Vegas

Just drop your tribe for a second. Drop your political affiliations. It’s just you in the void.

Do you think it’s a good idea to let the general public have unlimited access to fully automatic weapons?

To have clips on belt-feeds?

Just… pretend for a second you’ve never heard a litany of arguments about this. Do you want to see machine guns when you go to the grocery store? Do you want to fear death by bullet every minute of every day?

They tell me I can’t talk about gun violence today. Just like I couldn’t the day 20 first-graders were massacred, or a bunch of people out watching Batman were slaughtered. But guess what? We won’t talk about it tomorrow, because tomorrow will bring something new. If we don’t talk about it today, we never talk about it at all – until, of course, the next time. And one of these times it will affect you, or it will affect me.

This is the first time, that I recall, that one of these massacres has affected people I knew. One person’s mother was in Vegas today. Another person’s son was there. Both are okay. But that’s two degrees of separation. That’s far too few for my taste.

We entered the stage a long time ago where a sharp, sudden noise at Target makes me look for a shooter and pull my children to cover. I’ve never been in war; I don’t have PTSD; I live in the richest first-world country in the world. Why is this my automatic, first response to a sharp noise in public?

And still, they tell me not to talk about it. It’s wrong to “politicize” this. The icy hand of right-wing speech oppression is long. It extends even to this, even to the natural and automatic desire to protect yourself and your kids. Don’t you dare talk about it. Don’t you dare politicize this massacre.

Just sit there, silent, and wait your fucking turn to die.