Someday, my brother and I will inherit my father's guns.
My dad and I plan to go deer hunting in the fall. Together, we'll wake up early and drive to a state forest. Search out deer sign. Be very still. And hopefully, he'll shoot his rifle. We'll thank the deer and drag its body out of the woods. We'll bring it to a neighbor for processing, and eat it all winter long.
I’ll practice with a rifle for the next year and try to take my own deer after the next Thanksgiving.
My goal is to supplement our family's locally-farmed meat. I've inherited my father's love and respect for the land.
The boy in custody after last week's school shooting in Winder got his semi-automatic rifle from his father for Christmas.1 His name is Colt. The two of them bonded over guns and maybe not much else.
Their family went through a lot of troubles in the last few years. What do you do when you're fourteen and everything is falling apart around you?
Maybe in your fourteen-year-old way, you seek out connection any way you can. And if you don't find it, a Discord forum full of strangers starts to look like a lifeline.2
A gun starts to look like the only way you’ve ever known you belonged.
A rifle, a shotgun, a handgun, a semi-automatic weapon are all very specific tools. When you shoot each one, it shapes your body in a different way. I won't pretend to more knowledge than I have, but I have in fact shot each one. On my uncle's farm in Oklahoma, several times, and my college roommate's in Pennsylvania a couple, and at the skeet range on a vacation or two.
If you are at home in rural places, you are probably at home with guns, because you probably live a life that depends in part upon a good tool.
I'm trying to teach my son that we respect and care for our tools. He is just one year old, but he sees me sharpen our kitchen knives and oil our leather shoes.
It's the same with guns. We don't have any in our house, but he will learn about his Poppi’s. In our family, you don't so much as touch a BB gun before you can recite the rules about guns.3 In our family, you don't get a second chance or a do-over or an “accident” on those rules before you are no longer allowed to even be around a gun.
In our family, there is no such fucking thing as a “right” to a gun.
The enemy isn't “the gun lobby.” OK, the enemy is the gun lobby. But if you erase the gun lobby, a more insidious, enduring enemy remains. The enemy is Whiteness.
Whiteness is the enemy of White people. It's not our skin color but the habits of mind and heart that teach us to subtly replicate the myth of White supremacy. Whiteness is the kind of insecurity, greed, callousness, and cruelty, the loss of love, tenderness, and beauty that comes from inventing stories about people's skin with which to oppress and objectify them.
None of us invented White supremacy or asked for it as an inheritance. But it lurks wherever we go.
Whiteness is a tool of empire that strips us of the things that make us human in exchange for status and a certain version of security.
It says, if you defend the myth of White supremacy and strive to imitate the ruling class, you can pretend to be like them. It's a lie - a powerful lie, a cost-of-your-soul lie, masquerading as a little white virtue.
We give up the cultures that formed our belonging, in exchange for fitting in.
We discipline and dissociate from our bodies in exchange for little drips and drops of privilege.
We loosen our ties to community and family, choice by choice, chasing status and money under empire's punitive rules.
Whiteness will take your family’s beautiful legacy of caring for tools and working with land, and twist it into the demonic worship of violence.
Whiteness will steal your local sense of community, history, and common purpose, and then sell you a fabricated myth about killing machines to replace it, and you will think it’s a fine trade, and then the myth will kill your children.
Whiteness will sever your connection to everything that could have taught you what it means to be a man. It will leave you with nothing but a pile of metal and the most transparent insecurity, forever desperately chasing the need to claim a strength you didn't earn, to shore up the worth you can never quite prove because the worth is a skin color and a weapon.
And then it will kill you.
I have a good bit of sympathy with those who roll their eyes and tune out any liberal who wants to ban guns because they, personally, are afraid of guns. Guns are, perhaps, inherently violent; well, nature is violent. Guns are dangerous. Cars are dangerous.
People who say all guns should be banned seem to think no gun ever has a purpose, which betrays a certain unseriousness about the tools and ways and means of life outside the delivery range of Instacart.
But people who say all guns are some kind of birthright understand even less.
Handguns and automatic weapons are tools for killing human beings. You can use them for other things, just like you could make up a list of thirty alternate uses for a butter knife. But the fact remains that if you want to kill one or more human beings, these are the precision instruments to which you turn.
We ban lots of tools that the average person doesn't have the need or the skills to use. It is time. It is time. It is time.
But here I am, arguing for common-sense gun laws, when common sense needs no argument.
We need common-sense gun laws, and we need them now.
And we are already a country flooded with guns and gun markets and so many flavors of violence and it is shameful that we only take notice when children are shot at school, but not when they're shot at home.
It will take decades, maybe more, to substantially change the availability of killing machines in the U.S. And there's frustration and grief in that.
But this is also the time horizon of deep, generational healing. In decades, maybe more, we could begin to unlearn patriarchy and violence.
We need common-sense gun laws and we also, each of us, need to become artisans of new tools.
Tools of true courage, valor, and strength, that give our young men something to fight for and not just against.
Tools of care and the lost art of reconciliation, to recover responses to harm besides dealing greater violence.
Tools of community, of building and growing together what is good, to combat the loneliness that is the ultimate wage of White patriarchy.
I will inherit my father's guns because I have inherited the need for them. But guns are not my heritage. What an empty, horrible, pitiful thing to believe.
My ancestors served as Minutemen, long, long ago. My ancestors hunted and defended against animals on the prairies. And yes, my ancestors warred against Native people on their own land with those same weapons. Whiteness survives on violence.
Whiteness can't survive without guns.
I can't undo the violence my ancestors perpetrated. No amount of penitential abstinence or reflexive self-disgust will make the past or the present more liveable for anyone.
Overcorrecting on guns is not a way to absolve myself of the responsibility to reckon with Whiteness and unearth something better to pass on to my children.
On the contrary: if you create an actual sense of identity, lean into a grounding and honest spirituality, unlearn the threadbare hand-me-down patterns of fear that haunted those unjust warriors - you can see the gun obsession for the small and pitiful thing that it is.
You can find someplace to stand while pushing against something as massive as U.S. gun worship.
When I was pregnant with my son I went to a protest and said no more violence with my words.
Someday, maybe he will inherit my father's guns.
Someday, maybe I will take my son hunting and speak to him of my father's love of dogwood flowers, and my recipe for sausage gravy, and his MomMom's neighborliness, and of Audre Lorde and bell hooks, and of the uncommon courage called for by the way of Jesus.
We will say no more violence with our lives.
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-school-shooting-suspect-apalachee-high-92fce6b86f5e2ad23c3337aff1997cab
Per the article above, Colt Gray’s father was questioned about an online threat last year before giving his son the AR-15-style weapon.
Keep the safety on at all times you are not actively shooting at a target.
Never, ever point a gun at a person or dwelling.
This rule cannot be broken by “accident.” You must be aware of where your muzzle is pointing at all times.
Stay behind anyone who is firing a weapon and communicate clearly about where you are even when no one is firing.
If you’re not sure what you're doing, ask for help.
Keep guns clean and store them carefully.
Guns and ammunition are always stored separately, inaccessibly, and secretly.
If you are a child, you may never, ever go looking for either.
The penalty for breaking any of these rules even once is a ban from shooting or even joining an activity/outing where others are shooting. If any unsafe gun activity were to continue, guns would be removed from the house.