Firearms by the Numbers

It's time to talk about this. If the New York Times thinks it's important enough to warrant a front-page editorial, I think it's important enough to discuss too. That's about the only thing I think the New York Times and I will ever agree on where guns are concerned.

The difference, however, between myself and NYT is that my argument, as I detail it below, is not based on hyperbole, emotion, fear, or the desire to sell copy. In fact, it isn't very stirring at all, because it's based on numbers.

It is not within the scope of this post to talk about why the NYT article advocating gun control is rather poorly written, but it is within the scope, I believe, to note that it does not seek to put forth a particularly compelling argument based on the facts. It is, for the most part, an emotional appeal. What facts it does put forth are largely and objectively false. For example, according to the Times, the weapons used in the San Bernardino shooting were "lightly modified combat rifles." This is, strictly speaking, untrue. In fact, the rifles began life as California compliant semiautomatic AR-15s. California has some of the strictest restrictions on firearms in the country. It does not sell combat rifles. If what the NYT says is true, either the weapons were not "lightly" modified or California allows the sale of combat rifles.

This is but one example. It is not the one I wish to address. What I would like to address is the title, which indicates that gun violence in America is "epidemic."

This is a common claim by advocates of gun control: that gun violence is common in the United States, especially compared to the rest of the world. In fact, the biggest, and in fact, most effective argument for gun control is that gun violence is significantly higher in the United States than in other comparable countries. However, this argument, the single most compelling one, is significantly flawed.

First, let's examine the claim that gun violence is common in America, and let's do it numerically. We can do this by referencing the CDC's latest available data on gun deaths: that from the year 2013.

Let's get this out of the way now to avoid claims of cherry-picking: this data is reasonably representative (and you are welcome to fact-check that yourself using the back data from the CDC and other sources) and gun control advocates often make the claim that gun violence is on the rise, so picking the latest available data should actually give them an advantage here if that claim is accurate.

These are the facts: in 2013, there were 2,596,993 deaths in the United States. Of these, 33,636 were caused by firearms.

Let's get the first equation out of the way. These numbers mean that, out of all the deaths in America in 2013, guns caused 1.3% of them. (Actually people with guns caused them, but for the sake of brevity, I have chosen different wording. Anywhere this wording is present, it is implied that the guns themselves are not literally responsible.) For comparison, you were slightly more likely in 2013 to be killed by "nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis." You were 1.7 times as likely to die of pneumonia or influenza. You were most likely, in fact, to be killed by cancer (17 times more likely than being shot) or heart disease (18 times more likely). In fact, suicide and murder are not in the top ten causes of death in the United States, and that includes all types of suicide and murder, not just those committed with a firearm.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/LCWK9_2013.pdf

Viewed in this context, it is difficult to see gun deaths, whether suicide or murder, as particularly common by any definition. It becomes increasingly difficult to justify gun control on the grounds of mass safety when you begin to look at what kind of weapons gun control is primarily concerned with: so-called "assault weapons."

Before we delve deeper into the numbers, let's clear up what an assault weapon is: a legal term and a legal term only. An assault weapon is generally defined by largely ergonomic features, such as grips or stocks, and by appearance. These do not change how the weapon's operating system functions.

The closest equivalent in a technical sense is a semi-automatic rifle, a commonly held civilian weapon which fires one bullet every time the trigger is pressed. I was unable to find a good source for cyclic rate of semiautomatic fire, so here is a video of a man intentionally firing 100 rounds as fast as possible from a 100-round magazine:

Now feel free to check me on this, but I calculated that at approximately 240 rounds per minute (RPM). To account for variability, let's settle on 300 RPM. Keep this number in mind, because it is important.

Please also note that you would not be as likely to hit your target at that rate of fire. Even automatic weapons are generally fired in bursts to achieve any degree of accuracy. The reasons for this have to do with shooting technique and recoil and I would be happy to discuss them with anyone reading this, but they fall largely outside the scope of this post. Suffice to say, 300 RPM is not a particularly effective fire rate for a semi-automatic rifle.

Now that we've found the closest mechanical equivalent in firearm parlance to an "assault weapon" (which again does not exist in a technical sense), let's look at the closest linguistic equivalent: assault rifle. An assault rifle is a rifle firing an intermediate cartridge and is capable of select-fire (automatic or burst) capability. This simply means that the gun will fire multiple rounds when the trigger is pressed once. Assault rifles generally fire around 700 to 800 rounds per minute.

Most modern assault rifles fire a cartridge known as 5.56x45 mm NATO. The civilian version which is so close as to make no difference and actually mildly less powerful, is called .223 Remington. These are effectively the same round. What seperates a civilian semiautomatic rifle like the AR-15 from a military assault rifle like the M16A4 or M4A1 is the ability to fire in fully automatic or burst mode.

As you can see, a semiautomatic rifle is very different and far less effective in combat than an assault rifle. The fact is that while assault rifles are legal for civilian ownership, they are heavily regulated, extremely rare and prohibitively expensive. Most of the time when you hear about an assault weapon, you are hearing about the AR-15 rifle, a semiautomatic weapon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AR-15
https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/national-firearms-act

If you are still confused, here is a good summary: http://www.assaultweapon.info.

The reason this absolutely matters is because the term assault weapon largely applies not only to rifles, but to a very specific subset of rifles: those having ergonomic features which mimic military service rifles. Back to the numbers: in 2013, 285 people were killed with rifles.

The report I got that information from does not mention what kind of rifles these were, so it's likely not all of them were even assault weapons. Gun control which seeks to ban assault weapons, and this is the most common and high profile type of gun control, is targeting a weapon which is used in AT MOST 3.3% of firearms murders.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-20/table_20_murder_by_state_types_of_weapons_2013.xls

You may note that 285 is not 3.3% of total gun deaths. In fact, in the United States in 2013, there were 8,454 murders with firearms which means that only a quarter of firearms deaths were, in fact, murders. The other 75% are suicides, and that's important because another argument for the gun control lobby is that more guns leads to more suicide.

In this, the gun lobby may have a point. After all the United States does, as gun control activists claim, have a higher rate of suicide than some comparable countries. It also has a higher homicide rate than some comparable countries. But is that difference statistically significant?

If, as those seeking tighter restrictions on firearms claim, guns are the sole cause of this, one would expect there to be a proportional increase in gun ownership with suicide and homicide rates. Again, let's take a look at the numbers.

The homicide rate per 100,000 people in America is 3.8. The amount for gun ownership in the United States is 112 out of 100. Let's compare that to countries with lower rates of gun ownership, which are also comparable economically and culturally to the United States, specifically one gun control advocates like to use and their best example by far: Australia.

Australia has 21.7 guns per 100 people and a homicide rate of 1.1 per 100,000. On the surface, this is pretty solid evidence that gun control works. However, things get a bit more hazy when you look at another country with low gun ownership and strict gun control: Brazil. Brazil has 8 guns per 100 people. Fewer even than Australia. The homicide rate there is 25.2 per 100,000. This is why you don't hear gun control advocates talking about Brazilian gun control very much, even though it is extremely strict.

Of course you might argue that the reason for this is that Brazil is more unstable than Australia, and that's exactly the point. It is extremely unlikely that one single factor (i.e. gun ownership) would be the sole cause of higher homicide rates. This being admitted, it's hard to claim, as many do, that restrictions on gun ownership a la Australia or Brazil, would significantly reduce homicides.

A simple fact to put this all in perspective: America has the most guns per 100 people in the world and almost twice the guns per 100 people than the next country (Serbia). In fact, America has more guns than people. Yet we rank 121 (out of 218) countries in homicide. If guns are the primary cause, or even related in a major way, we should be be experiencing the homicide rates of Hondouras or Venezuala, at 90 or 53 homicides per 100,000 people (and rates of 6.2 guns per 100 persons and 10.7 guns per 100 persons) respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

This is the primary reason you will often hear gun control advocates talking about America's higher rate of GUN violence rather than homicide or other type of violence. With more guns we certainly have more GUN violence. But you're not very likely to be killed in America, and your odds of being killed with a gun in your entire lifetime are about 1% according to the CDC data cited earlier.

Of course, as noted earlier, a lot of these deaths are suicides. So let's look at those rates too. The suicide rate in America is 12.1 suicides per 100,000 people. We rank 50th in the world. The highest rates of suicide are in Guyana (44.2 suicides per 100,000 people with 14.6 guns per 100 persons) and South Korea (28.9 suicides per 100,000 people yet 1.1 guns per 100 persons).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

No matter how you look at it, the only real conclusions you can draw, by the numbers, are that GUN RELATED homicides and suicides are higher in America than in other countries, NOT that homicides and suicides are proportional to gun ownership. This latter assumption, which the numbers do not support, is the lynchpin of the most common and convincing gun control argument.

There are, of course, other arguments for gun control, and I'd be happy to take them up elsewhere and at another time, but I think it's important to examine the actual statistics here, because there is a sense in America that our unusually (and it is significantly higher than in any other nation) high rate of gun ownership leads to an unusually high level of deaths, and it simply does not seem to be the case as far as I've been able to tell from running the numbers. I'm not a statistician, but you're free to look over the same numbers and check my math.

Of course, I only used one year here, but the general trend of homicide has been declining for many years, while gun sales continue to break records. I found it difficult to track suicide rates but the long term trend appears to be downward albeit with a few spikes recently. If you would like to look over the available data and calculate gun ownership compared to homicide or suicide, you are more than welcome to do so and prove me wrong, but having looked over it, I feel that using the most current data is not only the most relevant course of action, but is in fact consistent with earlier years. If anything, it seems like 2015 will suffer far far fewer gun deaths despite huge gun sales.

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
http://time.com/4138559/gun-sales-san-bernardino-mass-shooting/

By the numbers then, there simply seems to be little statistical merit to the idea that gun violence in the United States is "epidemic" or that our death rates are definitely connected to our rate of gun ownership. As with most problems, those of the United States do not stem from one source and cannot be solved or mitigated simply by changing one or two factors. Death and violence in America, as everywhere, are complicated issues, and require complicated solutions, not simply restrictions on civilian firearms ownership.

I could go into why it SEEMS like there is a gun violence epidemic in America, but that would require a discussion of race (we only care when white suburbanites die), culture, the media, and other aspects which are beyond the scope of this post. I believe I have delved into this subject to a far greater extent that most people with whom I converse on it, whose opinions seem to stem from anti-gun lobby groups or the media, rather than CDC, FBI, or verifiable and cited tables on Wikipedia, which is by no means the unreliable database it once was. As I've stated numerous times, feel free to check the numbers yourself. They will tell you what you need to know.

To summarize: if we take 2013 as a relevant example, firearm deaths constitute 1.3% of deaths in the United States each year. 75% of these are suicides. Only .00016% of the population total is killed with guns each year and if the sources I've used here are to be believed, that number will be half that this year if rates remain steady, despite record gun sales. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership but falls largely into the middle of rankings of every country by murder and suicide rate, slotting both below and above countries which have stricter, even extremely strict, gun control. Of murders committed with guns in the United States in 2013, 3.3% were committed with any type of rifle. The amount of these which were "assault weapons" is unknown.

In short, and this is, frankly, the bottom line borne out by the evidence, there is no "epidemic" of gun violence caused by assault weapons. It simply does not exist.

Entitlement

There's no getting around the fact that I'm an adult now. No matter how many hours I blow in Fallout 4 (11 so far in three days with no signs of slowing) or how many weekends end in hangovers, I'm not a kid anymore. This is evidenced well by the fact that today, I'm going to discuss 'the kids these days.'

I don't really want to, but two events recently have pushed me to take a good hard look at today's college-aged youth because, in another old man cliche, I don't remember things being like this when I was in college.

What are the events? Those surrounding the Halloween debacle in California and Yale as well as the protests in Missouri over questionable circumstances, and the "Million Student March," both of which are, to be blunt, fucked up, and both of which stem from the same root: entitlement.

There have always been entitled people. That's the way of the world. There are always going to be people like that: arrogant in a way which expects people to take care of them - because if people ever stopped taking care of them, they would be totally helpless. It's one way to get by I suppose. We've all been in situations where we've felt helpless. For some people, it's an opportunity to develop the skills needed to overcome that. But for others, including a large number of college students today, it would seem, it's an opportunity to whine about it and bully people into getting what you want.

Let's start with that, because it's deeply ironic. Bullying is a form of weakness. If you're resorting to it, you're depending on your victim to help you out rather than on yourself and your skills. That makes you the loser in that situation. That's not the irony. I just wanted to make that clear. The irony is that anti-bullying is cited as one of the reasons why the biggest bullies of our generation, social justice warriors, bully other people.

Let's be clear here: we have a race problem in this country. We do. Minorities get the shit end of the stick statistically speaking. I know a little bit about this, and when I say a little bit, I mean more than most people. Sorry, but it's true and I have two degrees to back it up. In order to solve this race problem, we need, above all else, to talk about it. A lot.

So what's the problem? Well, we can't. Because it might "trigger" someone. Never mind that soldiers are coming back from an endless war with actual PTSD. According to SJWs, we should be more worried about offending an overweight person by talking about how we "privileged" skinny people work our asses off in a most literal way. What's the problem? Well, we don't just have a race problem, but also an obesity problem, and we can't solve that by telling people that being obese is ok. In a similar fashion, we cannot address race if we are unwilling to talk about it. It may "trigger" a minority to talk about race (although in 25 years I have never known that to be the case), but you can't fix something if you don't look at it. If you talk about race, someone might say something racist.

Fucking LET THEM.

Yes, let them. Of course it's offensive. It's a mark of progress that the word nigger is offensive. It means that we have advanced to a degree where we have largely said, "hey, being derogatory to black people isn't cool." So that's great. Now let's talk about it. Let's talk about the word nigger, why we don't use it anymore, and what to do about the fact that even though we don't, black people still face many many issues that white people simply never know about. Guess what? Someone might say something racist during that too, and that will give you a starting point. If you don't allow a person to say something offensive, you will never know they were harboring that thought and you're not going to be able to find out why they're racist and convince them of it.

But instead of talking about race and being honest with each other and trying to understand each other better as humans, we avoid anything controversial because someone's feelings might get hurt. How can that possibly be productive? Academia is about free thought, not conforming to a set of societal standards the mob sets.

Let me tell you something about history: nothing gets solved without someone being unhappy about it. Progress doesn't happen without discomfort. You can't face big issues without some mental stress. That's life. That's how things work. You are going to be offended at some point in your life. And sometimes you'll grow from it. I'm not saying that a black person being called a slur is good for them or anything like that. Really, I'm not. What I'm saying is that a middle-class white student would benefit from hearing something offensive because it might wake them up to the reality that this stuff is nasty and it exists out there, outside of their little bubble. And they they're more likely to do something about it. When there's a problem in the world, whether it's race in America or a leaky sink, you don't refuse to talk about it because you don't like it. You fucking fix it.

The problem today is that college aged students don't seem to want to fix anything, including their own problems. Let me tell you a little story. I went to college. Then I went to grad school. Then I incurred approximately a BMW M4's worth of debt and now I'm paying hundreds a month to pay it back. Not once, not one fucking time, did I think anyone but me was responsible for that debt. I agreed to the loan and I'm going to pay it. I don't harbor any ill will towards my loan servicer or the people I'm paying because I considered my education worthwhile and I was willing to make financial sacrifices to pay for it. I don't expect someone to hand me anything to cover it. Ever. Someone did hand me a LOT. Without him, and other members of my family, I'd have even MORE debt, and I'm eternally grateful to him and everyone who's ever given me anything. But I never asked for anyone to pay my loans. Not once.

So what the fuck is with the "Million Student March?"

It's not good enough that you're "entitled" to not be offended, but you have to make others pay for it while you get drunk at a frat and terrorize your professors if they say something you disagree with? I've seen some spoiled kids in my day, but that's too much.

Let's get something straight. If you're one of those people who thinks like that, you can talk about equality and social justice all you want, but at the end of the day, what you want is to have an education, medical care, and more money, but you don't want to pay for or earn it. You want to take it from other people. That's what you're advocating. You're entitled and it doesn't make you a social justice "warrior." It makes you an asshole. You're not a warrior. You're a brat.

If you're one of these people, you need to get something through your head: this world owes you exactly nothing.

Is that harsh? Follow up: does it matter? It's the way things are. The nature of physical reality is that if you are alone in the woods and you don't find a way to solve your problem real fast, you die. Nature doesn't care. Are you a good person? Hope you know how to light a fire, because if not, you're dead. Did you give to charity? Who gives a shit? Better learn how to fish or forage, because otherwise you're dead. Did you post on Tumblr that you think body shaming is bad? That's nice. Might want to find shelter or you're dead.

That's the zero sum reality of the world. You can argue that we're not in nature anymore, and that's true, but the basic principle applies here and universally: if you can't solve your own issues and use what's around you to do it, that doesn't mean anyone has a responsibility to save you. If you want something, you either work or you give someone something in return. Want to survive a cold night in the woods? Learn to build a fire. Want to go to college? Pay for it.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the problem starts when you feel you're owed something. You're not. You never will be.

Is that a pessimistic view of the world? I don't think so. Accomplishing goals is the best feeling on Earth. A child who has been spoiled and coddled, or expects to be, is being robbed of the best thing in life: achievement. Getting a free education that you bullied your way through won't feel good. It won't teach you anything. It won't help you. You're still helpless. And now you lack the skills and experience to help yourself.

I expect these kids will grow up, but I hope they do it soon because this is a problem. It is stunting societal growth in every conceivable way. Those who argue for free education and then negate their education by forcing their professors, who are experts in their field, to teach according to guidelines formulated on Reddit or Tumblr, are asking others to squander their money. In the end, the result can only be an undereducated public and a drain of wealth to that public. I may be old, but I don't want any kids educated by that process on my lawn. 

Do you?

Facelessbook

Due to one friend and several coworkers advising that I watch a show on USA Network called "Mr. Robot," I've taken them up on the advice and watched the first three episodes. It's got a lot of problems. The negative approach to banks and money is the same tired and failed populism that's been going on since the rise of Marxism and has been recently resurrected for the millionth time and portrayed as new by, ironically enough, and old white male candidate for president who has about as much of a chance of being president as Ron Paul did in 2008. Additionally, its portrayal of the impossibility of escape from depression and social anxiety is discouraging. However, there are a lot of things to like about the show, including this scene, which has become one of my favorite moments of television or film pretty much instantly.

This scene addresses a lot of things in just over a minute, but it addresses them well. One facet of this rant I've been struggling with lately is Facebook. There's no way around it. Facebook is terrible.

I keep going on Facebook even though I hate it. A lot. Posts on Facebook fall into three basic categories: people portraying their lives as perfect, monetized articles (i.e. Buzzfeed, Salon, Upworthy, if that's still a thing, you get the picture), and, really a subcategory of the type I've just mentioned: political articles which become more extreme every day so you'll generate clicks for the people writing them. And I don't want to see any of it.

It's obvious why I don't want to see the Buzzfeed or political stuff. First of all, you aren't doing anything when you share a link to that crap that other than generating revenue for the site that posted it. You're not changing the world or helping those in need. You are earning money for people who design websites to generate the most clicks. And they are not paying you to do it. You are working for them and you are not being paid. It's that simple. They don't care about you. They don't care about "social justice" or the events happening in our country. They don't care about anything other than cash, and you're helping them out every time you share a link with an outrageous title designed to get people to click on it. So stop doing it. If you're going to post something political, use your damn words. Think for yourself and post it. As an example, and one that's apropos right now, if you want to talk about gun violence in this country, don't post a skewed graph from CNN. Think about the issue and actually say something about it. While I'm on the subject, if you DO agree with the political confrontations of that graph, let me extend a hearty fuck you to you and everyone who trashes me and my hobbies. I'm not a terrorist.

Which gets me to my second point: we are VERY confrontational on the Internet, particularly Facebook. I'm part of this problem in a big way. We enjoy getting angry, which is why we post things we KNOW people will disagree with. It's the same reason we also post things we know people will NOT disagree with: we want attention. We want to sound like we're saying something, and we want our lives to matter.

Only here's the problem: nothing on Facebook matters, and I think we all know that. Again, what people post that's original, and that's pretty rare these days, falls into two categories: trite and confrontational. Most of my bullshit is the latter, but I see a lot of the former too. This isn't about anyone in particular, and I'm sorry if one of these examples fits your description but frankly I don't CARE that you were at Disneyworld because Disney is trite and you're an adult who should have outgrown it. Same reason I don't care about whatever you have to say about Harry Potter. That's a children's series. You're in your mid-twenties. Grow up. I also don't care about your selfies. I don't care about your dining experiences. I don't care about the sports you watch.

Before you get too pissed, let me be the first to say that I imagine you don't care about my stuff either. Why would you? You really care what I have to say on Facebook about gaming, cars, shooting, politics, anything? Of course not. You shouldn't.

This isn't to say your life or my life or anyone's life is pointless, because it isn't. I've got some of the best friends in the friend-having business, and they put up with my bullshit pretty well in real life. But that's the key: in real life. What Facebook does is offers us the chance to portray ourselves in two ways: people who are so happy that they spend their time taking pictures of their meals or people who act edgy even though they aren't. That's what Facebook does. It allows you to pretend you're someone other than the very nuanced person you actually are. It allows you to design yourself. But you can't do that. Because you have flaws. And the problem is that we KNOW we have flaws. We don't believe the image we've created for ourselves because we're aware that we're lying. We do believe the images other people have created, though. I read recently that smartphones can worsen depression. Big surprise there. We spend all day looking at people's lives and they seem happy or important and we feel, in comparison, malcontent and small. Such and such has a nice car/house/vacation/boyfriend/girlfriend. Why don't I? Except guess what? That's not really the whole story.

The biggest thing I've learned in the past few years while struggling with some issues of my own is that no one's life is perfect and they're struggling with life too. Everyone has problems. But you're not really supposed to talk about that. You don't wake up in the middle of the night worrying that your life is going nowhere and you don't know quite what to do about it and post that on Facebook. That'd be weird. And because that'd be weird, we've lost our concept of normal and we're afraid to talk about it or rely on each other to get through it. Facebook has become real life. We don't talk to our friends about important things anymore, because we've lost sight of what's important by posting about big issues and talking about them on Facebook instead in an attempt to matter. And then those threads get buried under the latest thing to post about. It's transitory and doesn't lend itself to working through everyday problems like what the hell your purpose is in life. We don't think about things longer than it takes to "like" them. And then we wonder why we're all walking around depressed.

And here I am posting it all on Facebook. Because that's what we do.

Facebook is designed to offer feedback. As humans, we evolved to value feedback and approval from others. It's hardwired. Facebook was designed to simulate this, and it does, but it's not real or lasting, like the high a drug user gets and although not as addictive, the comparison isn't new or originally my own. Social media is an emergent technology and the negatives haven't been fully examined yet. I'm glad they're being examined now, but we've let it get out of control. Facebook runs our lives. It takes a lot of time and effort to extract yourself from it. I'm in the process of doing that, but I come back, I binge post five statuses in a day. We all do. It's a problem. 

And I don't know what the solution is. We're all disconnected. We're seeing each other's lives in real time, but not the parts we care about and not the ugly parts that make the beautiful parts so great by comparison. Every single time I go on Facebook I find myself thinking when I log off that the site visit wasn't worth it. I get depressed, angry, annoyed, or all three far more often than I receive anything meaningful from it. Life's short. What's the point of feeling like that all the time? But I do it anyway, because hey, someone might have liked something I did or said, and then I can feel validated. It's nice to have that feedback, but what's the price and does it really mean anything?

These are questions I can't answer. This website is ingrained as deeply into my life as anyone else's to the point where I've just spent an hour writing about it instead of enjoying my night. I'm not going to spend more time formulating a solution. I'm going to post this and then forget about it until Monday. Because even if I just go make a cup of tea and watch the X-Files, or play Civilization, or read a magazine, I'm doing something. And it's fun. It doesn't even have to matter and I'll get more out of it than from finding out that you generated some clicks for Elite Daily or want to take my guns away again. If you want me to know that so much, tell me next time you see me. I'd rather hear it firsthand.

Ponies Should Pony Pony

I am a brony.

I've taken a lot of shit for that. Probably will for a long time. I don't care. I love this show. And I never know how to explain that to people. Problem is, the only way to understand it is to watch it, and who's secure enough these days to watch a show about cartoon ponies?

The answer is very few people, which is a shame because My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic may be one of the best shows on television.

You read that right. Before I go further, I'll admit to a few things. Many of the hardcore fans are weirdos and, having been to Bronycon more than once, a lot of them are autistic (nothing wrong with that, but it is what it is). But a lot of fans are also normal, socially well-adjusted mid-twenties males, which isn't surprising. You kind of have to be well-adjusted to admit you watch a show about cartoon ponies when you get right down to it, because you have to be comfortable enough with yourself to not give a damn about what other people think and comfortable enough with yourself to realize people will still like you even when you watch a show like this. It's not surprising so many bronies are male. Neo-masculinity (and probably femininity as well) is all about being comfortable in your own skin and not giving a damn if someone else wants to put you down for it.

Understanding the culture of MLP is important, because it plays directly into why the show itself is so damn good. The culture and the show itself are intertwined in a way that is distinctly and uniquely early 2000s. For the uninitiated, MLP draws from and integrates original content from its own vast fan base to such an extent that an entire episode is devoted to making canon most major fan theories and thanking the fandom. Name me another show like that. Just one. MLP may be about cartoon ponies, but is also the first show to heavily invest in its fans and crowdsource ideas for episodes in a seamless manner, and what is this millennium about if not integration and communication? The Internet, where most MLP media takes shape, is THE technology of the early 21st century, and MLP is the first, and so far only, show to understand that and allow it to shape the direction of its series.

It's a simple concept, but an important one. Most shows attempt to invest the watcher, but what greater investment is there than integrating fan-generated art and narrative into the show itself? MLP: FiM is not just a show; it is a living organism, and a symbiotic one. The show creates content; the fans create content based on that content; the writers incorporate it; the show evolves in a way no other show on television does. It is unique. It is a phenomenon. It is unmatched in most media even 15 years into the millennium. MLP is the present and future.

But people are afraid to like it, because ponies. And that's fucking stupid.

What you have to understand about MLP is that it's not just a show; it's a culture. There is a slang and a mematic form of communication built around it in a way no other show has matched. Sure, you can quote other shows. You can reference them. But there's not a culture built around them in the same way. You're familiar with the premise of other shows, maybe even the episodes. There are (many) novels about, say Star Trek: TNG (another show I love, and as a sidenote, features an actor who does major voice work for and loves MLP: John DeLancie), but are those novels an integral and official part of the canon? No. In MLP, they absolutely are. The show and the fan base are inseparable.

Again, name me another show like that. Just one.

This is the main draw of MLP: FiM, but it is by no means the only one. A show for little girls? Watch this clip:

Yeah. I'm sure tons of little girls get that monologue. It's socially acceptable to watch Spongebob and Adventure Time (and should be, because they're great shows), so get it through your head that this show is on that level. Just because there are pink and purple ponies in it doesn't detract from that fact.

And what if little girls watch this show too? The lessons, about loyalty, friendship, culture, individuality and community balance? What's the harm there? And why can't adults learn that shit too? What's to disagree with in MLP exactly? That friends and relationships are good and important? That people matter? That striving to grow as a person is good? God forbid anyone watch a show with those messages. In a cynical world, MLP is about being happy and loving the people around you. Who in the the hell is such a total asshole that they want to trash that?

Watching an episode of MLP takes 20 minutes. If you're embarrassed, fucking watch it in your own home. No one will know. It's been my experience -and I've found this to be universal in the community- that once you watch one, you watch another. Then another. Then another. Then you're a brony. And you know what? That's ok. That's great. Because this is a good show and there's no other show like it on TV. Yes the main characters are ponies.

So fucking what?

The Stars and Barred

This flag is a hate symbol. It doesn't matter if you argue that it's derived from a Hindu symbol, or that the events of the Holocaust were 70 years ago. This flag stands for something dark, evil, and brutal. Germans, largely, don't claim that it's a part of their heritage. They don't put it on their cars. They don't fly it above their capitols. They are ashamed of that part of their past, as they should be, and swastikas in Germany are generally considered distasteful.

Today is a big day and a day I never thought I'd see. Two of the biggest retailers in America are refusing to sell items which probably make them a large amount of money because they are symbols of hate. That's what the Confederate flag is.

I'm going to get this out of the way now: I'm calling the above flag the Confederate flag. I know it's not the national flag of the Confederate States of America. Everyone who knows me knows that I know that. I'm calling it that anyway for simplicity. Please don't try to engage me in debate about it.

There's something we also need to get out of the way right now: the Confederacy was wrong. It just was. Please don't try to tell me that its members were fighting for state's rights, or resisting some kind of Northern aggression. Do not try to tell me the war was about tariffs or federal power or a way of life or Southern Pride. The Confederacy existed primarily to propagate and expand American slavery. If you disagree with that, that is your right, but you are objectively wrong. This is not just my opinion. I have made it a significant part of my life to study slavery. I know more about it than  the majority of people in this country do or ever will. I know what I'm talking about. I have two degrees to prove it. The CSA was founded on slavery. It just was.

Here's something else that needs to be said: slavery was bad. There are still some people who will attempt to downplay or even argue against that. Again, they are objectivity wrong. Slavery was cruel and brutal in most cases. Slaves did not like being enslaved, nor were they better off under slavery than being free either in America or their home nations in Africa. Even a lucky slave who might have had a kind master (and this was not the norm) was still a slave. Slavery is, in essence, the stealing of another's life, and it is wrong. And slaveholders were wrong.

These are the facts. If you disagree, you shouldn't even be reading this, because you either need to go educate yourself on this or are simply stubbornly dedicated to being wrong.

All of that is why this is a big day for America.

As a country, we've hadn't really reached the point where major retailers would be willing to stop selling Confederate paraphernalia before today, because it's just so darn profitable. It's profitable because there is still a very large segment of the country, by no means limited to the South, that thinks the Confederate flag stands for anything other than slavery and racism. Some people have claimed that it's "become" a symbol of the South, rather than a symbol of slavery, but that's not a great argument, because what you're basically doing is defining the South by the rebellion it waged so it could keep oppressing blacks. That's not so great if you're trying to claim that your region of the country is awesome and that you should be proud of it. That's why Germans don't proudly fly the Nazi flag as a symbol of Germany and German heritage - they don't exactly want Germany to be defined by the Holocaust, nor should they.

Some people claim that the Confederate flag stands for states' rights, small government, or independence. That doesn't really work either, though, because, as I've noted, the Confederacy wasn't really fighting for those things. It was fighting for one right in particular, which was the right to own other people, and taking away someone else's rights isn't really a right, much less something you should be literally willing to die for.

When you get right down to it, the Confederate flag is just a really shameful reminder that half of our country entered a life and death struggle to oppress black people.

I'm not saying the Confederate flag should be ignored. I'm not saying it should be swept under the rug. We need to talk about it. We need to acknowledge that it exists. We need to accept that America's greatest shame was slavery and work through everything that means for us today as a country.

What I am saying is that no one should be proudly waving the Stars and Bars.

I'm all for free speech and I would never support a law to ban the Confederate Flag. But just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. If you are going around displaying the Confederate flag as a symbol of pride you either do not know what it symbolizes or you do and you don't care.

There's something else too, that many Americans aren't considering. There's a lot of talk about what that flag means to Southerners, and what its absence would mean to them, but in that context, "Southerners" implicitly means "white Southerners." That flag already gives me the creeps. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like if I was descended from slaves. Hell, even if I wasn't, the use of that flag by racists throughout American history might make me feel really really uncomfortable upon seeing it if I was a black American, whether my ancestors were slaves or not.

I say "might" because I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that all blacks (or whites, Asians, Hispanics etc.) must have the same opinion on literally anything. Still, one has to imagine that arguments that claim that that flag is ok can't be shared by a rather large proportion of Southerners, black or white.

And that's a good thing.

No one should be comfortable waving the Confederate flag around outside of a historical context, much like no one should be comfortable using the word nigger outside of a historical context. It's just not ok. And finally, after hundreds of years, we, as a country, are getting around to admitting that.

Symbols may be what people make them, but in some cases, they've represented something so horrific that it becomes impossible to use them without invoking that thing. The Confederate flag was carried by men who were fighting to preserve the very worst America ever had to offer, for an institution that brutalized men and women, tore their families apart, tortured them mentally and physically, and killed them by the thousands. That these men and women were able to survive, let alone thrive, under such a system, that they were able to resist in any way and make lives for themselves is not only impressive, it is heroic. Those are the men and women we should be respecting and looking to as examples of American heroes, not those who carried the Stars and Bars and certainly not those who founded the country it represented.

The Confederate flag is a symbol of a dark past whose legacy we have not yet come to terms with fully. We have not yet reached total equality, and it may be hundreds of years yet until we do, if we do. That is the legacy of the Stars and Bars. That is the direct result of the efforts of those who carried it. We can't fix that overnight, but we can help to try to fix it by refusing to carry that flag ourselves.

Historical Values

They say opinions can't be wrong. Too bad that opinion is wrong.

Society, or at least our society, focuses heavily on specialization. I chose to specialize in a few things, and one of them was history. I spent six years studying slavery and race in America, and after those six years, I'm here to tell you something: slavery was bad.

You'd think I wouldn't need to specify that, but I do, actually, because I was reminded tonight that some people are still on the fence about that.

Let me lay this on the line: the Confederacy was bad.

Yep. If you disagree, that's your opinion. Your wrong opinion.

See, the thing about history is that it's a legitimate field of study. I know, I know. You know exactly where General Dickface McGee of the 27th South Carolina was on April 28, 1864. You like to dress up in gray and fire a repro Enfield. You watch Modern Marvels. You're "a bit of a history buff." Guess what? I don't care, because that's not as important as why General McGee was there and what he was fighting for (and if you think it was "state's rights," I'd like to exercise my state's right to allow its citizens to call you a moron). If you can't articulate correctly why McGee was fighting, you aren't a historian, no matter how bad you want to be.

Why do I bring this up? Because there are people, a lot of people, who think they can have an opinion on this stuff without having to take the effort to study it. And that's not great.

Thing is, as a country, we're very hands off about STEM. We don't like to question that stuff. Math is math, science is science, and only the very few, and the very crazy, pretend that global warming isn't a thing or that evolution is bullshit. We rightly point out that experts have studied that stuff and come to a certain consensus and we bow to that consensus because we trust those who have put in the work to come to it.

So why do we not do the same for history?

Why can Joe Blow say the Confederacy was fighting for a glorious cause and have so many people believe it? Why can Pickup McDualie say that the founders had no flaws and should be worshiped and have everyone call him a patriot? Why are those ludicrous opinions any better than the opinion that evolution is bullshit because monkeys still exist?

Wrong is wrong.

If you want to understand the importance of history, consider how long you'd make it in life without a memory and then consider that our country's memory is our history. You should really really listen to the people whose historical memory is more studied than yours.

So yeah, my historical "opinion" is actually more valid than yours. Too bad for you.

Dick thing to say? Probably. But most of the country loves it when Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye slam anti-vaxers or creationists. The analogue to those people in my field is neoconfederates, Nazi apologists, great-men theorists. They're arguing against overwhelming evidence, and you need not listen to them. Ever.

A pretty chill dude once said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. (I think he was quoting the Bible or whatever; I'm not a facts guy; I'm a theory guy.) Our country is divided, in a sense, in that we allow opponents of the consensuses of STEM to be ridiculed, but we respect, as opinion, those who disagree with the consensuses of the humanities. And that's a shame.

A country with a large number of people who believe that the Confederacy had no racial motives may, for example, call blacks thugs when they riot against an unjust police system which has its roots in that Confederacy. A country that doesn't recall that its founders had flaws may be unwilling to question its own rectitude. Bad history causes problems. Good history is important; ergo, the opinions of historians are also important. Respect and defer to them.

This is a great country. You can believe that without believing that it's perfect or always was perfect. We are, like everything, flawed. Historians are generally of that opinion, and it is the right opinion.

But what do I know? I just spent six years buried in documents you don't know exist. I spent six years studying concepts most people aren't aware have been posited. I'm just a historian, not God, guns, and the American way.*

What do I know?





*To be fair, guns are pretty awesome.

Black and White Issues

I can't believe I have to write this post again.

No, you know what? I can. I can believe it because I see racism all the time, most often from people who don't know any better. Sometimes it's well meaning. Sometimes it's ignorant. But it exists, and the more you study it the more you notice it in places you didn't before. It's everywhere, but usually it's quiet and subtle.

And then there are the times everyone can see it and what's been boiling under the surface of American society literally since the day it was founded comes the surface. And it's ugly. And people don't like it.

I'm seeing a lot of social media in reaction to what's happening right now in Baltimore, most of it from middle class white kids who have never been given more than a speeding ticket, and certainly don't wonder if they're going to die every time a police officer talks to them. Violence, they say, isn't the answer.

What is the answer?

Violence may not be the answer, but it's an answer, and it's an answer to a problem most middle-class white Americans will never think about. Kids gun each other down every day in Baltimore, and no one says anything. The crime rates and poverty rates are disproportionately high in the black community, and no one asks why - until someone burns down a pharmacy. And then people talk about it. Not positively, but they talk.

Violence isn't effective? Seems like it might be if the only time you ever consider what life might be like in inner-city Baltimore is when part of it is destroyed.

Maybe the answer would have been to tell the cops who let Grey die in the back of a van that violence isn't the answer. The people I talk to ask me that I give the police the benefit of the doubt. They say that we don't have all the answers. They say that we weren't on the scene and don't know what it was like. They don't extend the same courtesy to the citizens of Baltimore.

Do I agree with the destruction of private property in Baltimore? No. Do I get it? Yeah, I do. The argument I see the most on Facebook is that the black citizens of Baltimore should be following the law and acting peacefully. That's because the law, to many middle class whites, means not running a stop sign or refraining from shoplifting, whereas in some places in this country the law is a protection racket for the people that murder kids. The law let Freddie Grey die. If the law is under no obligation to act peacefully, why should its victims be?

In all these self-righteous posts about doing the proper and legal thing, I see the uncomfortable shadow of paternalism. "Those people are destroying their own neighborhood; they won't accomplish anything that way." In these statements lie the sinister implication that whites, particularly middle class whites, know how to run a country best and are more capable of accomplishing political objectives, whereas poor blacks don't and aren't. Most often these arguments are accompanied by Martin Luther King quotes, because, to a lot of people in this country with a high school education in race, MLK must be the spokesperson for all black people. Let's not talk about Nat Turner. Let's not mention Denmark Vasey or Gabriel. And don't even think about Malcolm X.

Incidentally, here's a quote from Reverend King: "It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard."

Now why am I not seeing that one in circulation?

Here's a little something I picked up in my six years studying race in this country: black history is horrifically violent, and most of the time, that violence was white on black. A lot of black violence was in response to white violence that was institutional, systematic, and widespread. Accounts of personal brutality against blacks would nauseate your average middle class mallgoer. Watch a video of a lynching sometime. Martin Luther King and peaceful marches are not black history. They are a part of black history. A very very small, if admittedly important, part.

None of this is to say that burning down a CVS is right, because it's not. However, it is to say that there is more going on here than people see or want to see. This is not about Freddie Grey. This is about the long history of police brutality, particularly against poor blacks, that exists in the country, and the refusal to acknowledge it or to hold the police accountable. Context is important.

I don't like Obama. I hate Obama. I think Obama is a horrible human being with a sinister agenda. I think he's petulant, egotistic, and hides behind his popularity like a shield while he plots to do whatever it takes to protect his legacy - and nothing else. But tonight, for the first time, he said something I agree with: "If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could; it's just that it would require everybody saying, 'this is important; this is significant.' And, that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don't just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped, but we're paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids."

I hate Obama. But it takes genuine guts for an American president to say those things. And they're true.

If you don't want to see riots, hold your government and your law enforcement accountable. Don't pretend the problem doesn't exist until a group of people who deal with it every day make you see it in the only way left to them. It's not hard. It doesn't take thinking about it every day day in and day out - it only takes being aware of it. It takes thinking about it for five seconds before you post that pious little status about how you think people whose experiences are nothing like your should act. That's all.

If all we ever do when someone dies at the hands of those who are sworn to uphold the law in this country is blame the reaction to it, the riots won't stop. Riots, as King said, are "the language of the unheard." Perhaps when we learn to listen, that language will no longer be needed.

Survivors

Lately I've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead. It's a pretty good game, like everything Valve puts out. For those who aren't particularly serious gamers, Left 4 Dead is a zombie survival co-op put out by Valve, arguably the best software company on the planet. I could write an entire post of what makes this game so great: its simplicity, its emphasis on cooperation while retaining the individuality of its protagonists, its endless replayability. However, I'd like to focus more on its storyline which, in classic Valve fashion, is deep, but told largely through the player's experience, rather than explicitly through narrative. (Again, I could write an entire post on why this is a far better method of storytelling, but that's for another day.) Left 4 Dead focuses on the story of four survivors of the zombie apocalypse, who, although carriers, are immune from the virus destroying the world around them.

Surprise politics! I'm using the game's narrative as an analog for the way I feel in a world where Hillary Clinton evokes hope from anyone. See, my favorite character in Left 4 Dead (L4D) is Louis, an IT guy who spends his lunch breaks on the shooting range. (Gee, I wonder why I'm drawn to this character.) The reason I like Louis, besides his background, is that he's always positive even though his world is shit. There's speculation out there that he's this positive exactly because his world is shit and he's trying to help himself cope.

That's how I feel in a world where anyone would vote for Hillary Clinton. Or anyone else.

I come off as one negative motherfucker, but that's only because I think my sarcastic and cynical snipes are funny. In reality, I'm a very positive person and I think good always wins out. But I also think that's despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans are idiots. Sometimes I feel like Louis: a survivor immune to the virus of democracy who nevertheless retains a positive outlook for the future of this country.

But before I can go into why I'm an optimist despite myself, let's look at why democracy is a cancerous, shitty virus. The way democracy works, if you haven't heard, is that the majority gets to decide what to do. Nice, right? Except, as we've established, the majority can do some pretty dumb stuff. Keep in mind that America has always been a republic or democracy of some kind (pick your favorite, because historically you can argue either). And keep in mind that this republican democracy is essentially founded on racism, slavery, and a touch of genocide because it was kind of ok with the majority. Have things gotten better? Sure. But we still have problems - major problems - and we voted the people who caused them into office.

Democracy is the reason I don't vote. I play Left 4 Dead because I know the game is winnable. Democracy isn't. Vote for the Democrats and I lose my guns, my money, and my liberties. Vote for the Republicans and I vote for endless war, plus I could never look my gay friends in the face ever again without feeling guilty. It's a game you can't win, and I don't like losing, so I don't play. And yet, because I choose not to play, I'm subject to the verbal attacks of a million zombies claiming that if I don't vote I can't complain about oppression, and what's more, should do the honorable thing and deport myself.

Speaking of zombies, let's get back to Hillary Clinton. I never thought I would see the day where people would be happy that openly ambitious, smug, horrible human being would get to partially control anything in their lives.

Let's clear this up right now before we proceed further: voting for Hillary because she's a woman is as sexist as voting for Obama because he's black is racist. Period, end of story.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about the 2016 election, because apparently it's time. What in hell makes you think this will be any different? We voted for Bush and we got an endless horror of a war. We voted for Obama and we got more of the same, plus massive executive overreach, domestic spying, and drone strikes on innocent civilians. There's your hope and change. And now someone comes along and promises you the moon again and you believe her? Why?

Really. Give me one good reason why you think it'll turn out different this time.

The zombies in L4D are stupid. You know what you can do to them? You can throw a bomb with a flashing light on it towards them and they'll run towards it until it explodes and they die. You can put fire between you and them to kill them because they'll just keep running at you even though they'll burn to death. You can throw a substance that attracts them to you and gun them down while they crown around it. And they never learn. They're more American than George Washington eating an apple pie while riding a bald eagle.

They're also dangerous, because as stupid as they are, there are a lot of them.

That's why I feel like a survivor.

But here's the nice thing: survivors always win. The zombies don't actually matter in Left 4 Dead because they're mindless, interchangeable NPCs. The mindless NPCs around me who want to vote my rights away because they think it'll be better this time around can't actually hurt me. I'm immune. I don't buy in, I don't vote, I don't play their game. I can be oppressed. I can't be made to do it to myself. The only power politicians like Hillary have is the power to make you believe in them.

Don't.

Logic

I'm glad Leonard Nimoy died today.

Oh don't get me wrong. I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I've seen every single episode of every single show. It took me two months of my life. Not two months as in it took me from January to March. I mean if you wanted to watch all the iterations of Star Trek straight through with no sleep, no food, no interruptions of any kind, it would take you two months. That's how many there are. That's how much I've watched. So when I say I'm glad Leonard Nimoy died today, I don't mean I'm glad he died. I'm just glad he died today.

The character Nimoy played is my personal favorite from the Original Series, and probably a lot of people's favorite. I like Spock because he's logical. Nimoy dying on this particular day did logic a great service: it got people to focus on something other than arguing about what color something objectively was.

If some future historian is reading this, let me explain: my countrymen, my people, my civilization were so astoundingly, so amazingly, so unbelievably stupid that, as a collective, they spent the better part of February 27, 2015 arguing about what color a dress was. Yes. They did. I'm sorry. I hate them too. Please don't give up on history just because of this fact.

Let's leave the future historian for a bit. Presumably, he needs some time to claw his eyes and/or Internet-brain interface out of his skull anyway. Now I'm talking to you, present reader. What in holy hell were you thinking? Let's recap what's going on in this particular time period. We have a religious-political extremist group taking over a large portion of the world where, not incidentally, we get a large portion of our most widely used energy source. Net neutrality was just passed, and people still aren't sure what that even means, both literally and for the future. We're in the middle of a decade plus long war that won't end and the leader of our country is ok with drones not only killing people abroad but also with spying on us at home. And you spent your day arguing over what color a dress was?

Fucking really?

Let's get one thing straight: that dress can only be the color it is. That's how light works. Case closed. Let's get something else straight, and I want to be very very clear here: WHO THE FUCK CARES?

Seriously. Who cares? Who. Fucking. Cares?

You know what your problem is? Your problem is that you're willing to argue about what color a fucking dress is because you're too afraid to discuss real problems. You think it's boring or rude to talk about the fact that a sitting president is an accessory to murder but you think it's ok to make a hashtag about a fucking dress?

Oh, right, sorry, future historian. Hashtags are, like, these things people used to use to denote interest in something on the Internet. They usually went away after a week because people from 2015 can't focus on anything even slightly important for more then a week and - oh he's tearing out the brain thing again... Ok...

Back to the present, then. I said Leonard Nimoy's death was a timely victory for logic, and here's why: it got people to quit arguing about something with only one objective outcome. Something is either a certain color or it's not. The same people who are unwilling to argue about something that actually can be argued, like the war, the economy, or net neutrality, are totally ok with arguing about something that literally cannot be argued against. That's fucking stupid. I don't care if it's a joke. It's not funny. Something is either a certain color or it's not. I mean come the fuck on.

Yeah, it's cool our brains work a certain way. Yeah, it's cool how they interpret color. Hey, guess what? Maybe instead of blowing up Facebook and Twitter, you can go read a fucking book to learn about this stuff like the rest of us who maybe took a basic psychology course because we were interested in psychology, not because we wanted to argue about the color of a dress on the Internet.

This is not what the Internet was designed for. It was designed for the viewing of pornography. But after people finished with that (so to speak), it was designed to spread information. I can't tell you how much I've learned over the Internet. About computers, guns, cars, personal finance, cooking, beer, literally anything there's a subreddit for. And sure, I like to laugh at dogs doing funny things as much as the next guy, but we, as a society, have taken it to an extreme when we use it to argue over nothing the way we've been doing.

In fact, let's get back to basics. Go watch some porn. It's better than the mental version of jacking off we as a society have been doing all day.

For all the profanity and crudeness of this post, I think it's a fitting eulogy to a man who portrayed a character as logical as Spock. Because society could use a little logic. I'm going to go watch Amok Time now, in all its cheesy glory, and I'm going to drink rum out of my Starfleet glassware. Here's to you, Leonard.

On Target

As a white, heterosexual male, I don't get discriminated against much, and that's kind of nice. Ideally, I would like to live in a world where nobody is. That seems pretty unlikely, though, because, as I am constantly reminded, people aren't logical. I study slavery and race, and I can tell you that without a shadow of a doubt that racism is illogical. First off, race isn't even real. There's no so thing as race from a biological standpoint. Look it up. Yet, as humans, we not only see race, but act differently sometimes based on a person's race. And we shouldn't. Believe it or not, I've actually been discriminated against due to my race. Luckily for me, that's extraordinarily rare because we happen to live in a country were white people are privileged. But while that's kind of convenient for me, it's pretty crappy for a lot of people, and not good for anyone in the long run, so I'd like it to change. However, just because I rarely get discriminated against for my race, gender, or sexuality doesn't mean that I don't get discriminated against, a fact I was very much reminded of today when I was treated differently than your average person simply because I made the decision to own a gun. Disclaimer time: I am NOT equating this experience to the experiences of those who have suffered due to racism etc. That would be silly and offensive. Being judged for what you buy and for what race you are are fundamentally different things. I did, however, use that particular segue for a reason. In case the recent news from Missouri and other areas of the country hasn't made you aware already, sometimes black people get treated like criminals just because they're black. And that's stupid. Certainly some black people commit crimes. So do some white people. We don't think it's ok to go around treating all blacks as criminals, however. Nor should we. So why do we do it to gun owners? The obvious reply would be because being black doesn't make you dangerous or more likely to commit a crime. Well here's an interesting fact for you: neither does being a gun owner! Some people like golf or tennis. You know what I like? I like guns. I like shooting guns. That picture I chose for this post? That was a five-shot 100 yard group I shot last week. Anyone who shoots regularly can tell it's not perfect, but it's not terrible either. And I'm proud of it. And it was fun to do. Here's something else: if you've never shot before, I bet you couldn't do better. I bet you wouldn't even know how to load and fire the rifle I used, let alone understand zeroing, body position, and breath and recoil management. Even if you read about all that stuff on the Internet, that isn't the same as actually taking the shot and you'd find that out pretty quickly. In fact, I do have shooting experience, but take a look at that shot on the right. That happened because I flinched, anticipating the rifle's recoil. Just a tiny little common mistake, a slight muscle twitch at the wrong time, and look how far off the bullet goes. That's what's so great about the sport. It's all about form, technique, precision, and consistency. And math. If you're thinking that none of that sounds super criminal or threatening, and in fact sounds downright nerdy, you're right. And yet you'd be surprised how I get treated by some people when I casually mention my hobby. Today I was told, by someone who was clearly uncomfortable with guns, that I should change my profile picture on Facebook to attract more employers. My profile picture is me at the range. I am wearing protective goggles and hearing protection. I am pointing the gun in a safe direction. I am properly executing a supported shooting stance. To me this photo depicts an able, component person exercising his skill and knowledge in a disciplined way to achieve his desired aim and doing so in a safe, responsible way. 

To someone who doesn't like guns, it's scary. Because, gun.

Of course, I gently mentioned that, yes, I target shoot as a hobby, and I've never even shot an animal. I was told that that may be true, but there had been a lot of shootings in the news lately, and people were uncomfortable with guns. Maybe. There have been a lot of black people rioting in the news lately. You know something? I still don't find black people scary. Because that would be stupid.

I don't mind if someone doesn't like guns, but it's time this ridiculous stigma about them goes away. My hobby is legitimate, popular, legal, and, yes, even safe. I am not a criminal, nor should I be treated like one because I choose to participate in a sport shared by millions of others. That's not fair, nor does it even make sense. Linking a responsible, safe shooter with a criminal gunman is like linking a safe, responsible driver to a drunk driver because they both have cars. It needs to stop.

Incidentally, while I'm happy to make my picture private (frankly, I thought it already was), I'm not going to change it. It says a lot about me as a person, even if people who don't know anything about me or my hobbies aren't capable of seeing it. That rifle was a graduation gift from my parents. It's a beautiful and well-made piece of equipment. Shooting it relaxes me and makes me proud that I can achieve technical proficiency in a sport that demands it. I like that picture.

This is something I can't retreat from because it's personal to me. I can shrug off someone not liking computers, cars, or beer because when they tell me they don't like computers, cars, or beer, they just don't like them and that's ok and hardly offensive. With guns, though, there's often a judgement attached. If there wasn't, I wouldn't even mind. I have lots of friends who are for gun control, and while I disagree with them, they don't treat me personally like a criminal, so it's not an issue. It's not people who don't like guns that bother me, but people who act like I'm a bad person because I have this hobby I like, especially when that hobby is legal and safe. And I believe that all gun owners should be open and proud about their hobby.

Yes, I own a gun. Yes, I shoot my gun. And yes, I absolutely love it. If someone has a problem with that, the problem is theirs.