#fucking hate being disabled because its like- I have a pre-law degree

[disabled-dean]

Well it looks like my landlord is going to hell, rip 🙏🏻

[silvokrent]

This isn’t nearly as in-depth as I’d like it to be, but here’s my reaction to firearms legislation, mass shootings, who or what’s “to blame,” and what we should be doing about it.

At this point, honestly, I don’t care what your political stance is, whether or not you think gun legislation will or won’t stop “criminals” (whatever the fuck that actually means) from still getting access to firearms illegally. At this point, all that I care about is that we do something instead of debating every single hypothetical pro and con to any degree of restrictive firearms access. Yes, gun violence is a multifaceted issue, and the motives behind each individual instance of a shooting are going to vary. So if we’re not going to talk about making it more difficult for anyone to buy firearms, let’s talk about the sociopolitical motivations behind mass shootings, and what sort of solutions we as a society are willing to commit to.

The shooter was [insert minority here] that was motivated by [vague generalization of an aspect of their culture]. Okay. So if the attack was done by a perpetrator who had biased, bigoted beliefs that they inherited from their family/immediate cultural influence at home, then maybe we should implement more effective and comprehensive policies in schools that enforce ideological acceptance. Say, for example, that the shooter held misogynistic, antisemitic, anti-black, and anti-LGBT+ beliefs. Here’s a potential solution: legally mandate that schools — colleges, universities, and K-12 private, public, and charter schools — teach their students that women, Jews, non-white Americans, and LGBT+ people have the same human rights as anyone else, and that verbally/mentally/emotionally/physically abusing them in any social environment/setting (work, school, the gym, the bus stop, etc.) is unequivocally wrong. Start teaching children as young as pre-K that these toxic beliefs are not acceptable, no matter what that child’s parents are teaching them at home. Undermine hatred that the child is inheriting from their family. Teach children earlier about privilege and the centuries’ worth of oppression that marginalized groups have experienced and continue to experience, and teach them how to be allies to marginalized groups, like non-neurotypical individuals, or people that are physically disabled. Teach students comprehensive, scientifically-accurate sex ed, that illustrates the differences between biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, and that these differences do not get to be treated as “abnormal” or “subhuman” just because they’re not as prevalent or as widely-represented as heteronormativity or cisgendered folks. We should also take the time to educate people that just because you meet a person of a certain demographic with a hateful belief, doesn’t mean they represent their entire group. If rampant Islamophobia has taught us anything, it’s that society likes to create “the great other” to have as a relevant foil for our own values, and as a readily-identifiable enemy, while ignoring the hypocrisies and flaws we deny are a part of our own cultures.

But teaching children/students to accept people of other walks of life goes against my personal beliefs! If the government meddles too much in education, they could easily co-opt learning in the future to push certain agendas. Besides, you don’t have the right to indoctrinate my children with your radical liberal ideas! I wasn’t aware that teaching children to not be dickheads to other people was a radical liberal notion, but fine. Have it your way. And yes, I agree, too much government intervention can have its own problems, in a sense of who’s watching the watchman and making sure they don’t overstep certain boundaries. But having no standardized code that teaches students to accept people from other cultural/religious/ethnic/genetic backgrounds isn’t a solution, either. And frankly, there should be no reason why anyone would argue against teaching our kids that diversity is worthy of acceptance and celebration, not shunning and discrimination. If you’re not willing to enact a solution to fix the motivation behind mass shootings, then we need to make it harder for people with radicalized hateful beliefs to acquire firearms. Either present another plausible solution to reduce mass shootings, or pick one of the aforementioned solutions.

The shooter was a [insert person with a mental illness]. Sane people don’t commit terrorist acts! Ah, yes. The old “let’s scapegoat people with mental illnesses as the perpetrators as these attacks, rather than as the overwhelming victims, in order to avoid talking about gun control.” Very well. If we’re going to continue assigning sole culpability to individuals with anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and other psychopathologies, then that means we need to make medical treatment easier to acquire and less stigmatized. If you have a diagnosed mental illness, then you should be able to access free — or at the very least, cheap and affordable — healthcare to treat your condition long-term, through medication, one-on-one patient-psychologist/psychiatrist therapy, and accommodations in the workplace, school, and so on. People with mental illness should have greater access to resources that protect them from housing and workplace discrimination. We must, as a collective society, learn to not ridicule or make disparaging jokes at their expense, often to the effect of exacerbating their mental illness. We need to learn to not sneer at coping mechanisms, or ridicule someone that has a service animal for emotional and otherwise support. Because if mentally ill people are responsible for these attacks, then that means we should be treating their psychopathologies in order to prevent mass shootings, right?

But I don’t want my tax dollars to go toward the mentally ill! I shouldn’t have to pay to fix their problems. Skirting around the fact that people with mental illnesses didn’t ask to have those “problems” in the first place, what you’re saying is that “here’s a potential solution that could save human lives, but I’m not willing to spend money on it.” If allocating our government tax dollars means that people suffering from mental illnesses get help, and people aren’t as likely to die in mass shootings, then isn’t that worth the expenditure? Either present another plausible solution to reduce mass shootings, or pick one of the aforementioned solutions. 

Look. Lax gun laws are not the sole culprit behind mass shootings. The United States is a petri dish of centuries’ worth of culture clash, and the subsequent internalized hatred that comes with over-representation of privileged demographics, and erasure of marginalized people that’ve been stigmatized by the media. The problem is a combination of factors: compassion fatigue, apathy, complacency, a status quo that solely benefits certain groups at others’ expense, and an unwillingness to examine or relinquish our own biases because we don’t want to change. Radicalized violence and terrorism are multifaceted issues, influenced by factors I haven’t even touched on, because it’s late, I’m tired, and frankly I’m not the best person qualified to educate others on a complex topic I’ve only just begun to unravel myself. But I do know that we need to find a solution. We needed a solution yesterday. We needed a solution months ago. We needed a solution decades ago. Every time we are bombarded by senseless bloodshed and death, we go through the ritual of “sending our thoughts and prayers,” and then patting ourselves on the back and congratulating ourselves for doing what we think counts as the bare minimum.

It’s not enough. It’s never been enough.

Whenever someone tries to foster a discussion on gun violence and the underlying issues, the loudest voices in the room (typically our elected politicians) default to the cliché red herrings of “mental illness” and “[person of a certain minority group] committed the act, therefore [their demographic] as a whole is to blame.” And while there have been instances in the past of shootings being linked to specific groups, these generalizations are correlation, not causation. Clearly, pinning blame to any one group — a tactic we’ve been using for years — hasn’t fixed the issue, so we need to come up with a different answer. Revising our education and healthcare systems have the potential to fix so many issues in our country, but arguments are always made for why “it can’t be done.”

“Can’t” means “won’t.” Meaning that people have the capacity to try, but aren’t willing to.

Which brings us back to firearms. Because until we, as a country, are willing to sit down and find a solution for hate crimes and mental illness (the alleged culprits), then we need to make it harder for people to buy military-grade firearms and go on killing sprees at schools, nightclubs, and concerts. Our “right” to buy and stockpile thirty fucking assault rifles without a comprehensive system to account for the whereabouts of those weapons, and the identity of the wielder does not supersede a person’s right to not be shot and killed.

People are dying nearly every other day in our country at a rate not seen in other nations. At the very least, we should at least be willing to ask other countries for help, and try implementing their tactics just to find out whether or not they’d be a viable option for our country. Not wanting people dead as a result of gun violence isn’t a fucking political opinion. It’s not even a contentious ethical debate. It’s doing the right fucking thing. And if you don’t like any of the proposed solutions, then instead of telling me why mine are inherently wrong, offer up one of your own.