making sandwiches with swords

The civil­ian pop­u­la­tion iden­ti­fies weapons made for law en­force­ment and mil­i­tary as “as­sault” weapons.

As a for­mer Army per­son, this ter­mi­nol­o­gy makes me roll my eyes along with every­one else who is fa­mil­iar with firearms. The truth is, an AR-15 is not vast­ly more dead­ly than any oth­er semi-au­to­mat­ic ri­fle with a 30 round mag­a­zine. They’re func­tion­al­ly the same.

How­ev­er, there is some psy­cho­log­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance in the idea that an AR-15, like oth­er “as­sault” weapons, are made specif­i­cal­ly for killing oth­er hu­mans.

They’re not hunt­ing tools. By way of anal­o­gy: You can use a sword to slice a sand­wich, but most peo­ple wouldn’t. Ergo, even though func­tion­al­ly an AR-15 type might be the same as a hunt­ing ri­fle, we should ask our­selves why peo­ple are drawn to them over more con­ven­tion­al-look­ing firearms.

There’s lots of plau­si­ble stat­ed rea­sons:
“It looks cool.”
“Lots of cus­tomiza­tion op­tions.”
“I’m used to this plat­form bc I was in the ser­vice.”
“It was cheap.” etc.

At the heart of it though I think there is this idea that an AR-15 is a soldier’s weapon, a “sword” if you will. The own­er wants to be able to hurt/kill oth­er peo­ple when they deem it nec­es­sary. Most gun own­ers will tell you “when nec­es­sary” means self-de­fense, al­ways.

But ob­vi­ous­ly there’s a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the pop­u­la­tion who thinks “when nec­es­sary” means:
when they want to start a race war,
when two guys kiss in front of them,
when­ev­er some­one does some­thing they don’t agree with.

Sec­ond Amend­ment diehards will tell you that it’s in our hands to pro­tect our­selves, that the an­swer to death and may­hem is A Good Guy with a Gun. They tell us that to re­strict or dis­arm The Good Guys would re­sult in even more death and leave in­no­cent peo­ple de­fense­less. And yet, we al­ready have some of the loos­est gun re­stric­tions in the world.

So where the fuck were The Good Guys on Sun­day?

We need to re­strict ac­cess to “as­sault” weapons to take the swords out of the hands of bad guys.

There is clear­ly a psy­cho­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence be­tween tools for hunt­ing and military/law en­force­ment firearms that is not be­ing ac­knowl­edged.

Clear­ly the good guys are do­ing fuck-all, so it’d be some­thing at least.
 
 

—dar­cy nel­son

Flom­mist Dar­cy Nel­son is a hard-charg­ing, gun-tot­ing pro­gram­mer-for-hire, ply­ing her trade on the sil­i­con tides of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia – FLOMM! THE BAT­TLE For MOD­eRN 1923 show­cas­es her hand­i­work. Copy­right © 2016 Dar­cy Nel­son.

To sup­port the vic­tims of the Pulse shoot­ing, please do­nate here. Also, jet­BLue is ex­tend­ing an of­fer of free trav­el to/from Or­lan­do for im­me­di­ate fam­i­ly members/domestic part­ners of those im­pact­ed by the shoot­ing, de­tails here.

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