Guns and the Apocalypse
And reflections on yet another mass shooting anniversary
I hadn’t realized until the day leading up to May 24th that I had an anxiety pit in my stomach. May 24th was, as many will recall, the anniversary of the massacre that occurred at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, TX where 21 people were slaughtered in their fucking classrooms while an inept group of police lingered outside the school for hours doing nothing. 19 children and two teachers just gone. I don’t think I had realized I was carrying some kind of weight about the anniversary until that morning when NPR had a story where a mother of one of the victims was interviewed.
As I listened, tears welling up in my eyes, willing myself to not turn away and listen, my six year-old was at the kitchen island drawing and eating his morning waffle. About an hour or so from then, I’d walk him to school and drop him off at the Kindergarten doors and chat with his wonderful teacher and give him an extra long hug and kiss on the cheek and send him off inside. As I walk home, I’ll repeat the it’ll be fine, he’s going to be safe mantra that, whenever a blip of a thought about a school shooting crosses my mind, I say to myself to actively calm myself.
May 24th was one of those days where, of course, the idea of a school shooting was top of mind because it was an anniversary of one of the many school shootings that has happened in America in the last two decades. It was one of those days where I constantly have to swat away the school shooting fears. On a normal day, the worry isn’t as frequent. I probably think about it every day, if not every week, under regular non-mass-shooting-anniversary moments. But it’s more of a back-of-the-mind thought. This strikes me as a uniquely American condition of anxiety for parents.
I bring this up in a newsletter about the climate apocalypse for a couple of reasons. First, what is more apocalyptic for a family than to lose your child? And given that the number one cause of children and adolescents in this country is gun violence, it’s a very real fear for so many parents. While school shootings are a very real fear, so much of the gun violence that happens is within a household. Everytown for Gun Safety notes that 4.6 million kids live in homes with firearms that are loaded and unlocked and 3 million kids witness gun violence every year. And, like all horrifying statistics in this country, there is a disproportionate impact on kids of color. Black kids are 17 times more likely to die by gun homicide than White kids.
The second thing is that the psychotic American obsession with guns is, frankly, terrifying as we move toward an inevitable societal shift as resources deplete and scarcity becomes the norm. I wonder what the gun hoarders will do when shit hits the fan. Are any of us safe from the people who are surely convinced that everyone wants their resources or who will do anything to get someone else’s resources? And who’s not to say that these folks have been secretly hoping for this day to come because it’s a manifestation of so many anti-government fantasies? Yes, yes, #notallgunowners. But can’t we all agree that the sheer number of guns in this place is nuts? The number of guns in America equals 120.5 per 100 people. Second on that list is Yemen where there are 52.8 guns per 100 people, and Yemen is in the midst of an 8-year civil war.
I think American gun hoarding tracks well with the extreme right-wing obsession with the apocalypse. One might call them apocalypse fantasies. Mark O’Connell does a brilliant job in his book Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back delving into this uniquely American phenomenon of prepping. While his journey takes him through the mind of the uber-wealthy approaches to apocalypse prep via investments in bunker communities in South Dakota and New Zealand or Mars colonization, he begins his quest doing a deep dive into prepper mentality.
One of O’Connell’s observations from right-wing prepper writings out in the world was that there’s a complete lack of investment in society as we know it through the delusion that one must fortify their own little world in order to protect all that is good. “This is a prediction of the future that could be offered only by someone who was never fully convinced by the idea of society in the first place,” O’Connell writes, specifically of a prepper writer and blogger curiously going by the name James Wesley, Rawles (what’s up with that comma mid-name? O’Connell does his best to parse that out as well). Rawles writes that he believes that underneath all of us is a “savage within” that will come out the moment we get desperate.
O’Connell writes of this:
“Apart from the extent to which it indicated Rawles’s complete lack of investment in society itself, the introduction of the figure of the savage here was a lot more revealing than he presumably intended it to be. It had always seemed clear to me that, as a group, preppers were involved in the ongoing maintenance of a shared escapist fantasy about the return to an imagined version of the American frontier—to an ideal of the rugged and self-reliant white man, providing for himself and his family, surviving against the odds in a hostile wilderness. But what the use of the word savage made explicit here, I thought, was the extent to which this reactionary fever dream arose not out of any real understanding of the present of the future, but rather out of the historical trauma of America’s originary apocalypse: the dehumanization and near-annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures.”
I don’t think this can be put any better. And while not all these gun-hoarding, second amendment activists who think it’s just fine for any 18 year-old (or younger!) to go out and purchase a weapon meant for war would call themselves a “prepper,” this assessment seems just as apt for this group. Even for those of us gun-hating types, it has taken decades of unlearning the brainwashing of American exceptionalism and the ideas of “Manifest Destiny” that were all baked into the founding of this country to see what we truly did, which was, committed genocide. But the vast majority of Americans aren’t on the unlearning journey, especially those with strong convictions that hoarding guns will inevitably keep them safe when (not if) society breaks down.
And so, in the wake of yet another mass shooting anniversary, I think of all of this. Guns in some way are a part of my own journey as well. I still have yet to even see one in person because I still find them truly abhorrent and unnecessary and, well, fuck guns. However, they’re out there in the world (well, the American world) in unbelievable numbers and so I must find a way to reckon with their presence.
I have progressive gun owner friends who are there for when I’m ready to figure out what role guns play in my own journey. But for now, it’s important to put this out into the world in newsletter form.
I’ll say this, though (and I don’t think this will change no matter where this journey takes me), I think we’d be better off without any guns out there. I’m an absolutist in that regard. I’m squarely in the “take all the guns away” camp. Although I’m also a realist and know there’s no fucking way that right-wing America will allow this to occur unless you’re prying them from their “cold, dead hands.”
In the meantime, maybe we can at least get weapons of war out of the hands of everyday citizens. Like with abortion rights, right-wing political rhetoric and gerrymandering (and all that is happening to put extreme minority viewpoints in control of some states) skews public opinion. While certainly more people on the right are proponents of gun ownership and fewer restrictions, there are many common sense policies that both sides can agree upon. In any case, I think we can all agree that we can all do more to ensure that fewer people die of gun violence. So let’s rally around organizations like March for Our Lives, Moms Demand Action, and Everytown for Gun Safety.
I don’t think the daily anxiety of sending my kid to a school–or out into public for that matter–in America will ever recede. But I, along with millions of others, can do what we can to make sure that these kids have a future beyond gun violence as well as within a changing climate.