else. 

All the same, over and over you hear suburbanites proclaim THEY’D never go there because it’s unsafe. 

They turned it into a place of boogeymen and monsters, not necessarily out of direct things happening to them but out of anecdotal. 

Out of hearing the news of the worst of a place. 

They judge a whole city by its worst parts. 

I can do the same with rural areas, if I am honest. 

I heard today how a group was in the area for a geocaching gathering, something amazing that we got to participate in. 

They had fun in the downtown district, despite what they had feared, but once out in the rural area they were threatened with guns by people who didn’t even bother to find out who they were or what they were doing. 

That’s our society. 

Shoot first. 

Screw the rest. 

I get being the old man and shaking your fist and wanting to know who someone is if they’re on your property. 

Makes total sense. 

It’s yours. 

It’s when you feel you have a right to threaten someone that you lose me. 

Because why?

Are you willing to harm someone or kill them because they ‘trespassed’?

Lord. 

We are so fearful and there’s no end in sight. 

Now we see ‘rock stars’ and social media idiots playing violent scenes out in protest of this or that as a sort of performative act to show that they don’t believe in something or someone. They need the clout and the attention so they put on a performance. 

They don’t think about what it says to those watching though.
That it plants the seeds of violence in their head over, what, what a beer company does?

What someone does in the privacy of their home?

What someone identifies as?

We don’t want someone to tell us what to do, or what we can own, but we totally think it’s appropriate to know what happens in people’s bedrooms or in their homes. 

It’s madness. 

Utter madness. 

And when people act with no care for consequences, or what seeds they are sowing it creates a dangerous world. 

It creates a world where people speak with their guns and not their mouths. 

Where innocent people are killed out of misunderstanding and the perpetrators often get off, crying about how they made a simple mistake and it’s not their fault while someone else is dead or their life is forever changed due to that moment of violence. 

We are a fearful nation with too many ‘good guys with guns’ looking to shoot someone to prove how unafraid they really are. 

…c…

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