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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2or1Xrp
welp i woke up circa 5am from an anxiety dream in which there was a food crisis in the us and we were all anxiously trying to figure out how not to starve to death, and then i lay in bed wide-eyed and thought about the way morgan stanley has forced Tops grocery stores into bankruptcy to strip-mine their assets for shareholder dividends and that’s going to leave massive holes in the food distribution system and create a lot of food deserts (even in this cradle of wegmans culture there are a lot of low-income neighborhoods only served by a Tops, and then the nice suburb has a whole foods and a trader joe’s too, how unexpected). And then I started thinking about the gun control debate and how the Good Guy With A Gun fantasy, which basically everyone acknowledges is a fanasy, is distracting anyone from ever exploring the far more widespread in my experience, far harder to quantify Totemic Protective effect that most gun owners I know rely on– the basic rural assumption that everyone is armed is a plausible deterrent to home invasion and is often the only feasible security for a remote, sprawling, 19th-century farmhouse that has six ground-floor entrances and none of them have the kind of latches you can lock. But I don’t know how to write that up compellingly, and trying to think of ways to do so while lying in bed trying to fall back asleep is, uh.
Counterproductive, I think.
(But it did make me think about a friend who was a reporter in an urban area, and a group of neighborhood kids once showed her their gun. They had a gun, you see. They didn’t know what kind it was or how to operate it; it was some kind of handgun they’d found, or something. They kept it hidden near a playground, and it kept them safe, they believed, because, well, it was a gun, and she gradually realized that they thought it was like. A magic totem. It would keep them safe, no one would hurt them, because they had it. That’s at play just as much as the Good Guy With A Gun fantasy, and they’re both fantasies, but only one of them is getting any social media attention. It’s not that the Magical Gun Of Protection is any more logical, but it is a little more sympathetic, and it’s far closer to my lifelong experience of proximity to gun ownership.)
oh my gosh don’t reblog this, I’m not remotely prepared to Argue For It. I’m just saying, people are complicated and there’s a lot of fear in all of this, and the But Conservatives Love Cops head-scratching contradiction is kind of because Conservatism Isn’t A Monolith, and a lot of us in those red-voting rural areas grew up basically never having seen a cop and not really having any opinions on them and our entire game plan for home invasions never actually involved trying to call them. 9-1-1 wasn’t a thing in my neighborhood until I was in junior high and even then, who’d show up if you dialed it was never very well understood. But I knew where the rifles were kept.
Oh and then I started fixating on what I’d really do if there was a famine so that wasn’t super helpful. (I was thinking about how I spend the summers sleeping in a canvas tent on a farm, right next to the main food production field, and I refused to take a shotgun out with me so I’ve got a hatchet and a baseball bat that stay out there with me. Hm.)
Anyway there’s no way I’m falling back asleep after all that.
(Your picture was not posted)
welp i woke up circa 5am from an anxiety dream in which there was a food crisis in the us and we were all anxiously trying to figure out how not to starve to death, and then i lay in bed wide-eyed and thought about the way morgan stanley has forced Tops grocery stores into bankruptcy to strip-mine their assets for shareholder dividends and that’s going to leave massive holes in the food distribution system and create a lot of food deserts (even in this cradle of wegmans culture there are a lot of low-income neighborhoods only served by a Tops, and then the nice suburb has a whole foods and a trader joe’s too, how unexpected). And then I started thinking about the gun control debate and how the Good Guy With A Gun fantasy, which basically everyone acknowledges is a fanasy, is distracting anyone from ever exploring the far more widespread in my experience, far harder to quantify Totemic Protective effect that most gun owners I know rely on– the basic rural assumption that everyone is armed is a plausible deterrent to home invasion and is often the only feasible security for a remote, sprawling, 19th-century farmhouse that has six ground-floor entrances and none of them have the kind of latches you can lock. But I don’t know how to write that up compellingly, and trying to think of ways to do so while lying in bed trying to fall back asleep is, uh.
Counterproductive, I think.
(But it did make me think about a friend who was a reporter in an urban area, and a group of neighborhood kids once showed her their gun. They had a gun, you see. They didn’t know what kind it was or how to operate it; it was some kind of handgun they’d found, or something. They kept it hidden near a playground, and it kept them safe, they believed, because, well, it was a gun, and she gradually realized that they thought it was like. A magic totem. It would keep them safe, no one would hurt them, because they had it. That’s at play just as much as the Good Guy With A Gun fantasy, and they’re both fantasies, but only one of them is getting any social media attention. It’s not that the Magical Gun Of Protection is any more logical, but it is a little more sympathetic, and it’s far closer to my lifelong experience of proximity to gun ownership.)
oh my gosh don’t reblog this, I’m not remotely prepared to Argue For It. I’m just saying, people are complicated and there’s a lot of fear in all of this, and the But Conservatives Love Cops head-scratching contradiction is kind of because Conservatism Isn’t A Monolith, and a lot of us in those red-voting rural areas grew up basically never having seen a cop and not really having any opinions on them and our entire game plan for home invasions never actually involved trying to call them. 9-1-1 wasn’t a thing in my neighborhood until I was in junior high and even then, who’d show up if you dialed it was never very well understood. But I knew where the rifles were kept.
Oh and then I started fixating on what I’d really do if there was a famine so that wasn’t super helpful. (I was thinking about how I spend the summers sleeping in a canvas tent on a farm, right next to the main food production field, and I refused to take a shotgun out with me so I’ve got a hatchet and a baseball bat that stay out there with me. Hm.)
Anyway there’s no way I’m falling back asleep after all that.
(Your picture was not posted)
