At the moment, all kinds of hell are raining down on Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann on Twitter over remarks Moore made on Olbermann's show regarding the rape allegations against Julian Assange. This all started when blogger Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown called Moore and Olbermann out, and escalated after Olbermann engaged and Moore ignored it. Although I agree that both Olbermann and Moore were way out of line, I have stayed out of the fray, primarily because there is a lot of slime and bullshit being slung around by both sides, and I honestly do not have the energy, patience, or Copious Free Time to engage with two angry mobs right now.

But then, today, Sady posted this:

And now I’m being accused of working for the CIA. Also on no fucking evidence, as it turns out. I’m being called names, and screamed at by hundreds of people every day, I’m being harassed, I’m being threatened, I’m scared for my physical safety to the point that I’m looking up dudes and seeing exactly what ‘stalking’ consists of in case I have to press charges...

And I knew I had to say something. We all have hot-button issues that compel us to speak out, and this is one of mine. Simply put:

If you are being stalked, if you are being threatened, if you are in a situation where you are in fear for your safety, it is time to buy a gun. Get a 12-gauge for the house, and if you live in a jurisdiction that actually gives half a shit about women's right to defend themselves, get yourself a handgun suitable for concealed carry. In fact, get one anyway. Check out Second Amendment Sisters' list of instructors, or find a friend who can spend a few hours with you at the range, or just walk into one of your local gun ranges and tell whoever's behind the counter that you're being threatened and you want to learn to defend yourself. Learn how to draw and fire at close range, and make a plan for how you'll use the layout of your home defensively if an attacker tries to confront you there, and practice like you're gonna play.

You want to know what the patriarchy is? News flash: it has fuck-all to do with a buttertroll alt-media whore or his mainstream media enablers. The patriarchy is scaremongering do-gooders who try to convince you that "if you have a gun your attacker will just take it away from you and shoot you with it," when the truth is that an eleven-year-old girl can evade and run off a group of armed intruders with a rifle she first picked up mere days before, without ever firing a shot. (That happened last week, by the way.) The Man is exploiting your fear to keep you down, but you don't have to take it. Self-defense is a human right, a women's right, a gay right, a civil right. Anyone trying to frighten you into giving up that right, regardless of how progressive they may otherwise purport to be, is not your ally. neo_prodigy can tell you all about bullshit allies, and I'll paraphrase his beatdown to "helpful" meddlers because the brother knows how to preach it:

It's not about what you want. It's about the world we live in. Until sexism and violence against women is a thing of the past. Spare your Sensitive Liberal Dude tears, check your privilege, and sitcho ass down. Because you're now becoming part of the problem.

I left a comment very much like the two paragraphs above on Tiger Beatdown earlier today. Several hours and many other comments later, it's still in the moderation queue, and I sadly suspect it will remain there, unposted. I'm not kidding about the sad part. Sady's blog gets a lot of traffic, and a huge amount of it is in the demographic of people who need to hear this -- women who have been hurt, women who are afraid, women who express their gratitude that someone understands that they've been raped. Women who need to know that is not merely okay to fight back, it is right to fight back, with whatever amount of force is necessary. Women who aren't getting that message as part of their diet of feminist blogs and mainstream patronization. Women who have the sacred right to protect their lives and their loved ones, and who might need to hear that from someone else before taking the initiative to learn how.

If the patriarchy is about men trying to take agency away from women, then being able to defend oneself effectively is the most radical of radical acts. You already know Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann aren't going to defend you. You already know that the police and the media aren't going to defend you beforehand and they aren't going to make it any easier after the fact. But you can do what isn't expected of you: take back the power. Stand tall, take courage from your moral and legal rights, and answer intimidation with confidence in your knowledge that no one can silence you. If necessary, answer it with lead.

"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." — Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

In the comments to my last essay, editer writes:

Given [the fact that extremist right-wing radio and TV hosts are encouraging people to show up armed to Obama speeches, among other things], is it any wonder that the sight of gunmen at Democratic events makes a lot of us nervous?

The thing is -- if they succeed in making you nervous, you're letting the terrorists win. That's right, I just called Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their scum-sucking ilk terrorists, because that's what they are: they preach divisiveness from their bully pulpits in order to inspire hatred in their followers and fear in their targets. Those are terrorist tactics. And they have every expectation that their targets' response to this particular fear tactic will be to recoil in horror and redouble their efforts to restrict or ban firearms, thus further angering the Loyal Followers and driving even more of a wedge between what they view as their useful minions -- the right-wing authoritarian followers -- and their useful targets, which is to say, people like you and me.

Nothing -- I repeat, nothing -- would turn the tables on the Limbaughs and Coulters of the world more than a group of peaceful, armed progressives showing up at one of these rallies. It's just not in the script. They haven't planned for it, they wouldn't know what to do with it. And they'd do exactly what they've always done when someone goes off script and throws them for a loop: rage, fume, and weaken their own credibility. They're hilariously predictable in this regard.

Now, as Bob Altemeyer explains quite lucidly -- I'm a convert, I'll admit it, the science sold me -- this doesn't mean that they'll end up driving away their flock. Authoritarian followers will perform truly amazing contortions to avoid having to come to the conclusion that one of their Chosen Leaders is wrong. But you don't have to strip away the followers to strip away the power; point of fact, it's more effective to strip away the money. And when these bozos flip out, they go off script and say dumb, offensive things. We can use this against them. ELEVEN major corporate advertisers have dropped their sponsorship of Glenn Beck's show thanks to pressure from citizens like you and me who object to Beck calling Obama a racist. ConAgra. Geico. Sanofi-Aventis. LexisNexis. These are big companies with lots of money in their pockets, and the more we can inspire the Becks of the world to show what giant assholes they really are on nationwide television, the greater the likelihood that we can convince these major corporations to pull out of Fox News entirely. Do that enough, and they're gonna have to start firing some people.

So why not show them that we're not afraid of them, and let them hang themselves with their own rope?

Seriously. I want to see a dozen gay couples show up to one of these events, carrying signs that read "Health Care For All", "Right to Keep and Arm Bears", and "Gay, straight, black, white: marriage is a civil right", every last one of them with a holstered pistol. Now there's a front-page photo for you.

So apparently a guy decided to show up today to an Obama speech in Arizona while carrying a pistol and a semiautomatic rifle. (He didn't want to give reporters his name, but that's him in the foreground in the picture over there.) Good for him! He and William Kostric have both conducted themselves admirably, declaring for all to see, "I am a citizen who is well-informed of my rights and responsibilities under the law, and I will acquit myself in a law-abiding fashion." We need more upstanding citizens like these guys.

This afternoon, on Twitter, I was reminded of why.

See, although I've never hidden the fact that I love the Second Amendment and believe that it's one of the most important founding principles of American government, I've never really gone out of my way to engage people about it like some of y'all are wont to do. I prefer to do my activism on a one-on-one basis, by shaking up people's expectations. If you've never been around guns, if none of your friends are gun owners, if your only exposure to guns has been violent movies and reports on the six o'clock news about people being shot during robberies, it's easy to think of gun owners as Those People who Aren't Like Us. It's easy to conflate gun owners with closed-minded rednecks who would rather put a bullet through a queer or a feminist or an anti-war protestor than have to live in the same society as them.

It's a bit different when you find out that the woman who just walked three miles through the streets of San Francisco with you in the Trans Pride March, who goes to raves with you and wants drug laws to be completely overhauled and blogs in favour of gay rights, is just as proud of being a responsible gun owner.

I found out about the fellow in Arizona through someone I don't actually know: some guy on Twitter who started following me yesterday. He had some interesting links, so I followed him back, and he tweeted a link to an article about the guy in Arizona. I tweeted back that as long as he conducted himself peacefully, that was great news. This kicked off an hour-plus-long debate which, apart from a couple of interchanges with antagonistic people at a Diversity Fair at the University of Iowa where some friends and I had a booth representing the gun culture, was really the first frustrating conversation about guns I've ever had. I guess I'm lucky.

See, in the Sassaman household we have two rules for houseguests: if you use the stove, make sure you turn it to the "off" position that really is "off" and not the "off" that leaks gas, and you must understand the four rules of firearm safety and show us that you can safely unload the guns we keep in the house. That's it. You can use our shampoo, if it's in the fridge it's fair game, we don't mind if you walk out of the shower in the altogether -- but we expect and require you to know how to be safe with the two dangerous things in the house. We'll teach you basic gun safety and step you through all the physical stuff, as many times as you need or want, but if you're not willing to do that, you're going to need to find somewhere else to crash. (We'll help with that too.)

It's pleasantly surprising just how much this opens people's eyes: discovering that wow, there actually are People Like Us, people who share Our Values and fight for the same things we fight for, who are also passionate about gun rights. I don't know exactly what goes through their heads, but I like to think it's something along the lines of, Huh. Maybe guns aren't as scary and alien as I always thought they were. Maybe they really are just tools, just inanimate objects that take on meaning only in the context of whoever's holding them.

You know, like a dude in Arizona carrying a pistol in a holster and a semiautomatic rifle in a resting position over one shoulder with the barrel pointed safely at the ground.

What I didn't expect, today, was just how much context some folks want to assume, even in the absence of any evidence whatsoever to support those assumptions. Twitter-guy ranted, angrily and at length, about a "greasy redneck cowboy" he'd seen in a grocery store the other day, openly carrying while doing his shopping. He accused this man -- who he didn't exchange a single word with -- of being "afraid" and "paranoid", and said that he "was sorely tempted to grab it and make him shit his cowboy pants."

I was flabbergasted. "Wait," I said, "so you think it's OK to just walk up to some dude in a supermarket and assault him if you don't like what he's holding?" Well, yeah, apparently he did. That blows my mind. If you wouldn't walk up to some dude in a supermarket and snatch his backpack off his shoulder, why on earth would you walk up to some dude in a supermarket and snatch his gun off his hip? (Uh, or try to. Good luck with that, by the way.) 

The conversation continued, with Twitter Guy launching invective left and right, while I did my level best to answer his rhetoric with reason, his anger with level-headedness. I won't recap the whole thing here -- you can go read it on Twitter if you really want to -- but the one thing that really struck me, throughout the conversation, was the sheer depth of his conviction that those of us who support gun ownership and the right to carry in public do so out of fear. He labelled me "insane", he labelled gun owners of his acquaintance as "paranoid" and "nutcases". I shrugged off the name-calling -- dignifying it with a response never helps -- but he kept coming back to it, again and again, demanding to know why someone would carry a gun in public if they weren't afraid of something.

At the end of the conversation, just before I called a halt and went to dinner, we were on the subject of when it would or wouldn't be appropriate to use a firearm in self-defense in a built-up area. "If there's a rapist in my face," I said, "I'll take that chance." And when I got back from dinner, what do you know, a snarky response about "See, you claim you're not afraid, but your words say differently."

That, ladies and gentlemen, pissed me the hell off. I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I do know women who have been violently raped by complete strangers. (I won't out them here; that's their choice, not mine.) I'd trade my right arm for the chance to go back in time and make sure they had a loaded handgun and the skills to use it on the night they were raped. You know why? Because trying to frame the discussion about self-defence rights in terms of "fear" versus "lack of fear" is more than disingenous, it's an out-and-out lie. English has words like "concern" and "qualm" and "doubt" and "dread" and "paranoia" and "unease" because fear is not a binary, it's a continuum. We have the phrase "healthy concern" because there is such a thing. I'm "afraid" of being in a situation where I might need to defend myself with deadly force the same way I'm "afraid" of having my bad ankle go out under me and dump me on my keister in the street: I wear stiff boots to keep my ankle from buckling, and when I'm in a situation where it's lawful for me to do so, I carry a handgun. 

So I told him his male privilege was showing, and that was the end of that.

I support gun rights because I support civil rights, plain and simple. I cheer every time a woman plugs a would-be rapist, every time a PoC plugs someone trying to assault them because of the colour of their skin, every time a queer plugs a would-be gay-basher. It's not that I especially like violence; the bare truth of it is that some people will listen to nothing else. Some people hear "it's wrong to physically harm people because of the colour of their skin, or what's between their legs, or because of who they love" and it just slides right off as if they'd never heard it. Am I saying "let's go shoot all the racists"? If you think that, you haven't been listening: firearms are a tool for self-defence, and I don't mean "the best ~ is a good offence". Nobody likes to admit it, but if you're a minority in the United States, there are people who believe, as surely as they believe that the sun will come up in the east tomorrow, that your mere existence is a killin' offense. These people are wrong, and if one of them attacks your person, then for God's sake just shoot the motherfucker. If just ten percent of the gays and lesbians in America were to learn how to shoot and carry handguns, there'd be a lot fewer Matthew Shepards or Paul Broussards or Brandon Teenas or ... well, you can read up for yourself if you don't already know.

This is what William Kostric means, by the way, when he says "an armed society is a polite society." And so do I.

But I wonder, because I know some of you reading disagree with me -- what is it you think we're afraid of? 

michiexile: Emma is a handgun, btw?
maradydd: Yep, my .40 caliber Sig Sauer P226.
michiexile: /me is SO tempted to ask whether there are also Sig Süss, Sig Salzig, Sig Bitter and Sig Umami.

By now I'm sure many of you have seen Ze Frank's latest project, From 52 to 48 | 48 to 52 With Love.

( Here's my contribution.Collapse )