Again...

There was an opinion piece yesterday about why Gen Z isn't mourning Charlie Kirk. Which is a nonsense take. A lot of Gen Z is completely distraught over it. He was if not the main reason at least one of the largest motivating forces behind getting Gen Z to turn out for Trump. He was a voice of a generation for the conservative youth. Like it or not.

So yeah, a percentage of Gen Z isn't mourning him, but another percentage is.

But the thing I found interesting in the opinion piece was though they sampled a lot of TikTok reactions from "the youth" using Kirk's own words to show why they weren't going to mourn him; and let's be honest about who he was, though the media seems insistent on painting him as some sort of free speech warrior saint, he was a racist, he was a misogynist, he was a Christian Nationalist. And if you didn't fit into his preferred worldview he was a bully. He maintained lists of professors that were too progressive and his followers took the people on that list and terrorized them. Not so much free speech champion. He was a speak like me champion. BUT ANYWAY....

The thing I found interesting about the piece was that the author didn't mention that it's kind of rich to expect Gen Z to mourn any gun death. Millenials and Gen Z spent their entire school careers with lock down drills for active shooters. Why would we expect them to be shocked by a gun death? Especially the gun death of someone who believed they were just a cost of "freedom." The fact that close to the same time as he was shot there was a shooting in a Colorado school and it was only mentioned as an "oh yeah this too" in writeups shows that they have no expectation for anyone to care about them being shot, so why should they care that he was?

We are a violent country. Everytime someone says "this isn't who we are" it makes me roll my eyes. As a country we've only had between 17-20 years of peace since our founding. Big wars, small conflicts all added together. We are a warlike nation. Trump just emphasized that by saying he was going to start calling the Department of Defense the Department of War. And when you consider that during peace or wartime we are still killing each other here at home...well...we've never been a peaceful nation.

Talk to your friends in other countries about what our reputation is. You will be shocked. Or maybe you won't. We are who we are.

We can wish we were different. We can say that nobody should die for expressing an opinion no matter how shitty that opinion is. We can fully believe that. But none of that makes it so. Lockdown drills for active shooters will continue to happen. You will have your own moments in crowds where a noise or a feeling will make you check for the closest exit or hiding place. It's not constant, but it's consistent.

The only thing we will continue to do is find a way to blame "them" instead of "us" for what happens. Be truthful, you hold your breath when something happens, a school shooting, the Kirk killing, any high profile shooting, you hold your breath and hope it isn't someone who is closer to your ideology than theirs. You want that distance, and that ability to blame.

Nancy Mace yesterday was shouting trans slurs and today is praying for the soul of the shooter. What changed? Well the Wall Street Journal (THE FUCKING WALL STREET JOURNAL) was wrong in their reporting that the shooter was trans. He's a white boy with conservative parents so now his soul is important to her.

Why wasn't it yesterday?

Because yesterday she could find an "other" to villainize. And so she did. Today it's a coin flip on if the kid is as conservative as the parents so better step carefully.

And honestly, though we all do it, myself included, there is no distance you can achieve. The motivations might be different, but the violence is the violence. In America there are more guns than people. It's more likely that the people you know have guns than don't.

When we lived in the townhouse I kept a target with a pretty good grouping of bullet holes taped up in the garage. When workers would comment on it, usually saying my husband was a good shot, I would tell them it was mine from the first time I went shooting and seemed to be naturally good at it. It was a threat. Flat out. I was letting them assume I was armed (I wasn't at the time) and that I frequently practiced (I hadn't gone shooting again at that point). I was a woman by myself in my house with a strange man and I wanted him to believe that I was not vulnerable. (though I was)

That all changed during the BLM protests in 2020. We now are armed. When you see the emails between the police and the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer and realize that they are not going to protect you, well, you take it on yourself. And that's the country we live in.

A lot of us are armed. A lot of us are angry. A lot of us don't trust the powers that be. And a lot of us find it hard to mourn one gun death when there have been so many others.

I've said before that I stopped arguing about gun control after Sandy Hook. That dead kindergarteners couldn't change opinions so we were lost as a country. I still believe we need it. I would register, take a licensing class, have my ammunition tracked, all of the things I've advocated for, in a heartbeat. We have a safe already. Everything is locked up. We've taken lessons to make sure we know how to handle them safely. And accurately. There isn't a regulation that I have recommended in the past that I wouldn't follow now. I also don't own AR17s or accessories that make my guns fully automatic. Which is a distinction without a difference if I am aiming my glock at you I can do enough damage with a semi automatic pistol.

Violent nation.

We can mourn who we would like to be. Who we like to pretend we are. But it would be better if we were more honest about it.

Nobody should die for expressing an opinion.
Nobody should die because they went to school that day.
Or church.
Or a movie.
Or the mall.
Or a public space.

It's the guns. And until we are willing to look at that as a problem it doesn't matter what should happen. It will happen.

And you can't other it away.