I didn’t have a name for all the feelings that resided in me when I thought of Janeera.

What I did know was that I refused to go to the Texan famous Whataburger restaurant because the part of me that was Californian was loyal to In-N-Out. Eventually I relented and said my first time would be with her.

What I did know is that we took goofy videos of us on the bridge behind our community college that she posted on an obscure photo sharing app.

What I did know was that we kept postponing our hiking — we called it exploring — plans beyond the bridge, because we just knew we would be tired and aching and would complain about it for the rest of the week.

What I did know was that if I went to school the day she was murdered, she would have walked me to my class’s building on the opposite side of the school.

And she would still be alive.

Friendship opportunities during community college were scarce. Sure, I was lonely, but was it really worth making friends in this new state when I could possible move again when I transferred to university? I figured I could probably last one more semester.

After the first week of spring semester, I entered my Spanish class about 2 minutes earlier than usual and noticed a small girl sitting in the seat next to mine. I sat down, settled my things, and asked her how she had fared through the homework.

We consistently became the only people that showed up to the class that early. I told her that I came early because if I even came in a minute late, everyone’s heads would swivel in my direction. And even if only for a second, their attention would be solely on me, and the idea of that made me want to vomit. I sucked in a deep breath of air after the fat text bubble I had just blurted out. She agreed with me.

And from then on, an unexpected friendship bloomed.

Janeera and I would hang out at the bridge behind the school. She called the bridge a secret; she said that nobody ever hangs around this far behind campus. So we claimed the “secret” bridge as our own and went there almost every day.

On the school’s side of the bridge was a garden — it was green with mold and just the right amount of neglect that made it feel a little sad. It had tall trees with leaves covering the sky and the occasional duck that had strayed from the small stream under the bridge. It was always cold there, but she never wore jackets––she said she didn’t feel so cold. The other side of the bridge was what we called the forest. A forest was too big of a word for what it really was; a cluster of trees with a few trails here and there to make it walkable.

One cloudy day we stood on the bridge and looked over to see the muddy waters below us slowly undulate away. She told me about how she identified with her Hispanic culture and how the political climate made her upset — not angry, she reiterated. Just sad.

“What’s your opinion on guns?” I asked. “I hate them. I would feel safer with more gun control.”

“I also believe in gun control,” she replied. “But I like the concept of gun ownership. What about you?”

“I am scared to death of guns,” I told her.

I didn’t go to school the day she died. There was no reason for my absence — I was lazy and the spring semester was winding down as summer approached. My phone started to light up around 10 a.m. — someone in my history class group chat asked if anyone else had heard the noises that sounded like shots. They all replied no. I told them I skipped classes that day. A few moments later, someone else in the group chat said that yes, the noises were real gun shots, and that they were following intruder protocols right that moment.

I scoured local new sites, incredulous that a shooting would happen in the small suburb of nowhere Irving, Texas. I pulled down the touchscreen on my phone, morbidly curious for the next update. Every refreshing of the page followed was followed by a dark curiosity accompanied with a pit of dread. Thank god I wasn’t at school, I thought.

I didn’t even text Janeera to see if she was fine.

The evening the shooting happened, I went to Panera Bread with a family friend. I had macaroni and cheese and an M&M cookie. My history class group chat lit up again with the latest update on the incident: that there was a reported one fatality.

“Thank God,” one of them texted. I clicked on the link and the first image on my phone screen was Janeera’s face with a flower crown Snapchat filter on her head. I excused myself and shuffled my way through the restaurant until I stood still in a bathroom stall. The idea that my only friend, a quickly close friend was dead — no, murdered — was unbelievably impossible for me to grasp. I didn’t know how shock felt, but I was sure it felt like it did then.

The feelings that flowed through me were foreign. How was I supposed to untangle my emotions if I had no idea how to handle them?

How was I supposed to untangle my emotions if I had no idea how to handle them?
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I told my mother about Janeera. She didn’t understand that I wanted to lay my head on her lap and cry. I told a friend about Janeera. She didn’t take me seriously. I suppose it has to do with the façade that I wear that everyone sees: I’m funny, I make jokes, I’m never serious, and I definitely do not have friends that are victims of gun violence. She just looked at me and asked if I was joking. Why would I be joking? I answered back.

One hot day, I walked across the bridge to the forest for the first time ever. I followed the path between the trees and not a single tear formed in my eyes. Which was strange for who I was, I normally cried at the simplest of things.

When Janeera’s brother messaged me on Twitter with information about her wake and funeral, I cried.

When my history group didn’t believe that I was Janeera’s friend and I basically had to prove to them that I actually was Janeera’s friend, I cried.

When I listened to “Blue Jeans” by Lana Del Rey — a song we used to listen to — I cried.

Why Are We Used To Violence But Caught Off Guard By Hurt?

So yes, it was quite strange that after all the talk we had about our potential exploration, I didn’t cry when I went into the woodsy area without her.

I walked for about two hours. My headscarf burned an embarrassing tan line around my face and my Converse high-tops were definitely not the right shoes for the activity.

When I went to Whataburger for the first time with a few coworkers, I remembered my promise to Janeera that my first time trying the traditional Texas staple would be with her. I didn’t cry then, too. I felt melancholy; a longing for a friend who understood me in a way that I thought rare for someone as complicated as myself.

The police say that this man was stalking her after she had turned him down multiple times. If that story was correct, I knew nothing about it. She never told me about a guy persistently asking her out on dates, or that he was following her. I wondered why. Every time I walked outside and saw a man holding an object, or walking a little too fast, or with his hands in his pockets, panic began to brew in my chest. Theoretically, I knew that every man wasn’t a potential school shooter, but there was a small part of my mind that totally believed that every man was.

I was lying down on my bed and scrolling through my phone. School had been canceled and professors sent out emails addressing Janeera’s death. Teachers were giving out accommodations on finals due to the tragedy. My Spanish teacher called me personally after she sent out a class email. I picked up the incoming call and when the professor told me who it was, tears slipped out of my eyes as I remembered the way our friendship had begun.

I didn’t understand the pull that made her use a tragedy for comedic purposes.
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A girl I knew recorded a few “story time” videos about the shooting and posted them on Snapchat. Her videos were of her laughing and making inappropriate jokes about the gun and the man. I tapped on the screen to skip to other clips of her talking. She continued to laugh and joke.

“And as soon I heard those gunshots, I got up and sprinted! I didn’t wait for any professor or anything!” She laughed hysterically. “At least only one girl got shot — she should have run like I did!” More laughter.

I didn’t understand the pull that made her use a tragedy for comedic purposes. And honestly, as stories go, it wasn’t even the slightest bit funny. A few days later, she approached me at school. She offered her condolences and wrapped her arm around me in a halfhearted hug. I wondered if people talked to me to become closer to tragedy. I accepted her words but eventually walked away. All I could hear were her videos and how she trivialized Janeera’s death.

Spring semester was my last time physically at school until I eventually transferred to Seattle University, the following year.

Something about the school felt out of place, like it had shifted in its fixed position in time and space. Someone had been shot dead at our school.

Janeera used to sit at this particular couch that was to the side of the college’s common room. We would meet there and sit for an hour or so before heading to our Spanish class. I don’t know exactly where she died, but a morbid piece of my mind imagines she was shot on that couch.

Something about the school felt out of place, like it had shifted in its fixed position in time and space.
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I imagine her face in shock as she realizes that she is about to die, I imagine the bullets hitting her as she bleeds through her clothes, staining the carpeted floor and couch. I know that following that trail of thought will not get me anywhere productive, but I can’t help but follow it anyway. The idea of walking into school and passing the common room everyday sickened me.

When brainstorming this piece, I sat and talked to a close friend. She has a degree in sociology, and is the perfect person to turn to when you need help with big pictures in social settings. “Why do you think that some school shootings get more attention than others?” I asked. “What happened that made us numb to these deaths?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Later that day, the news broke on the Parkland school shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018. The thoughts that ran through my head when I heard of the tragedy— I knew they were not logical.

Every rational part of me knew that these thoughts were unreasonable, but the combination sadness and guilt overrode the logic. I thought: “I spoke the shooting into existence when I speculated aloud earlier. And it’s my fault.” For the rest of the day as I refreshed the news on my phone, I berated myself for causing the tragedy: If only I had chosen a different topic to write on, if only I had kept my mouth shut and not asked stupid questions, 17 kids would still be alive and I would be spared from having to revisit the death of my friend as if it was the first day.

The vigor that I see in the Stoneman Douglas high school students inspires me. They say every movement starts with one moment. And I think that we are in a moment right now — the high school students that are demanding for their safety is a moment. The national and international support, and the momentum they have is a moment. Their ability to organize events, marches, and movements in less than one month is a moment.

I can only hope that I can tap into my strength and contribute my voice to a cause that is deeply personal to me.

It took me six months to tell my therapist about Janeera. During the session I used nearly half of her tissues. She called it a “multiple Kleenex day.” After the session, she gave me a hug. She had never hugged me before.

Dr. Novinsky told me that I didn’t know for sure that if I was at school that day Janeera wouldn’t have died. In fact, she told me that if this man was stalking her, he would have known that she would be with me and I would be dead, too.

And I wonder if death would have been more peaceful than the seemingly perpetual sadness that followed me long after Janeera’s death.

When ardent defenders of gun rights don’t want to talk about what’s wrong with guns, they talk about what they think is wrong with the people who make the news for using guns the way they’re made to be used. Often there’s a quietly intense litany of curses — “crazy,” “nuts” — meaning the individuals in question do not count among the “normal.” During this part, they always spit the word “sick” as though there is nothing more wretched and strange than being mentally unwell. Being me. Being among what is actually an enormous and ordinary population.

A disdain for those deemed abnormal is animating the conversation. After the massacres in Las Vegas and Parkland, the idea of bringing back asylums has found new support, in thoughtless one-offs but also in serious proposals in trustworthy outlets. A few Parkland survivors, too, suggested targeting the mentally ill for increased surveillance by law enforcement. There is a troubling desire to deal with the disorder that is gun violence by putting people on notice for their diagnoses.

It can be hard to define disorder, both in the clinic and in talking about what we will and will not put up with as a society. It takes nuance to distinguish disorder from wellbeing on a continuum of possibilities and amid the deep inflections of culture and social context. (Are you depressed, or going through a rough patch? Are you fasting because of anorexia or a religious observance? Is an unlivable minimum wage a spur to betterment or a sign of breakdown?)

But carefully defining disorder is core to grappling with the U.S. gun problem — and envisioning a less disordered, more just world. What do we admit into the fold of normal? What do we map to the edges? And what are we seeing all upside down?

For all the people who marched and spoke out for gun control, there may remain as many with a stoic, fatalist understanding that tragedies like gun violence are to be expected. But this understanding coexists with the idea that the various kinds of hurt seen as the causes and effects of gun violence — mental illness as well as the wounds that follow the path of a rifle round — are not a part of ordinary life. We’ve gotten used to violence as background hum, yet we are unprepared to recognize and live alongside people who have been hurt. We’re caught in a chilling dynamic of hurt disseminated and then obscured.

It must be said again up front that the link from mental illness to gun violence is far from straightforward. So entwined are our ideas of mental illness and shocking violence that the question of whether a violent individual is mentally ill is often answered by the fact of their behavior. It is true that reports of mental illness are common among those who carry out some of the most devastating mass shootings. But there remain many mass shooters who do not have an established diagnosis; and among perpetrators of smaller-scale violence, who far outnumber mass shooters, rates of mental illness are unusually low. Even severe mental illness is not enough to explain the pronounced patterns of gun violence unique to the U.S., because concomitant disadvantages are part of the picture. Using the single variable of mental health as a net for identifying danger captures far too many people who were never going to violate the social contract.

The wrongful dread of mental illness as this seed of unthinkable acts makes it difficult to conceive of mental illness as an ordinary characteristic, found abundantly among friends and neighbors and maybe even in ourselves. When I was struggling to get a handle on my major depressive disorder, I understood the concept of “needing help” to mean possessing shortcomings terrible enough to require professional intervention. I shrank from crucial medical care because accepting it would have felt like admitting monstrosity. I did not realize how common my illness was. Nor did I realize that monstrous tendencies inhabit every human being, not just the ones we would make outcasts.

How We Learn To Love ‘Good’ White Men With Guns
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The unseen ordinariness of mental illness, and other illness, can explain gaps in care. Sickness is implicitly seen by too many lawmakers as what happens when you have done something wrong, not a quotidian fact of numerous lives regardless of how they have been lived. If serious illness were seen as truly ordinary, it would not be so hard to afford. Nor would disability be so often a sentence of poverty. Workers would have the right to get sick yet stay employed. Swaths of public life would not still be inaccessible to people with disabilities, and the Americans with Disabilities Act would not be at risk of getting fundamentally undercut.

The people who survive gunshot wounds are no exception to this neglect. The tens of thousands who die every year in the U.S. because of guns are staggering enough, but these dead represent only 20% of those who have gone through the trauma of being shot. Many of the survivors deal with chronic pain and posttraumatic stress combined with health-care insecurity, as detailed by sociologist Jooyoung Lee. Many are uninsured or underinsured and struggle to control their pain, and some may become desperate to find relief; one leapt into traffic in order to be admitted to a hospital for pain treatment. “In addition to feeling victimized by their shooters, gunshot victims also felt victimized by a health care system that did not continue to care for them,” Lee writes.

Even more numerous than the dead and wounded are those who care about them. Some time ago, a rare dear friend to me gained access to a gun, and left us. They were 17, I was also 17. I still dream about it. Impossible to trace the immense shape of the loss. But here is a fragment of it: Not long afterward, I sought out a doctor and asked for a new prescription for an antidepressant. I am trying to say a gunshot has a long echo.

Dear Congress: I Don’t Need An Effing Gun, I Need Health Care
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Each of these hurts is elided by inaction. Despite a richness of resources we are at least adjacent to, the threshold at which our current leaders begin to pretend to want to address the health and safety of the hurting, including those with mental illness or physical wounds, is a critical mass of tragic headlines and town hall callouts where constituents beg for access to medicine or for protections from weapons that will continue to inflict injury. The rest of the time, the everyday fact of hurt is, it seems, too atypical to acknowledge through meaningful action at high levels.

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” If only Sontag’s view were more widespread.

Next to the refusal to see illness as ordinary is the reluctance, especially among those whose foremost sympathies lie with a couple lines on a centuries-old document, to see current levels of gun violence as disordered. Gun deaths in the U.S. have been repeatedly excused as the price of our exceptional freedom. These deaths now threaten to outpace those from car crashes. Few of the records of people shooting each other are defensive or can be in any way justified; far more incidents are murders or suicides. The violence is absolutely beyond a passing side effect of patriotic or honorable necessity.

Yet the prevailing understanding has been that this violence is impenetrable and inevitable. This violence is not to be challenged, but accommodated. For all the dismay felt across the ideological spectrum after every tragedy, there remains a current of deference. There is a greater willingness to carve out gun-shaped spaces across the lives of the potentially vulnerable than to, say, reinstate the ban on assault weapons. School shootings are to be met with backpacks that are bulletproof or see-through, behemoth panic rooms wedged beside students’ desks, something something CPR, calls for more empathy not from potential shooters but from potential victims, and buckets of river rocks in every classroom for dispatching threats by stoning. Believing violence to be inevitable also looks like increasing the presence of police in schools, which brings further risks of violence toward and criminalization of students of color and students with disabilities.

These measures are sometimes called hardening the target. They amount to a crouch that braces against onslaughts of our own making as against the uncontrollable weather. It is imaginatively flat.

There is a greater willingness to carve out gun-shaped spaces across the lives of the potentially vulnerable than to, say, reinstate the ban on assault weapons.
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All these imaginative shortfalls converge in the worst way. The costs of gun violence, from physical to financial, are immense, yet numerically murky. These wounds not only are seen as inconvenient outliers but also have not been adequately quantified, thanks to the ongoing inability of federal agencies to research gun violence. This lack of clarity on consequences muffles the urgency of acting on the problem.

The rhythm of violence inflicted while its effects are obscured is often wielded by the privileged and powerful. We see this with sexual predators. We see this in the increasing permanence of war and the failure to care for veterans, or to reckon with the damage left behind. We see this as the right of the police to freely execute black people, made normal every time yet another officer responsible is released without charges.

And it’s in privilege and power that we might begin to find an explanation for the seeming inability of a nation to connect the dots from gunshot to wound. Gun laws in the U.S. have long operated in service of white supremacy. The majority of mass shooters are white men, and about half are domestic abusers; and men constitute the vast majority of shooters overall. But the group most vulnerable to gun violence is young, working-class black men.

Many noted the contrast between the widely cheered protests spurred by the well-off white neighborhood of Parkland and the less-popular movement for black lives, rooted in Ferguson. Gun violence as it most often occurs elicits so little material response because the aggressor or the injured can often be subsumed into structures of oppression. If those who remain in that imaginative crouch shifted the landscape of their sympathy, perhaps the violence we have come to know as everyday would seem more strange. The people who have been hurting the most could finally make their way from the periphery to the focus.

By Kali Holloway

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, died in 2013 at the age of 94. Though he often shrugged off criticisms that he’d given the world a tool that has helped murder millions (he once compared himself to a “woman who bears children,” declaring himself “always proud” of his creation), months before his death, he revealed intense remorse. In an April 2013 letter to Russia’s Orthodox church, Kalashnikov said a profound sadness had dogged him in the final years of his life. “My spiritual pain is unbearable,” the gun inventor wrote. “I keep asking the same insoluble question. If my rifle deprived people of life then can it be that I…a Christian and an orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?”

The letter was made public in 2014, after being published in the Russian newspaper Izvestia and later picked up by Western outlets. The missive offers an unvarnished look at a man who, taking stock of his life, came to regret what he once considered his greatest achievement and contribution. “The longer I live,” Kalashnikov continued, “the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.”

The Russian church — like its American Christian counterpart and religious entities since the beginning of time — reassured Kalashnikov that it was totally okay with murder as long as the act was committed in the name of the state. (“If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it,” a spokesperson noted.) This is not surprising, unfortunately; religion is gonna be religion. What’s more interesting is Kalashnikov’s lamentation about his part in making a killing machine, a sadness that seems to have gradually overtaken him across the years. While the letter contained Kalashnikov’s most intense expression of remorse, it was not his first sign of regret. A decade earlier, Kalashnikov admitted in an interview that he “would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example, a lawnmower.”

5 Places Hypocritical Republicans Ban Guns For Their Own Personal Safety
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As Rebecca J. Rosen noted in the Atlantic, “that’s the thing about building weapons-grade technologies: You can’t control their use.” Einstein regretted signing a letter to President Roosevelt warning of Germany’s potential to produce atomic weapons — a letter that ultimately led to the creation of the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein, a pacifist, never worked directly on the effort, but regretted even tangential involvement in the project. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he later said, “I would have done nothing.”

Similarly, Alfred Nobel is said to have willed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes, particularly the peace prize, as a sort of penance for creating the deadly explosive dynamite. Arthur Galston, whose research led to the development of Agent Orange, “was deeply troubled by the part his work played in extending war into environmental destruction, spoke often about his sense of guilt and responsibility, and became an extraordinarily articulate antiwar activist who made many trips to Vietnam and China, focusing always on the dangers of Agent Orange.” Weapons-grade pepper spray inventor Kamran Loghman appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss aggressive and abusive police use of his invention on peaceful protesters around the country during the time of Occupy Wall Street. “I saw it, and the first thing that came to my mind wasn’t police or students, was my own children sitting down, having an opinion, and their being shot and forced by chemical agents,” Loghman said. “The use was just absolutely out of ordinary, and it was not in accordance with any training or policy of any department that I know of…I feel it’s my civic duty to explain to the public that this is not what pepper spray was developed for.”

‘The longer I live, the more…I wonder why the Lord allowed man the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.’
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Eugene Stoner didn’t live to see the weapon he invented, the AR-15, used in any mass shootings. But his family maintains that he would have been revolted to learn that the rifle is now used by civilians in any capacity, and heartbroken to see it employed in civilian mass killings in America. In 2016, Stoner’s adult children and grandchildren told NBC News that the late Marine was an “avid sportsman, hunter and skeet shooter.” But they insist he had “never used his invention for sport. He also never kept it around the house for personal defense. In fact, he never even owned one.”

“He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events,” Stoner’s family told the outlet, days after the Pulse nightclub massacre, where the killer used an AR-15 to kill 49 people. “After many conversations with him, we feel his intent was that he designed it as a military rifle.”

“What has happened, good or bad, since his patents have expired is a result of our free-market system,” Stoner’s family said. “Currently, a more interesting question is, ‘Who now is benefiting from the manufacturing and sales of AR-15s, and for what uses?’”

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

Do as they say, not as they do.

Paul Ryan (Credit: Gage Skidmore)

By Kali Holloway

After every mass shooting, a portion of this country insists the real problem is that there aren’t enough guns. The group that pushes this absurd lie includes Republican politicians, many of whom fear that admitting otherwise would drive away NRA donor funds. There’s been a lot of recent discussion about how GOP legislators do nothing in response to gun massacres, but a 2016 Harvard Business School study proves that’s not quite true. In states with overwhelmingly Republican legislative bodies, after mass shootings, “the number of laws passed to loosen gun restrictions [increases] by 75 percent.” Despite being counterintuitive and demonstrably dangerous, more firepower is the GOP’s go-to solution because “something something don’t tread on me.”

It’s a bad-faith proposition. A party that truly believes guns are the way out of this thing, and that an even more heavily armed populace will ensure American safety, would make different personal choices. In fact, we can gauge GOP disingenuousness on the gun issue just by noting all the places Republican politicians frequent where weapons are banned. Pointing out their hypocrisy has never helped to shame the GOP into decency, but it’s worth a review nonetheless.

Here are five places hypocritical Republicans ban guns in order to ensure their own personal safety.

1. The White House

Along with making Mexico pay billions for a wall it opposed and never taking a golfing vacation, Trump promised on the campaign trail to legislate a future in which guns could legally be brought into every kindergarten classroom and nursery. “My first day, it gets signed, okay? My first day,” Trump told supporters in Vermont in 2016. “There’s no more gun-free zones.”

While it’s true no president could unilaterally scrap federal law, it’s also true that Trump’s complicit Republican Congress would probably greenlight any pro-gun horrorshow he could dream up. Yet, in the year since he took office, Trump has not spoken out once — even via his digital bullhorn at Twitter — against the anti-freedom gun ban at the White House. What better way for this president to signify his wholehearted support for gun-based lifestyles than by letting White House visitors from around the world — especially those who live under the tyranny of gun control abroad — bring all the guns they want into the People’s House?

Mad Lib For An Ineffectual GOP Response To The Latest Mass Shooting

Or maybe Trump hasn’t brought up the matter because he doesn’t actually want strangers bringing guns into the White House, seeing as they can and do kill people at the squeeze of a trigger.

2. The Republican National Convention

The quadrennial gathering of this country’s most dedicated Republicans should be a place where GOPers can briefly escape oppressive gun-free “safe spaces” and live on their own gun-riddled terms. Attendees should be permitted — nay, required — to come armed to the teeth. Downtime convention activities should be strictly gun-focused. (Think ball pits, only filled with guns. Cocktail hours, only the drinks are all guns.) At the very end, instead of confetti, the audience should be showered in loose ammo.

But instead of a three-day orgy of gun lust and ammosexuality, the Republican National Convention is a gun-free zone. Guns were banned at the RNC in 2008, 2012 and 2016, and that’s not for lack of trying by those who bothered to petition for bringing guns to the party. For some strange reason, the RNC keeps choosing venues that explicitly ban guns, almost as if it was looking for a convenient excuse. The Secret Service keeps banning guns from the events, almost as if it knows the whole “good guy with a gun” claim is a just a myth. And not a single Republican politician has raised their voice to demand guns be allowed on the convention floor, almost like they’re tacitly admitting to being iffy on the whole “responsible gun owners” thing.

3. Mar-a-Lago

A staffer told ABC News back in 2016 that guns were banned from Trump’s Palm Beach golf property, where the president spends so much time it’s hard to know when he’s doing the actual job of presidenting. That policy appears to still be in place, according to a Politico report from late last year. “Pocket knives, laser pointers, pepper spray, and any other items deemed to be a safety hazard are not permitted on property,” a letter the club sent to members cautioned. “Any items surrendered will not be returned.”

4. The U.S. Capitol Building

Surely, a Congress that has steadfastly refused to pass gun legislation is cool with guns in the Capitol building, if only to make a patriotic point. Why not let the Senate and House galleries double as shooting galleries, since guns are such a national point of pride? When are the gun-loving legislators of Congress, who believe that murdered 6-year-olds are just the price of freedom, going to change the rules so the U.S. Capitol building can become the guntopia it’s meant to be?

The short answer is never. Guns are banned on the Capitol grounds and inside the building itself, which includes the House and Senate galleries. Visitors are also warned against bringing “black jacks, slingshots, sand clubs, sandbags, knuckles, electric stun guns, knives (longer than 3”), martial arts weapons or devices…razors, box cutters, knives, knitting needles, letter openers…mace and pepper spray.”

Why not let the Senate and House galleries double as shooting galleries?

Which all raises the question: what kind of heartless, cruel and immoral people consistently vote against gun control for most Americans’ work lives, but cynically keep guns far away from their own place of business?

5. Republican Town Halls

In early 2017, when Republican legislators realized that angry crowds were showing up in town halls to speak against repeals of the Affordable Care Act, they found two ways to avoid those meetings. The first was to label their own constituents “paid protesters.” The second was to demonize civically engaged voters as violent mobs. It was all for show, of course. In fact, as Talking Points Memo notes, “guns are frequently prohibited at GOP congressional town hall meetings, especially after the shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011. Even stalwart conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan and former Rep. Allen West opted to ban firearms at their town halls.”

Texas Republican Louie Gohmert even went so far as to invoke Giffords as a political prop to get out of being berated by the people he supposedly serves.

“At this time there are groups from the more violent strains of the leftist ideology, some even being paid, who are preying on public town halls to wreak havoc and threaten public safety,” Gohmert claimed in a statement. “The House Sergeant at Arms advised us after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot at a public appearance, that civilian attendees at Congressional public events stand the most chance of being harmed or killed — just as happened there.”

Giffords, incredibly, had to release a statement encouraging Republicans to do their damn jobs.

“To the politicians who have abandoned their civic obligations, I say this: Have some courage,” Giffords’ message said. “Many of the members of Congress who are refusing to hold town halls and listen to their constituents’ concerns are the very same politicians that have opposed common-sense gun violence prevention policies and have allowed the Washington gun lobby to threaten the safety of law enforcement and everyday citizens in our schools, businesses, places of worship, airports, and movie theaters.”

In an interview later, Giffords stated, “If you don’t have the guts to face your constituents, then you shouldn’t be in the United States Congress.”

And maybe, if you don’t have the guts to deal with the laws you force the rest of us to live under, you for sure shouldn’t be involved in making them.

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/mad-lib-for-an-ineffectual-gop-response-to-the-latest-mass-shooting-28c0c6c51ec0/ Wed, 04 Oct 2017 22:08:19 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3378 Read more]]>

There’s a lot to do in a day, and there are a lot of mass shootings. This handy guide will make preparing your statement a snap!

My heart is _________ (NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE) over news that ________________ (# OF VICTIMS) Americans have been tragically killed by
a _______________ (POSITIVE ADJECTIVE) mentally disturbed family man who deserves our compassion.*

At times like these, we must commit to not _______________ (NEGATIVE ADVERB) politicizing a _______________ (NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE) tragedy.**

I will be praying extra hard in the coming days, to ensure our ____________ (POSITIVE ADJECTIVE) God prevents another mass shooting from happening in the most heavily armed __________ (PATRIOTIC ADJECTIVE) country in the world because truly, that is all any of us can do.

America remains a resilient ______________ (HYPERBOLICALLY POSITIVE ADJECTIVE) nation in the face of ________________ (BOMBASTICALLY NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE) adversity.

I am, again, so very _____________ (NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE).

With condolences,

___________________________
(GOP CONGRESSMAN NAME)

*Unless perpetrator is Muslim/brown/black, in which case please write “vicious terrorist thug.”

**Unless perpetrator is Muslim/brown, in which case please write “allowing dangerous Islamic terrorism to destroy America.”

***This Mad Lib may be used after every mass shooting in perpetuity forever.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-truth-about-the-men-who-riot-and-kill-51dfbe9be219/ Fri, 26 Aug 2016 15:22:49 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1863 Read more]]> Without transforming our cultural understanding of gender,  the riot will rage on, taking new forms, attracting more and more fearful people searching for a way to prove that they belong.

A 27-year-old man with a history of abusing his girlfriend killed five people in Alabama last week, apparently because they tried to help her leave him. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have now been at least 248 mass shootings in the first eight months of the year, which continues an alarming upward trend in this kind of violence in the U.S.

In a 2015 essay for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explored whether or not the frequency of reported shootings in America has created a self-propagating “phenomenon” — with each new act increasing the likelihood that another person, somewhere in the country, will soon lash out.

Referencing the work of sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell posits that school shooters, as a group, function much like a riot, in that each new participant’s “threshold,” at which they are compelled to join, is lowered by those before them. Riot instigators may be those on the brink of desperation, or people willing to destroy property for little reason at all, but at some point even otherwise “law-abiding” citizens tend to also suddenly take part in chaos. Gladwell uses this model to explain why it’s become so hard to create a single profile for shooters, or predict who might be next:

“The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

This echoes a 2015 New York Times analysis of mass shootings in general, which concluded that “what seems telling about the killers . . . is not how much they have in common but how much they look and seem like so many others who do not inflict harm.”

Yet both the Times and Gladwell come to their conclusions while only glancing at a certain commonality: that these shooters are nearly all men (and mostlywhite men at that). Furthermore, these writers seem to presuppose that there is a “normal” or healthy ideal of how young men should behave in America. Which suggests that if it just weren’t for all these high-profile massacres, perhaps the threshold for violence amongst men would have remained higher, and so many of them would not be choosing to “inflict harm” on society.

But, in the year of Donald Trump, as we process the loss of more than 270 lives at the hands of mass shooters — whether in Alabama, at a gay club in Orlando, or on the streets of Dallas (not to mention attacks in Munich, Fort Myers, Baton Rouge, Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad, Nice, Kalamazoo, and too many other places to list) — it’s important to ask the question again: What exactly is “healthy” behavior for men? When exactly do boys learn how to be men in ways that do not inflict harm on society?

Gladwell himself makes a strong case for broadening our lens on this topic, in further explaining Granovetter’s research:

“[Granovetter] was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. ‘Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,’ he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. ‘But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.’ You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.”

Similarly, mass shooters in this country can’t be entirely separated from Granovetter’s group of boys who act recklessly out of a fear of being called “sissies.” It seems likely that the killer in Orlando, who targeted a gay nightclub that he himself visited (and who also had a history of domestic violence), shared an overt fear of femininity. The shooter at UC Santa Barbara in 2014, who made a confessional video listing his frustrations with women, was also clearly disturbed by the idea of appearing less than manly. As were countless other killers before and after them.

And though a majority of young men do not become murderers — or even “delinquent boys” — it’s no stretch to say they are mostly being socialized to carry in their hearts that same fear. So perhaps we should consider that so-called “healthy” visions of masculinity exist at the edges of society (if at all), and that the dislike of women and all things “feminine” is much closer to the center.

If mass shootings are akin to a new kind of cultural “riot,” then, it is a riot born in the traditional culture of masculinity — thriving in a country built on the macho mass violence of genocide and slavery. And it is occurring within a global society still dominated by hypermasculine straight white men, and where men of all backgrounds are cheered more for their loyalty to other men, than for their resistance to oppression.

But why exactly has this particular threshold been lowered in the last few decades? Gladwell points to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High, and the way news of that spree, and many subsequent ones, spread online and openly taught young men the rituals of mass killing. He emphasizes the role of visual storytelling in this process:

“[T]he sociologist Nathalie E. Paton has analyzed the online videos created by post-Columbine shooters and found a recurring set of stylized images: a moment where the killer points his gun at the camera, then at his own temple, and then spreads his arms wide with a gun in each hand; the closeup; the wave goodbye at the end. ‘School shooters explicitly name or represent each other,’ she writes.”

Illustrating this point, last month in Munich, a man who killed nine people at a shopping mall was found to be using the photo of another shooter (who killed 77 in Norway exactly five years before attack) as his own WhatsApp profile picture.

These killers don’t consume or create their stylized images of masculinity in a vacuum, though. We have long seen them elsewhere. If those who planned Columbine “laid down the ‘cultural script’ for the next generation of shooters,” as Gladwell writes, they did so within the context of other scripts and images which have also encouraged young men to, as Gladwell put it, “contemplate horrific acts.”

If knowing the stories of past shooters helps to lower the barrier of entry for these killers — or if this is a riot “in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before,” as Gladwell claims — perhaps it’s worth thinking more about how these stories intersect with those we most often tell about men.

Like all American institutions of power, popular cinema — one of our most celebrated forms of storytelling — is filled with white men, and is often centered on a conception of masculinity which encourages a fear of being called a “sissy.”

The stars of the year’s top live-action film, Captain America: Civil War (Captain America and Iron Man, played by Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr.), or in last year’s blockbuster Jurassic World (Owen Brady, played by Chris Pratt), were not hellbent killers, but seemingly noble heroes intent on saving humanity from evil. These guys recall beloved movie characters like Han Solo, the kind of hard-shelled, wise-cracking white men who aren’t afraid to bend a few rules in pursuit of justice.

That seems different than how we might initially describe someone like Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver’s “lone wolf” protagonist who plots the execution of a presidential candidate and takes out his frustrations by murdering a pimp. Yet films like Taxi Driver or Reservoir Dogs aren’t cult hits because they necessarily differ from the status quo of popular cinema, but because they zero in on specific, familiar representations of masculinity, and then take them to extremes.

Why The ‘New Masculine’ Movement Is Just As Toxic As The Old One
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Similarly, SUNY professor Tristan Bridges says that instead of seeing mass shooters as “outliers or oddballs . . . we should actually think of them as conformists . . . They’re over-conforming to masculinity.” The truth we tend to avoid is that the norm is for men to be valued for harmful anti-social behaviors, and that most stories about men, intentionally or not, reinforce this norm.

Physical toughness, lack of emotion, and power over women are just as linked and celebrated in blockbusters like Captain America, or this year’s Deadpool, as they are in films like Taxi Driver, only slightly more obscured by romantic subplots, CGI-ed villains, or a framework of fantasy. But at his core, the immensely popular Iron Man is also a “lone wolf” type who rarely cries, makes rape jokes, and uses aggression to gain the respect of other straight men.

How many of our favorite movies — from American Sniper to Dirty Grandpa to The Revenant — give men ways of overcoming challenges that don’t appeal to aggression, power over women, and other limiting ideas of “manliness”?

Films like Batman vs. Superman tend to reiterate that (white) men are entitled to control, and that acceptance into the “group” of masculinity requires dominance. But they also risk providing a script for how men should go about obtaining that power — or at least reaffirm the vision of what it looks like to “become a man.” This echoes the underlying messages about masculinity we see in the videos of mass shooters, or even ISIS propaganda.

And, at the end of the day, there is no mainstream counter narrative for how masculinity should be performed. Instead we see Hollywood’s ideas about the man “club” replicated in mainstream politics, in the culture of law enforcement, popular music, comic books, video games, and in our everyday lives. Adding extreme violence to that mix — or guns, or racist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive rhetoric — only fans the already rising flames.

In The Atlantic, James Hamblin recently expounded on the problem of “toxic masculinity,” but again emphasized its specificity: “The idea of toxic masculinity is — critically — not a sweeping indictment of bros or gender. It’s an admission that masculinity can be toxic at times.”

Yet, just as in Hollywood, “toxic masculinity” remains the most pervasive mode of masculinity in this country. Our patriarchal constitution, embedded in white supremacy, was written with these very behaviors in mind. As R.W. Connell has described, there are indeed many different “masculinities” in existence, and race, ethnicity, class, and a myriad of other factors can alter one’s experience. But the version we most often see, hear, and value — everywhere from cable news to talk radio to within our police departments — is primarily toxic.

This same fear of being excluded from the club is exactly what’s fueling Donald Trump. And though it’s certainly terrifying, we can no longer pretend that his is a fringe vision of manhood.

Toxic masculinity remains the most pervasive mode of masculinity in this country.
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It’s no coincidence that one of the common ways men criticize Trump is by resorting to the same type of hypermasculine shaming which accelerated his rise — ridiculing his penis size or calling him a “wuss.”

Can we expect to put out the fire in the hearts of “violent” men if we don’t recognize that we — all of us who have been socialized to be men — are also standing in flames? That we are a part of that same riot?

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t critique the inciting words of men in power, or completely denounce the thinking of mass shooters, but that we might spend more time considering broader context — and looking inward. Because improving mental health care or eliminating access to guns alone (just like removing extreme violence from cinema) will not change the harmful context of masculinity. Neither will defeating Trump.

In fact, we might ask ourselves: In our pursuit of a “healthier manhood,” are we more interested in creating a safer and more equitable world for others, or just putting ourselves above the ugliness of these men — creating new hierarchies? Why is it that straight cis men are more comfortable talking about “reimagining masculinity” than simply embracing “femininity”? Are we still holding onto that same fear of being called a “sissy,” of being associated with women?

Gladwell frames that New Yorker essay around the life of John LaDue, a young man who was caught planning a school shooting in Minnesota. The writer suggests that perhaps LaDue, who “never expressed a desire to hurt anyone,” was more attracted to the ritual of being a mass shooter — like a rioter who stumbles into the crowd — than he was to the end result:

“LaDue was fascinated — as many teen-age boys are — by guns and explosions. But he didn’t know the acceptable way to express those obsessions.”

Isn’t it strange that there is an “acceptable” way to express a desire to destroy others? As bell hooks writes, “many boys are angry, but no one really cares about this anger unless it leads to violent behavior. If boys take their rage and sit in front of a computer all day, never speaking, never relating, no one cares.”

On the 4chan message board where a 2015 shooter in Oregon allegedly left evidence of his plan, there are a number of casual replies from men who offer ideas on how to best enact mass murder. Most of them may not have imagined they were talking to someone who was seriously planning one, and yet they feign seriousness as a way to impress others — to prove their masculinity. And as subsequent reports revealed, the deceased killer himself may have once been one of those men, with those “obsessions,” who performed on message boards in an effort to be acknowledged by others.

These men may perceive themselves to be anti-establishment, but they are in fact — like Trump, Deadpool, or the Orlando shooter — just replicating the same systems of the establishment. The same fear of isolation, and same obsession with gaining entry into the club.

LaDue eventually received a plea deal, and on the day of his last hearing, Gladwell recounts how his father, David LaDue, stood outside the courthouse answering reporter’s questions:

“He wanted to remind the world that his son was human. ‘He had love,’ LaDue said. ‘He liked affection like anybody else.” [ . . . ] He talked about how difficult it was for men — and for teen-age boys in particular — to admit to vulnerability.”

Before he learned the rituals of mass shooters, John LaDue was taught the rituals of manhood. The way you must shut yourself down to matter. How physical force always speaks louder than a cry for help. These are the ideas which have been plaguing society since long before the Columbine shootings, September 11th, or the hateful murders at Pulse nightclub.

Regardless of what else we do, without transforming our cultural understanding of gender — without being vulnerable as people who call themselves men, without embracing love and what we call feminine, and including ourselves in this work of better, less gendered storytelling — the riot will rage on, taking new forms, attracting more and more fearful people searching for a way to prove that they belong.