Angry Planet - Tacticool Girlfriend Explains Why America Loves Guns

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

Guns, guns, guns. America loves them and their use is enshrined in the second amendment. It’s such a big deal here that an entire culture has grown around it. From the outside looking in, gun culture can seem...surreal and fetishistic. The truth is more complicated. The overwhelming majority of American gun owners are responsible and are not taking photos of themselves aiming a loaded weapon at their own dick. Yes, that’s a thing.Here to talk to us about the second amendment and gun culture is Tacticool Girlfriend. Tacticool Girlfriend is a YouTuber whose channel covers gun safety and gun culture. And she does it all with style and flair that you don’t normally see in the space.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been carried out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to coimbration, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom, peaceful.

Freedom has never safe-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Beal. Guns, Guns. America loves them, and their use is enshrined in the Second Amendment. It's such a big deal here that an entire culture has grown around it. From the outside looking in, gun culture can seem surreal. The truth is much more complicated.

The overwhelming majority of American gun owners are responsible and are not taking photos of themselves aiming loaded weapons at their own decks. Yes, that's a thing. Here to talk to us about the Second Amendment and gun culture is tactical girlfriend. Tactical girlfriend is a YouTuber whose channel covers gun safety and gun culture, and she does it all with style and flare that you don't normally see in the space. Tactical girlfriend, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Can you tell us a little bit about your YouTube channel, what your kind of goals are and why you started it? Sure, yeah. So my channel, basically, I've been a social media presence for about a year now.

The channel's been around for probably half a year on YouTube. And it's basically all been intended to be built around demystifying firearms and creating an alternative voice and representation that you don't normally. see in the gun community to at least, I think, offer a more friendly or more welcome and accessible voice where other people might feel a little bit more alienated by what is represented in mainstream gun culture and attitudes. And so this project just serves to just offer an alternative more friendly face to folks who might otherwise just, yeah, not really be very interested in hearing what people in the traditional gun community have to say. I have a question about how we define a gun community. Is there such a thing? It sounds like

such a big coalition if it is. Yeah, the word community itself, I use that here, but I generally do try to avoid using it because it is so incredibly abstract and obfuscated through its use. And when we say community these days, we oftentimes just mean anybody who shares a commonality. And these are people who don't know each other, don't know that they each exist, or see eye to eye on literally pretty much everything. And yet they're still all categorized because they have some common identifier. So I do kind of, I appreciate you asking, that's certainly a good question. And I think maybe more what we're trying to get out here is gun culture as a whole, basically everybody who uses a firearm and is visible. Because yeah, you could argue that there's many gun communities. I would actually probably argue that and say that, yeah, there's not a unified community by any measure of that term. I think that's really important. One of the questions I have here, actually, is I live in the South and I work for media companies in the Northeast. And I found that one of the things that I'm really good at is explaining cultures that people in the Northeast are curious about but do not understand to them.

And doing some of this demystification myself, can you give us like a topography? or can you map out the different gun communities in America that you see that are kind of part of the broader culture? Gosh, there's so many. You've got all the way from the extreme far-right, like, fascist-adjacent communities that are, like, training to be paramilitaries and such, all the way down to, you know, more average, I think, representation of a farmowner in the mainstream Republican conservative communities. down to liberals. There is a liberal gun club, and moving further left. You got all sorts of different leftist contingents, such as Socialist Rifle Association. You've got John Brown Gun Clubs and various other local lefty-friendly clubs. And in between all that, you have clubs that are built more around identities, such as groups where they particularly appeal to women

shooters or queer folks or people of color. There's all sorts of different identities out there that kind of help carve out their own space as gun owners. And yeah, you name it. Basically, there's a category for it in the gun world. Why do you think that we in the media do such a bad job of kind of covering this stuff? Because it does feel like in the mainstream press, everybody gets lumped together, right? Yeah, I think largely there's maybe a stick. when it's directed towards a group of people who simply just own the same thing, such as a firearm,

thereby they all get lumped into it when we stigmatize firearms. Therefore, all gun owners are guilty of such things like when we're talking about gun control, then it becomes an issue for every gun owner, regardless of where they find themselves and what communities. And, yeah, tends to homogenize. And on the flip side, like from the interior as opposed to the critics, you have the loudest voices in the gun community where people are in control of the narrative. They have the money, the backing of the NRA, whatever. They have the dominant voices. They are the celebrities that you see on YouTube a lot. And they usually are indicative and reflective of similar attitudes. And thereby they control that narrative.

and they very intentionally gatekeep it as well. I think that mainstream gun culture, mainstream gun culture, as we know it is a gatekeeping device. And that is like something that I do want to try to deconstruct personally because I do think it's actually for their own good. It's better that we have a more diverse voice pool of different people in the gun community as opposed to this one group that like gets represented.

And therefore like everyone assumes that every gun owner looks like this. and it's not doing us justice at all. Can you describe some of the gatekeeping that you've experienced in what you... Yeah, I think, first of all, it starts with messaging, and a lot of that comes down to appealing to values, and thereby that's why you see your bread and butter NRA appealing to the Republican voter base, and thereby, if you aren't a part of that, then you feel alienated when you see that's like the main representation of a gun owner.

And beyond that, there's all sorts of dog whistles in various media, especially that I've seen on Gun Tube. And yeah, it's just like culturally, there's a very informal but very calcified experience of values that are embedded and expected in a lot of the immediate representation that we see for gun owners. Sorry, my finger was slipping on the mute button. All right, can you describe then, like, the aesthetic of your channel and tell us why you've made the choices you've made in terms of the way that you present this information? So it's very different than anything else I've seen on Gun Tube. Right. I'll start by saying that, like, I'm queer, and my aesthetic very much, I guess, probably appeals to that. I like bright colors and shiny things.

So, like, my backdrop very much is like that. and my lighting is very much that. And so in my videos, I am like wearing my tactical gear when it's appropriate. Otherwise, like, I very much just try to be myself and what I look like on a daily basis. And so my style is not very, I guess, what I would say, chutty for lack of a better term, that's not my aesthetic. At the same time, like, I do want to get into the gear and talk about it. But I try to not be like a lifestyleist about it and just build a channel that, like, I would like to see on

YouTube in general, and that's ultimately everything else just follows that. Please describe what it is that you put in front of people on a regular basis. So on a regular basis, like my channel, at least at this juncture, hasn't been really built around trying to be very showy for the most part and like showing me doing all these cool, even though it's in the name, like tactical things. Like, I'm not trying to do what like forward observations is doing where they're like trying to sell a brand and make all these like cool room breaching room clearing videos or even going down to some of the more in-depth like I guess like defensive techniques or anything like that although I do want to get into that

right now where the channel is I'm just trying to cover the basics because so much of the fundamentals and so much of what it means to be a responsible farm owner isn't very well represented in Gun Tube in my experience. So I just want to drive all of those points home, be like, here's how you're going to be a safe gun owner, here's how you're going to be a responsible gun owner, here's how you're going to get your fundamentals down to be proficient and just work from a really good, healthy base. And like I said, in the future, I might get into some more advanced topics. But right now, I just really want to cover making sure that people got their bases completely taken care of. Do you think we do a bad job? I guess there's like no

formal system for it, right? Or how you get into guns and into gun culture and learn your gun safety. It's really going to be dependent on whoever onboard you and what community you're immediately a part of. Do you think we do a bad job generally? And maybe the gun community does a bad job of teaching these basics, like trigger discipline, how to clean things, like range etiquette, all that kind of stuff. I don't know. It's a mixed bag, I think. With what we see in a lot of communities, they're really good about at least trying to talk about trigger discipline specifically. But I feel like oftentimes that just comes from like people trying to be online bullies and being like, oh, I got you. I'm better than you. You're, you're, your trigger discipline.

you're a crappy gun owner and it ultimately just comes to them like trying to flex on each other. Whereas we don't just talk about all the safety rules and be like, hey, like maybe we can do this better. Hey, I'm going to take you aside. Let's talk about this. And let's try to support each other and just make sure that we're all being as safe as we can. That's just like an example. I feel like there's so much bravado, so much and not enough like here's how we build a healthier community in general. And yeah, I think we definitely can do a lot better than what we're doing right now, at least. Matthew, I would say, though, having grown up in a very heavy gun regulation state, you actually in New York state have to take a hunter's safety course before you actually get even a

rifle. So I just got, I got taken to the range by a friend's father who was a police officer and taught that way. It sounds like more fun. Oh, it's the Texas method, which it was, And even that was more formal than what normally happens in Texas, I think. But anyway, that's an aside. What do you, what is your favorite part of this? Not making the videos, but like when you're, what is your favorite part about being part of the gun community? What's your favorite thing to shoot?

What's your favorite part of the activity? Honestly, in my experience, it's teaching other people. And that's part of why, like, I started this channel because I'm like, a lot of the things I say, to folks in person that I have and trained in the past, I'm like, wait, we could just like create, I could create a series of videos and just make the stuff more accessible to everybody while simultaneously making it a bit more accessible and friendly to a lot of folks who might otherwise feel very alienated from the gun world in general. In person, though, like when I've taken people training and I did this last weekend with a friend, and every time I see somebody

get better at what they're doing, get more proficient, and be more safety-minded. Like, that makes everything so much more worthwhile to me. And it just makes me feel great when I can see, like, tangible results from me, like, I'm by no means going to claim I'm an expert or anything. I'm just going to say, I'm a decent gun owner. And I like to see that skill pass down to other people who are also trying to just be a decent gun owner. What is it that attracts you to guns in the first place? You personally. That is a good question, too. I personally didn't grow up with guns. I actually never had a firearm until I was an adult. I never shot a firearm until I was an adult. So for me, it's been a more recent experience and it's something that, like, I got into, mostly just because once I started shooting, I got hooked, I was just like, this is really fun.

It's a really cool challenge. I like working with mechanical items and like studying them. And I don't know. For me, it's just like the challenge of learning a new skill set and being able to apply it in a way that like does bring people together. And in a way that like I think can be practical. Some extent or another, especially like from a defensive standpoint, like I'm a concealed carrier. I do. think that's like ultimately the function of everything that I do, even if some of the things I do are like absolutely not related. Like it's all a lump sum skill. And it's utilitarian as well as just very enjoyable for me. What are some of the common mistakes from people that are getting into guns for the first time? I think one of my biggest pep heaves are folks going to the range with no real objective in mind and not having like the right mindset and it's not even their fault. It's just not instilled in them. And they don't have anything to work for. And they end up just shooting junk at the range and not getting anything out of it. And like I think going to the

range can be a really fun activity and it can be a social activity. And that's great. But especially in the economy that it is right now, I don't think we can really afford to be wasting a lot of ammunition, just plinking. So I think the biggest pitfall here is just like people not having a regiment or like an understanding of what they want to accomplish by shooting and thereby not having the attitudes or the gear to properly accomplish that task. I think you could save so much time and money if like people were started on the right track. And given the tools that they need and the mindset that they need in order to actually make this far more rewarding than it will actually be if they're just left to their own devices. You just touched on something I think is really interesting that I want to get into a little bit.

Can you explain the economy? Like what is going on with ammunition? And is there other stuff that there's a shortage of? Yeah. The entire gun industry right now is it's like completely on fire. And it's been that way since the pandemic. There was last year, obviously we started with COVID and everyone freaked out about that. And then there was various hot spots of social unrest that also freaked a lot of people out and caused them to panic by. And then this continued to drive that scarcity that is just spiraling out of control and everyone's afraid of everything right now and everyone's skittish and trying to buy up as much ammunition in guns as possible. And like also as a result we've had probably don't quote me on this, but it may be the biggest explosion of new gun owners that we've ever seen

in the industry, and thereby, like, that's also been driving a lot of this demand. So nobody's got, like, ammo and nobody's got guns or any guns that, like, people generally want to buy. So it's just been really hard. Everything's super inflated and very scarce. And, yeah, everyone's frustrated. What's a normal amount of ammunition to have in your house? There is no correct answer here, in my opinion. I think some people may be recreational shooters and they may go to the range once or twice a year. They might be hunters even who don't hunt very often. So they might only have a few hundred rounds, honestly, on hand at a time, if they're not stockpiling any ammo. And they just have enough to do the thing that they do twice a year, if that.

And then there's the opposite end of folks who are scarcity-minded. So they stockpile thousands and thousands of rounds, people who are like afraid of the end time. So they have a bunker just like full of supplies and ammunition and guns and whatever. And like in the middle, there's just a lot of folks, I think like me who do a lot of shooting. And that is both recreational as well as defensive shooting or training. So I stockpile probably a few thousand rounds myself of ammo combined of three different calibers that I use generally. So I don't know. It can vary.

I think it just depends on your attitudes around guns and what your function is with them. In a related question, how much does ammunition range from price-wise? Pre-pendemic, like, and depending on the caliber, of course, it's going to vary a lot. Like, 22 long rifle is generally regarded as like one of the cheapest forms of

ammunition and like pre-pandemic. I don't really remember the price because I don't shoot 22, but it was probably even like less than a cent per round. And like now it's 30 cents per round. It goes, it skyrocketed a lot. And I think pre-pandemic like 9mm was like averaging like 17 cents around and like now it's you're lucky to get it at 50 cents around. It really is a massive increase. So people who are doing this, they have thousands and thousands of dollars in their basements, right? This is a very expensive hobby now. Right. The pandemic and like all of 2020 basically turned ammunition into its own currency.

I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, I had like my first post-apocalyptic trade and barter where I traded. I think it was two boxes of two, two, three of wolf golds for a bottle of rubbing alcohol because that was also very scarce at the time. So yeah, this stuff like quite literally is worth its weight in gold at this point. Do you know is this, and this may be a little in the weeds, but I want to ask it, do you know if that scarcity is also affecting gunpowder, brass? It's not too hard to make your own ammo if you have the components. Right. The main issue here, I think, like, black powder and brass and, like, even bullets are not going to be,

they've definitely had some inflation as a result. And everyone's, like, trying to get into reloading now, too, of course, because everyone's freaking out about not being able to get ammo so naturally. That has also fallen into place. But the big one are primers, there's been a huge primer scarcity. I think a lot of manufacturers bought them up. Production went down for a while and everyone's trying to get into reloading. So that's been a perfect storm of primer scarcity.

And yeah, primers like cost as much as ammo, basically. It almost costs as much to make your own ammo as it does to just buy commercially made. And what about, I had done some research on this not too long ago and I found conflicting information. What about armor? Armor has been weird too. A lot of people because of the pandemic and all the panic around it have also generally gotten other accessories that would be essential to using a fireman in a defensive capacity because everyone's scared. So armor has been a huge one. Plague carriers included are all just. completely dried up. And there's extremely long wait times. I know cry precision has for their plate carriers probably an eight-month lead time at this point. It's been absolutely wild. So it goes across the board for sure. Just to put the costs in perspective and the shortage in perspective,

I just did a very quick research. And there are literally billions of rounds that are made every year, at least there were in 2017. So that's a lot of people, and that's a lot of people buying a lot of ammunition. And I've been like reading articles about this. And apparently a lot of the manufacturers, probably most of the major ammunition manufacturers in the U.S. have added third ships to their production line and various manufacturers are looking to expand production, but they don't want to go too deep in because they know this is temporary. But they know this is temporary. But They do have a two-year backlog of where they want to be, basically. And so they are definitely working harder to put a lot more ammunition out

because the demand has absolutely spiked and reserves have dried up. So I don't know, we're going to see a lot of shuffling in the industry, I think, for the next year or two, as definitely is going to have a ripple effect. But I do predict that, like, in a year, it's going to definitely stabilize. And I do think that ammunition prices are actually starting to actually go down just a tiny bit. At least that's what I've been seeing lately, but I don't want to jinx it. Should we be worried about this at all from the perspective of, not that we can't find the ammunition that we want, but that Americans are stockpiling arms and ammunition? There's a lot of,

I know, there's just a lot of weird tension in the air right now. It's been dissipating, but. Yeah, I don't know. This is all based on fear in the first place. Like, everything that we're seeing here is completely driven by fear. And like a lot of gun purchases are in general, not to stigmatize them or anything. Like sometimes that fear is very warranted and legitimate too. But regardless, I think we've entered like this extremely cartoonish phase of like human evolution where it's, you couldn't even make this up. We are truly seeing like truth being stranger than fiction. And yeah, there's huge amounts of tension, especially coming from the gun community and within the gun community. Everyone's really on edge. And personally, I'm not that

worried about it. I'm just annoyed more than anything. I'm just like, could you please everybody just calm down for a second. Like, we're going to be okay. Please stop panicking. And let's just do the best that we can do with the situation that we're given. Go outside, wear a mask and get your vaccine. And I don't know. Everything's going to be fine. I mean, like, not everything's going to be fine. There's always problems. And again, like some people are definitely warranted in their fears. And I don't blame people for feeling anyway about anything in general, but we do need to get a grasp on reality and take a deep breath collectively. And yeah, just, I don't know, understand that like circumstances are the way they are, but don't base

your whole entire life around the moment. Let's look towards the future and plan for the future. However, that may be, but things are always changing. And like, we're never going to go back either. There is no normal. Everything is always evolving, but accept that, that, like, change is just going to happen and adapt to it. And that's okay. It's absolutely not the end, though, in my opinion. Well said. In a political question, not terribly political, but why do you think it is if there's a whole spectrum of gun owners from far left to far right, why is it that those on the far right are so much more visible? That really comes down to, I think, the zeitgeist of what the U.S. is and what a lot of this has come from, starting as a settler colony that relied on slavery to build and expand. We naturally have created multiple levels of marginalization in this country and thereby monopolize not only wealth and control, but like with wealth and control comes armaments as well and those armaments are thereby used to further defend that wealth in control and it continues in this cycle. So naturally we've seen the demographic of your average gun owner, or at least what we expected to be in this

country being a white cis male. And like that's just what it is. I don't harbor resentment for anybody who happens to fall under the identity and owns a gun. But those are the social circumstances that we have inherited and thereby the industry that is built around maintaining the firearms, which are thereby intended to maintain the wealth and control, are largely meant to appeal to that base. And that's very much why I think there is intentional gatekeeping around it to help continue to propagate that. And I think we're seeing a lot of shifts socially and necessarily so lately in the gun community or in the gun world, I should say, where certain people are in the industry are like, wait, it's actually profitable to

appeal to everybody and including marginalized folks and minorities. And I think that's not mainstream, but we're seeing more of that happen, which is great. And it's thereby growing the community and one of the largest populations of, or one of the largest identities that we've seen grow in 2020, like some of them, I'm sorry, I'm trying to word this right, a good portion of the new gunners that we see coming into the gun world in 2020 were people color and women. And so that's necessitating a huge shift in like how the industry is thinking about how they strategize who they appeal to, what their base even is, because it is becoming more diverse. That is a fact. It's changing. It's just, yeah, it's traditionally been a very intentional

monopolization. Just some thoughts on some additional thoughts on this. I also think that like white dudes with guns, even though they say they don't like the media, like to be on camera. And I think some of the marginalized groups have a better sense of their own history and remember what part the media has played and demonizing them in the past and are much more media savvy and that they will talk less to journalists and interact with the press less. And so that part of the story doesn't get out as much. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but just a thought. But I do, can we talk about then, as we're starting to get into this, the importance of the Second Amendment and gun culture in America for liberationist movements. Now, are you talking about like how

the Second Amendment may relate to other struggles abroad, basically? No, I mean, other struggles here. I'm using liberationist movement very broadly in America. I'm talking about, like, trans, basically marginalized people defending themselves with weapons in America, and how that's viewed, and how that's, like you've said, is changing. It's really interesting. I have almost, I don't want to say I do, but like I, there is some mixed feelings on I think it's great. I think the Second Amendment is guaranteed by the Constitution for everybody to legally bear arms, who at least are of age, to do whatever their state mandates. But it's empowering in a way for folks to be able to take self-defense into their own hands. And that's like an extremely powerful thing to do. That broadens autonomy. It creates less dependency on things like the police, which is actually a pretty common threat.

in the gun community in general, like even your traditional gun owners are going to be like, yeah, I'd rather have a gun than have to wait for the cops to show up in a defensive situation. That's pretty common sense. So allowing people to get access to those things that come down to their defending their very existence is an extremely powerful thing. Even if the liberation of these people doesn't immediately require them to do, it makes a huge statement and it's reflective of their attitudes of being like, hey, like, we are going to stand up for ourselves. And that can mean a number of things. That can mean legally. That can mean

social. That can mean down to, yeah, defending their own lives if they have to. So that's very powerful. At the same time, I'm not saying this is bad, but I am saying like, people might get lazy about it where they use guns in a way that like, I think are not necessarily the best representation of them that traditional gun culture has propagated where people see them as fetishistic objects, where they view them as a quick ticket to being completely invincible or thinking that they do. There's a lot of delusions that come with owning a gun. Like, a gun does not guarantee you anything and it can put you at more risk than if you didn't have one in the first place sometimes. So I think there's a space to be practical.

about gun ownership and not just be like, hey, look at me, I'm really strong and I'm powerful because I have this very powerful metal objects that I think people overestimate the symbolic nature of the gun and what it means in the material world. So I just want to have a bit more of a sobering understanding of firearms in general. And yes, they have their place. But please don't lean too heavily on them. Like we got to do so much more, especially in liberationist movements of, hey, like, we got to tackle the social issues and the legal issues and everything else. Otherwise, like taking cool photos of yourself on Instagram with your gun is not doing anything to further those causes. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we are going to pause there for a break.

We are on with Tactical Girlfriend. We'll be back right after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we are back with tactical girlfriend. This gets into the first video I saw from you that really caught my eye. was the state of the gun community featuring the gun penguin, which I encourage everyone to go watch. It's incredible. It's very great. All the stuff on your channel is great, but I really liked that video. And one of the things I thought that you brought out related to this that I thought was very interesting is the Mulford Act in 1967. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, gun control in general has actually had a pretty interesting pass that like I don't think

has talked about enough. I think, you know, people are definitely vocal about it, but It's, I feel like mainstream gun culture is, oh, we're not going to talk about that part of it. We're just going to talk about how the big, bad, I mean, liberals are here to take all our guns and and send us to FEMA camps and whatever paranoid delusions there may be. But really, gun control is traditionally, it's the state trying to curb what they think is a threat to the status quo. And in the 60s, that was perceived as the Black Panther Party being a large threat to what was traditionally white America and the homogeneity over power in the streets and as well as in the state. And we were seeing the civil rights movement and black folks getting out and being like, no, this is, we need to be citizens and like really basic stuff that we take for granted today. and it didn't happen that long ago.

So part of that was like the Mulford Act in 1966. It was a response to the Black Panthers being in the streets with guns saying, no, we're going to police the police. We're going to defend ourselves and each other if necessary. If you keep snatching us and committing hate crimes against us, Ronald Reagan, who was the governor at the time, worked with actually the backing of the NRA to mandate that like open carrying around the streets and around public buildings was. absolutely not legal anymore. So that's like an interesting juxtaposition to the main narrative that we hear about Ronald Reagan being, you know, this, this freedom-loving hero of the American people and the NRA being this bastion of gun rights where both were actually really the opposite at that time. It makes sense. He was a freedom-loving hero of white people of a certain stripe.

Right. Like, it's very clear what these things stand for. And actions definitely speak louder than words here. And that's like only one example of gun control. Like gun control traditionally has always been used to target marginalized people in a very disproportionate manner. New York's stop and risk program is like a huge good example of that too. And like it perpetuates this very day down to people getting their doors kicked in. How do you think this relates then to the current conversation around gun control in this country? Because the thing we're all scared of right now is mass shooters. And the liberal idea of how to handle this problem seems to be to restrict access to guns. What do you make about all of this? I think it's really a historical and very tone deaf personally. Like, when we think about mass shootings, like, these things don't happen as often as people getting stabbed or whatever. Yes, they're horrible. It's absolutely disgusting and very disturbing

when these things happen. And I sympathize with anybody who has had to witness anything like that or been the victim of those things. And I hope to never see that happen again. That being said, I don't think gun control as we know it is going to actually fix this problems. You have mass stabbing in schools in like Japan. There's been historical examples of that. If somebody wants to kill somebody, they will. So I think the preventative measures here need to be more, we need to tackle the issues that we aren't willing to talk about because they're not easy to fix. And those are social issues dealing with social alienation, making sure we have better counseling for folks, especially students, and better know-how with parents to just be better parents. All these things

can greatly mitigate these things. They're just harder to implement and don't feel as good as passing legislation. But the fact of the matter is, like, the legislation doesn't historically fix its problem. Like, one of the biggest mass shootings that we can think of is the Columbine Massacre, which occurred during the assault weapons ban from the Clinton administration. Those guys used handguns and shotguns. Those are things that I don't think in this country will ever get banned, no matter how much gun control you want to throw at the wall. Like, there is going to be a threshold where we're going to say, no, okay, those guns are okay. The implements are here. There's more guns in this country than people. And I think the question is not, okay, what do we do to magically make

these things disappear? I think it's like, what do we do with them? And how do we create a healthier society if these things are going to exist? Because, yeah, I don't think you can really turn the clock back on that. It feels like such an intractable problem to me. And there's all these there's all these contradictions that are baked into American life that I think just make things feel impossible to circumnavigate politically sometimes. But anyway, do you, speaking of contradictions, another one of the things I thought that was very interesting in that video was your discussion around the prevalence of authoritarian aesthetic in some circles of the gun culture. Can you talk about that a little bit and why it's bad? Yeah, it's obviously just my opinion. Nothing is inherently bad, but I think it's fairly problematic from my perspective. Like, in the gun community, as a response to, let me rewind here, not just in the gun community, in the political sphere of the U.S. and all the mess that it is, we have had lately a lot of awareness around police brutality.

and that has especially been brought to our attention that black people especially are at risk for police brutality as well as many other minorities. And that has sprouted the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, as a response, people who are either racist or confused say, oh, no, that's not the case. And despite the statistics that, like, this is happening, people are in denial and they want to stick with the status quo and say, no, everything's okay. Police brutality is not a problem. Or if it is, it's always just a few bad apples and it is what it is. So we're just going to try to sweep that under the rug.

And so the response has actually been a bit more vitriolic than that, of course, down to besides people being outwardly racist, there's a lot of people being like, no, I'm backing the blue and I'm with the police on this one, support our police. They think it's a conspiracy against the police where it's nowhere. we're literally saying, please stop killing people. And so we've seen the blue line flag, especially being a symbol of those attitudes that has sprouted up. And I think the blue line flag predates Black Lives Matter. It was never really that much of a controversial thing until more recently when it was used as a thing to be like, no, actually, I'm going to take my position on

this side of the fence. I'm against Black Lives Matter. I think that you are trying to dismantle my order and I feel threatened by it, so therefore I'm going to stick with those guns here. And so in the gun community, we see the blue line flag being used by a lot of more right-leaning people, of course. And at the same time, we've like traditionally had a very common take-it attitude in the gun community of, no, I don't trust the authorities. I don't trust the government. Like, you're not going to take my guns away and you're not going to pass legislation to take my guns away. And if you do, I'm not going to comply. And so there's this prevalent attitude of people wanting to, by any means necessary, hold on to their guns. And it's created this interesting contradiction where people will actually use both of these, like,

attitudes combined together. And largely, you can see it manifest as like stickers or flags where you have the Gadsden flag or the come and take it flag, right next to the blue line flag. And it's, okay, wait a minute, who do you think is going to take those guns? And then I've gotten a lot of pushback since I made that video. People are like, you're used to big city cops and they're just, they're not connected to the community, but like in my small town, I know my sheriff and he would never do these things. And I can't speak for you, but regardless of the fact of the matter is like the power relations and the power structure that is mandates that if there was ever an event where your firearms are to be seized, that the police would be the ones to carry out those orders. And there's been this like interesting,

attempt by people trying to work out this cognitive dissonance to be like, oh, the police are not actually a part of the government. They're like their own entity, but it's no, they're actually the executive branch of basically your local government, where they literally will carry out orders of the state at gunpoint. And at that point, at that juncture, whether they do or not, I can't say for every individual police officer, but like the power relations and the mandates that are in place are, like, written down on paper. Like, we know what these things are. Are there rules that should be put in place around firearms?

Should people be allowed to, I know this is the old typical question. You know, in the sense, I almost apologize for asking it. But from our conversation today, it does lead me to wonder, do you legislate against machine guns? Where is the line or isn't there a line? I think a lot of that depends on your faith in the state. to manage those affairs. And like, naturally, like some people are more inclined to support things like red flag laws, which I think are a very imperfect solution to a very big problem. And I think there's nuance in there for sure. That being said, if you don't trust the state, then it doesn't make sense to

have the state carry out something that would, you know, potentially put you at risk. for violence or take away your means for self-defense. So, like, I will leave it at that. You can take that for what you will. But I personally want to see less of us relying on the state to try to force a healthy society through the pipeline by limiting what we can do. And more, I want to see us as social human beings, as social creatures, to tackle the difficult issues that underlie everything rather than slapping a band-aid on it, being like, oh, people are violent, so let's take away these violent means that are actually going to end up targeting other people for violence through seizures and police brutality and monopolization of power.

And rather, I want to see us talk about violence and what it means and what we need to do to solve those problems, what to get better about creating a healthier society. It's just always frustrating because, like, we can chase our tail with, like, legislation all day, and, like, we always do. But we never get to the root of the problem. Like, these things actually take energy and resources and time away from really tackling the root of the problem. And I know it's easier said than done, but I want to get to the root of the problem. Do you think then that that is part of what your channel is about is trying to get to the root of that problem? I don't think that my channel is necessarily like going to make leaps and bounds about

any of that, but like I do hope that maybe it helps make the world a better place and a healthier place, a healthier society in general. And yeah, I don't know. I think it's like the beginning of a conversation. I really hope that more people take that and run with it and do even better things with it, really. What advice do you have for somebody that in 2021 wants to buy a gun? Good luck. You didn't just go. I mean, yeah, good luck.

I don't mean to discourage you, but yeah, it's going to be hard. And that said, you need to be motivated and determined to acquire that firearm. And don't just buy a firearm and put it in your closet. it, don't buy a firearm just to have it, have an intention behind it, and make sure that you become proficient and train with it on a regular basis. Make sure that you're able to do those things because if you're not, then all is lost. I just don't think that you need to have these things and feel powerful. You need to train with them regularly. That's my best advice. Oh, and also, yeah, seek out community. Seek out folks in your area that are amenable and friendly. And

and find people to shoot with because that's going to be the best way to keep that momentum up with your training and make it fun. Tactical girlfriend, thank you so much for coming onto Angry Planet and walking us through all this stuff. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. All right, Angry Planet listeners. That's all for this week. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Tactical Girlfriend. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like what we're doing, please go to angryplanet.substack.com. For $9 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month. Next one is going to be rolling out tomorrow.

It's another conversation in our Angry Ocean series. It's going to be looking at the non-state actors and how they use the ocean. Again, that's at angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com. $9 a month. Get you access to two bonus episodes and commercial-free versions of. these episodes. Hope you enjoyed the week's show. We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet.

Stay safe until then.