Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 899: Slate: Trump supporters sound alarmed that people like me are buying guns. Maybe they should be.

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Trump supporters sound alarmed that people like me are buying guns. Maybe they should be.

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Today is Thursday, I'd say about the 19th, give or take. And we're doing a little long-form action here today. An article from Slate, Cecil sends me the articles to choose from. I took a look at this one. I took a look at the articles. And I immediately wanted to do this. this one because this is something that's been on my mind personally so much over the last few months. I've been thinking so much about it. I want to kind of share this with the audience. So this story is called My Gun and Me. If you had told me this urban progressive lesbian 10 years ago that I'd own a gun, I would have laughed in your face. Now I can't let my weapon go and I'm far from alone. It's a really interesting article told from a perspective that a lot of people don't hear.

a queer woman is telling a story about her perspective on how guns both make her feel unsafe and make her feel safe. This whole article is literally there are show. It's cognitive distance. The whole article is just feeling

uncomfortable about this thing because this thing is such a huge part of our lives now and is something that I think a lot of people, like it's built and baked into American culture. And I think a lot of of people are starting to come to terms with their ideas around guns. Maybe they weren't the same

as they were before. And they're trying to come to terms with that in a way that's rational. And it's hard. It's not an easy road to travel. It's super not. So this woman initially, there's so many similarities, too, to us. So this woman's a journalist, obviously, and she initially got a firearm and went through concealed carry classes because she was writing a story about it, which is what you and I did. Yeah. We bought, you know, we had been guns. owners before, but we had owned shotguns for like sporting clays. But she bought a pistol. I'd never owned a pistol.

I never owned a pistol either. I bought a pistol along with you. We did an episode or two on our experience doing the concealed carry. This was many years ago. And it was and we had conflicting feelings about like the utility

of that weapon, about the insanity of the classes and the people that were a part of it. So many experiences that sort of match here with this reporter. And then this reporter did something that I also felt so related to, which is for a long time, she took the gun, she locked it up, I think very responsibly and carefully. So the gun had a lock on it. Then the gun itself was put in a lock box that was locked. And then she did not have ammunition stored in the house. In my view, that is a very safe

weapon, right? Like that gun. And then it was in a coffee. So like, that is a very safe weapon overall. It's very hard for me to describe a scenario that isn't absurd where somebody is going to get hurt with that gun short of somebody stole it. New was there, broken in the house, stole the gun, and then went and committed a crime with it. And at that point, it's like, well, that's not on me, right? So that's on gun culture in America, right? The fact that guns that available. I have very much for a long time a similar policy with my own handgun. I kept the gun in my house. I would not keep ammunition in the house. I kept the guns stored in a safe or locked cabinet and then I had a trigger lock on my gun. And I felt very

comfortable even with kids in the house. I could not imagine a scenario where that gun was going to hurt somebody by accident. And I knew statistically that that's the biggest worry I should have. And over the last year or so, I've begun to really think differently about what I want from that gun and guns in general in my life and in my house because even as like the least targeted person in America demographically, there is a general feeling of like how unsafe this moment is. Sure. Yeah, no, and it's interesting too to see sort of it play out in other people on the street getting murdered.

We got an opportunity to see a couple different people get murdered recently on the street. Renee Good, Alex Prattie, both of them murdered by ICE agents, both from Minnesota. Alex Prady had a gun on him at the time. And we talked about it on the show a little and we've gotten some messages about it. We actually, there was pieces of that that we didn't put. They fell on the cutting room floor because we weren't sure, especially after Prattie had,

this was the week before Prattie had gotten killed. We had talked about guns on our show. But then over the weekend, while I was proofing the show, Alex Prattie dies. He was murdered by the state. And then I decided to cut some of those pieces out because I felt like the nuance would be lost in the moment. I felt like at that moment,

it would be hard for people to parse what we were saying versus what was set on the show versus what the reality of how people were dealing with guns in our country. And the conversation that we had that wound up on the cutting room floor was talking about groups of people who were now starting to carry long guns to protests. So we had a conversation beforehand.

Nobody's ever heard this conversation before. It was just between you and I, wound up on the cutting room floor. And it was very specifically about groups of people who were now starting to take long guns in open carry situations to these large protests or to even small protests or marching with them very specifically as a way to say like this vulnerable community will defend itself, right? This is what they were brought for. And after Alex Prattie was murdered, I decided to take it out of the show specifically because I thought that that nuance of open carry versus concealed carry would be lost. on a lot of people because concealed carry is a very different animal. And this is something we talked about on the show a couple weeks ago. I was talking about surprise guns. And when I said, when I was

talking about surprise guns, I'm very specifically talking about concealed carry. I think concealed carry creates a situation where someone may, as a law enforcement officer, we don't train law enforcement officers well enough in our country. And that's obvious. And they sometimes can be a very afraid of of a gun that surprises them and they can sometimes react just like that person reacted up in Minnesota when they found a surprise gun

on Alex Preddy, they shot him dead and not just one guy, two guys unloaded their guns into him. So I think it creates a situation that may exacerbate everything might be more dangerous if there's a...

I mean, I don't know how you feel about that but for me... I feel very much the same. For me, I think that a concealed carry weapon can really, escalate a situation. And I don't know that I've changed from that at all. Yet, I still haven't sold my concealed carry gun. Yeah. I'm still legally able to do it. And when my,

my ID comes up in the future, I'm probably going to renew it. Even though I never done it and I haven't done it yet. Because there's part of me that's like, I don't know that I want to give up that ability, that privilege that I've worked for. Yeah. I, I guess I like, I wanted to say on this show a few things Because like I feel like I know some things are true, which is that my guns, and I own several, I own sporting guns and I have the handgun, they make me less safe. Just by all the numbers, there's no numbers, there's no research, there's no statistics that you can find where they balance out. They make you less safe. You are, and the article touches on it, like the rate of suicide goes way the fuck up, dramatically so. multipliers higher when there's a gun in the house.

The opportunity for there to be an accident, the opportunity for somebody to use that gun against you, the opportunity for that gun to be taken from you and used in a crime, the opportunity for somebody younger in your home to gain access. There's so many ways that that gun makes you less safe that are far more statistically likely than that gun having defense utility. right and I know it and I know it and I still and even as a fucking the least persecuted demographic possible right outside the billionaire class like I am a middle class

cis hat white guy right I am not in the target demographic for any kind of you know persecution at all I recognize that like the system builds privilege specifically for the me's of this world. Even though, even then, I still am like, God damn, I'm going to renew that license just like you. And I'm not selling that pistol. And I don't know why. And I recently bought self-defense ammunition for my shotgun. And I don't really, I can't tell you why I did it, but I have this sense that if there's some kind of, and I, here's something I don't know if you've wrestled with. I have a sense that there is an inflection point and I feel and need to prepare for that inflection point. And I don't know what any of that sentence means with specificity. And my lack of being able

to know with specificity what that means outside of feeling around it makes me very uncomfortable about how I prepare for that inflection point. And I have, like I once recognized that like I would be best off probably stockpiling other types of resources. And then also recognizing that like if some kind of massive civil war, civil unrest, systemic failure hits the fan, no amount of preparation is probably going to make much difference in anything but the shortest term, you know, a week or two. Even as I know that and even as I can't conjure in my mind, Cecil, a scenario where any of this is useful.

Like there's a part of me emotionally that feels responsible to like be prepared. And I don't even know what be prepared means. And I feel like there's a similar undercurrent that I can't imagine how strong it is for people that are in marginalized and oppressed communities. Yeah, I'm in the same boat where there's a part of me that thinks be prepared and it's okay to be prepared. And planning things doesn't hurt anyone. but there's another part of me that says like, is this futile? Does it matter? Is this a waste of energy? Is this something that I should even be concerning myself with? Do I add fuel to the fire by creating myself an extra, a piece, a weapon in my house that I could use in a situation like this? Am I creating fuel for the fire here? There's a lot of things that go through your head when you think about those sorts of things. And cognitive distance is a perfect way to describe this because neither of us

are preppers. Nevis are people who think that that's sort of useful energy to spend. But there's also a part of us that says we don't want to be caught unaware. I don't want to be on my back foot at this moment. My plan, you know, I've had plans run through my head and my, the only thing I can think is I just need to get to the northern border safe. How do I do that? How do I facilitate myself getting to the northern border and applying for asylum in the north if bad, bad, bad, bad, bad things happen? If that's the case, how do I facilitate that the best way I possibly can? And I know that there's other people in our country that are thinking about this more deeply than I am because they're part of a non-protected class.

They're part of a people. This article very specifically focuses on a whole group of people who would be absolutely targeted and have been absolutely targeted by this administration. So this is a group of people that are absolutely in the crosshairs, and they are seeing this, you know, the light flash before their eyes here. Yeah. And they've got to make hard decisions about how, like, if they're going to keep the gun and they're also running through the same agonizing decisions about,

does this make me safer? Does it make me more of a target? Is this a bad thing? Is it a good thing? And they're torn, just like I think a lot of people who are liberal gun owners are torn. And I think that there's a real, like we have to contend, I think, with the world we want versus the world we have. I think that for me at least, I think we have a gun culture in America that there is no political

will to change. There are more guns in America than people. It's built into our constitution. It's baked into our narrative of who we are. I don't believe that that's going to change. At the same time, I will aggressively support any legislation to ban all the guns. And if guns got banned tomorrow, I would whistle with joy as I threw them into the pyre. And I would have no qualms about that whatsoever. But I also am like, well, as long as I'm living in a gun culture, do I want to be the one who's unarmed?

And I don't know how I feel about that, even knowing all the facts and statistics, even knowing all that. So like, I don't really need you to email me that that's nonsensical. I'm going to tell you, I know it's nonsensical and non-rational. But like I, again, I have this sense of deep responsibility

for my safety and for the safety of my loved ones. I don't think this makes me more safe, but it feels insane to live in a gun culture unarmed. That feels nuts to me. And then I have also very much thought many, many times. And I still do believe with a lowercase be, maybe. Like, I have thought about like starting a charity to help arm women with firearms. I think that there is a gun culture in this country that for the longest time has been a culture where white men,

hit guns. And then everybody else, women, minorities, et cetera, have far fewer guns, far fewer. And that does not seem like the balance we need. And like we live in a culture where women are unsafe and they are often preyed upon and the statistics around the violence that women endure at the hands of men is unbelievably awful and prevalent. And part of me is like, I wonder if that would change if just the baseline assumption is that pretty much the women you meet are armed. And I wonder if that would change some of that predation. I don't know if it would or not. I have a feeling it might.

And I wonder about if we're going to live in a gun culture, how do we level the playing field in a way that actually does make us safer? Can it work? Is there a possibility that can work? I don't know the answer to any of that stuff. I'm uncomfortable with all of it. But like you said, I literally recently bought self-defense ammunition for, my home and watched a bunch of YouTube videos of people that I'm like, I bet I don't agree

with you about anything. But you seem like you know what you're talking about. Yeah. You know? I wonder, because I saw recently with with Preddy, that the gun laws in this country are not meant to protect people that they don't want to protect. And I wonder if we're always going to be swimming upstream. And here's what I'm going to say, let me talk about the pretty shooting for a moment. In this article, I want to read a tiny piece. This is where they talked about how much class time they got

with the gun. She says, after a four-hour in-person class on firearm laws and safety, having never shot a handgun in my life, I received a permit that allowed me to conceal carry a firearm in almost every state. Most states don't require a permit at all. So that's what was said in the thing.

And that's true, right? When we were in that class, they had said that Illinois had some of the strictest restrictions on whether or not you were going to be able to get this particular license that many places across the country are so much easier to become a concealed carry member. You could do whatever you like. One thing that I heard, I obviously listened to Rogan covered the pretty shooting.

I covered it with Michael Marshall. You can go listen to the No Rogan experience. The person who he talked about it with is a man named Andrew Wilson, who's one of these scummy manosphere, debate bros. And so you can go follow that and listen to that show if you like. But in that show, those guys very specifically harp on how if you're a concealed carry person, you know better. You took a class. You're trained for this. You know this stuff. And it's just not true. No. Like our class very specifically, we could have never paid attention. There was no quiz whatsoever

on the written, on the actual knowledge portion. The only quiz that we had to take, was shooting a target at 5, 10, and 15 yards, and we had to hit center mass and not be outside of center mass, I think we had to get an 80, 80% or something like that score? Do you remember what it was? It was something very low bar. Yeah, it was very low bar. When I first heard it, I said,

oh my gosh, you know, I've practiced with this gun, but I'm afraid I might miss. And I hit every shot center mass because it's not far away from you. It's really close. So it wasn't a big deal. It was literally easy. like you could close your eyes during the five-yard portion. Oh, yeah.

You can poke your finger through it, it feels like. And it's not an issue. The 10 yards isn't very hard. The 15 was like the hardest portion. And that really was, I think it was 10-7. I think it was 5-7-10, actually, now that I think about it. Not 10, 5-10-15. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't even know if it was all the way down to 15 yards.

I doubt that it was 10. I think it was 5-7-10, actually, now that I think about it. Now that I say it out loud, I think it was 5-7-10. So nothing, 30 feet away is nothing. So we were. when we went to this class, there's no, there wasn't, sure, did they talk about this stuff for a little while? Yeah, he talked about it, but he also had this really weird discussion about what a perpetrator was, and he had all this, where, you know, it almost seemed like he was teaching a vigilante class in some ways. It was really weird. But you're not trained. You're not like a fucking commando. You're a dude who took a two-hour voluntary class in most cases.

About, like, and they're showing videos of a guy shooting a gun off his head because he was looking down the barrel. Yeah. This is all gun safety stuff. It's all basic, simple NRA gun safety stuff. This guy doesn't know the difference. And he's not, and also, he's not the trained professional in that position, right? He's just a dude. These other people who are trained professionals, they actually saw a gun and freaked out and shot him 10 times.

Right. So the trained professionals in this situation, the people who should have hours and hours and hours, if not months and months and months of actual training didn't even rely on it. They just literally just shot a human being because they got afraid. Yeah. So we're not even talking about them, but they kept on heaping this on. And I think the reason why they do that is because they want to discredit anybody who they don't want to actually have a gun. They don't want you to have a gun. That's why all those laws got passed against the Black Panthers years ago. Yeah. Right? Why in California they started changing gun laws because they didn't want black people to have guns. Once black people said, hey, man, that's a right we have, the Second Amendment. Cool. Then they started changing the gun laws about that. They very specifically will do what they can. and bend and manipulate these laws so that the thing you're trying to create the manifest, you know, vulnerable people having guns,

they don't want that. Right. They don't want that to happen. So there's a part of me that when I hear that, I say, well, no, fuck you, we should do that. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, right? I was like, fuck you, we should do it then.

But, you know, they're the people who have been embracing and intertwined with these gun laws for so long they're manipulating them against the regular citizenry. Yeah, and I think that's exactly, I feel so strongly that, like, there are so many people in this country, the majority of people in this country by numbers are way less safe than they should be. Way less safe. You know, like, if you say, like, who is most at risk, it's like, okay, well, we know that women are at tremendous risk of violence. We know that people of color are heightened risk of violence.

We know that people who are in the LGBTQIA community are at heightened risk of violence. That's now the majority of people. that's most of us, just not me, at a heightened risk of violence. And I keep thinking to myself, and at the same time, these are the people who are oftentimes least likely to be armed, to your point, because they have not been told and sold and sort of like inculturated to believe and understand that like that same Second Amendment right applies to them the same way. So now who has all these guns?

You know, it's a bunch of like white dudes, you know, for the most part and like thugs of the state. And I know all of that. And I recognize that if you were to, if there were to be a large movement of people persecuted and endanger people who suddenly have weapons, the state will use that as an excuse to prosecute greater violence upon those people. Yeah.

And we saw that even with Alex Pretti, who was not demographically in any of those classes. the immediate response from the state was essentially he had a come and he had a gun he had a perfectly legal gun he never touched never touched it was on his hip it was legal he did not do and the immediate response was that gun made him less safe because the state wanted it to make him less safe and i at this like i'm of two minds i'm constantly on this issue like fighting myself fighting that cognitive dissonance where i feel like i know the numbers and the science and the state's statistics and the social research. And at the same time, I'm like, yeah, but fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, the only people. We're going to live in a gun culture and the only people who get to walk around.

Like, with the benefit of that are these fucking assholes? And all these people over here who are every day living in a less safe environment, they're not arming themselves. I feel like that's crazy to me. There's something crazy making about it to me. feels it hits that unfair button in me that like wants to like level that all out. And there's a there's a part of me too that says maybe it's not a great idea for these people to have guns, but there may be a time when they won't have that choice.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like there may be a time in the future where they do do some sort of laws. They do make some sort of laws. We're talking about, you know, trans shootings and how they might make a trans law. Even though people have spoken out against it doesn't mean that they do. can't do that sort of thing. So what makes us think that this right that we have doesn't turn into a privilege later.

When all the things, all the bulwarks against it start to fold because they say, well, we'll still have our guns and they won't. And that's okay, NRA. We will make sure the bad guys don't get guns. And the NRA folds or whatever. You know, these lobbies that are the gun lobbies, they start folding because they say, well, we know where our bread is buttered. in the future, you have no idea if you're going to have this opportunity. So there's a part of me that's like,

well, you got to take advantage of it now if that's the case. Because who knows what's going to happen and I mean, you don't know what's going to happen next week with this presidency. And they've done things far more egregious on a whim.

Yeah. I don't, I actually don't disagree with that. I feel like a crazy person, but I feel very similarly. Like you've got, I do wonder if we are not in a place where there is a window. And if more people

rather than less avail themselves of their Second Amendment right, it becomes harder to strip it away selectively. If, however, most of the people carrying and owning guns in this country are this sort of hegemonic power class only, and that's the majority of them, then it would be relatively straightforward to select out and say, okay, well, this demographic can't have guns, this demographic can't have guns,

and we'll pass a whole bunch of, like, laws which maybe they don't specifically cite the demographic, but they cite enough sort of other factors that they essentially limit, the same way we've limited voting rights. Sure. You know? It's like, all right, well, we can't pass a law that says you can't vote because you live in this demographic. But we know that people in this demographic also share this commonality and we'll target that

instead. You know, I don't know how that would work, but smarter people and I are probably working on finding ways to disarm people who are currently most endangered. You know that the Supreme Court has been very famously pro-second amendment for a very long time, right? But I wonder if they would be selectively

pro-second amendment in the future. If some of these cases that got in front of them happen to disenfranchise certain groups that they don't like, I wonder how much they would willing to be pushed that, you know, shove that second amendment over so that they can hurt those people if possible.

Because I don't think that's outside of the realm of possibility. I think that the Supreme Court is, they're as malleable as they need to be to hurt vulnerable communities. I mean, they've proven it time and time again. So I can't, you can't put your stock in the sense that they're going to have some sort of,

you know, like, they're going to stick to their guns or they're going to have some sort of consistency. You can put stock in that. That's not something you can you can look at it and say, well, we can definitely rely on the Supreme Court to make sure everybody has their ability. I don't think that that's the case at all. No. You're in a weird spot where you don't know if next year a case gets in front of the Supreme Court

and says, no, we're actually, it's okay, we can look at trans people and say those, they can't have guns. Or we can look at LGBT community, the entire community, and say they don't get guns. Yeah, and look at what the Trump administration has already done and is doing actively right now, right? They created a class of people, which does not legally exist, called a domestic terrorist. There's no legal definition for that. But they've created

a class of people called a domestic terrorist. It doesn't have to have a specific name. Anybody, they're saying like basically anybody in Dry involved in the drug trade is now a domestic terrorist, and we can use our military against those people. They've, in their targeting of trans people

to pull their Second Amendment rights away from them, the only way that they would be able to do that that I've read is to essentially say those people are mentally incompetent or mentally unfit. There are ways that the government is already working to label the people that they want to

literally kill, shoot missiles at when they're on boats, right? They said that, you know, Antifa's a domestic terrorist organization, we're going to find it, root it out. And, you know, who's to say that they don't just decide that all of these people over here are part of Antifa. One of the great things about targeting Antifa, if you're the Trump administration,

is because it doesn't exist, there are no standards for membership. So they get to decide who the members are. And then they get to decide whatever level of violence and lack of due process, they want to leverage against those people. I wouldn't be surprised. We have three more years.

Three more years. I would not be even remotely surprised if there were not efforts to disarm, massive efforts to disarm. What I think a lot of people are waking up to, and I think us included, as well as many other people who have been normally protected for all of their life, is that they're seeing their rights not be as available as they have been in the past. And they're seeing their rights getting infringed and that's making them uncomfortable. lots of people in our country have to deal with their rights being infringed all the time, right? That's their state of being. Like, you know, people of color, people who have, you know, women, people who have, very specifically, are of different groups of people that are like, you know, LGBTQ, things like that. Those people have always had less rights.

They've always had fewer rights. And they've always had those rights infringed whenever it made other people feel like they felt like they want to infringe on those rights. This is something that is new for a lot of people. like me and you and other people where your rights get infringing. Like, whoa, wait a minute. This is very alarming, even though it's been happening for a long time to many different communities. And I want to read part of this. This is, they're talking to somebody who happens to be part of this group of LGBT plus shooters.

They're meeting and they're talking. And one of them says, Roxanna thinks about circumstances that might make her reach for a gun. she envisions maga mobs inciting mass civil unrest, or if the country devolves into deep authoritarianism, she and her wife will want protection as they flee to the Sanctuator State of Canada. That's my plan too.

I'll hit you ride with them. They sound ready to go. There's also a possibility some kind of mass roundup that would find armed agents knocking on a door. I expressed doubt that Roxanna and her wife, a peace-nick fashionista, could successfully fend off the Gestapo

should they arrive, quote, probably not, but they're not going to take my black ass alive. I'm not going back to any plantation and I'm not going

any concentration camp, end quote. This is a group of people who, this is like a, like, this is not a new thing. Yeah. This is not something that they just,

that we just thought up for these people. These are a group of people that have had to deal with this shit for a long time. They've had, you know,

we see these two white people, Renee Good, and Alex, pretty get murdered by the police and there's a big uproar but it's like like there's been a lot of people murdered by the police they just happen to be black and brown yeah and they get murdered by the police all the time yeah and i think that what's included in that also is that they're filmed i think that's an important piece of this is that they're filmed right a lot of people are saying hey there's a lot of people who died in ice custody i'm like yeah but i haven't seen the video of that right the videos we got a

chance to see these videos so i don't want to say that that doesn't play a role in it but it also their names are getting out there way more than people of color that's for sure you don't know all. I can't recite you a litany of all the people of color who got murdered. Right. Right. And in, in, in, in, in, in, in custody, I can't recite that litany. So I think, like, there is something to this very vulnerable group of people who are acting in this way. And I, I'm, I'm, I'm a hundred percent behind it. I'm like, yep, I'm just like you. I'm like, you know what? Let's get more guns in your hands. Because of all the people in our country,

who feel the most vulnerable, they should be the ones who try to get back the tiniest bit of semblance of sanity in this terrible, terrible situation where it. Yeah. I, you know, as a corollary to that because I think it has a lot of parallels. You know, I was thinking about the way

that we treat women and self-defense in this country. And what we do a lot of times with women is we teach women how to avoid situations where men will prey on them. And then we teach them how to use their hands and keys and, you know,

kick and punch and do self-defense. I'm not shitting on that at all. It's weird to me that we don't, not weird to me. I think it's telling to me that it is not just as common a message that, hey, you should do all those things and you should have a gun on you. Because if I'm saying you're unsafe over here, but you should rely on your hands while all these other people over here are saying a gun is the thing that makes me safe. If I'm a white man, the message I hear is that what levels the playing field is from the bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Guy, guy. That messaging is not gender neutral for a reason.

The thing we're going to tell women is do the thing that we think is less effective. That way if some guy shows up and he's got a gun, that's all really nothing. I think we are purposely creating narratives for people who are most in danger to defend themselves with less powerful tools. so that the people who maintain access to the most powerful tools do not ever have to themselves be afraid. The Renee Good murder and the Alex Pready murder, I think part of why they're important is that these were white people that were murdered. And now all of a sudden, people who actually have systemic social authority, which is white people, see themselves for the first time as potential victims of this kind of state violence. and so that gets a lot more attention because it's like, well, wait a minute.

For years, that violence was for the me's to perpetrate on the ewes. Now all of a sudden, I'm also potentially a victim. I'm part of being a youth. Heavens, heaven's heavens. You know, and like we're clutching our fucking pearls. So I want to like recognize that that is, that has always been the case.

And it's always been a fucking problem. And I don't think it's ever been an accident. I think it's always been really intentional. Yeah, so there's a couple of pieces from the article that I thought were interesting and worth reading. So here's a quote from the article I want to talk a little bit about. Those were individuals who still had faith that the system would work according to a set of established rules and that well-meaning people could make a difference.

This specifically refers to the sort of mind shift that has occurred in a lot of people where once we saw that the system itself was no longer operating and assisted in a series of rules with good, well-meaning people that sort of self-checks, it checks itself and has these checks and balances. Once all that starts to sort of break down, that really struck me as like, oh, wow, okay, well, all that's imaginary, you know, all those things that like, and I, when I read that, I thought, you know, who is not surprised by this is all of the Japanese, all of the descendants of the Japanese people in 1940s who were legitimately just here as citizens. And then one day the state knocked on their door and said,

you don't own your home and your business anymore. You now live in this camp, in this internment camp. And that's that for you. It's not like it hasn't happened here. It's not like it can't happen again. And the thing that prevents it from happening is that we all agree it shouldn't happen. That's it. And the second thing that prevents it from happening is maybe you're armed.

And if the first piece falls away, then the second piece feels more understandable to me than it ever has before. Then there was this quote, which I thought was fucking brilliant. Guns are a personal answer to a collective problem. They embody a turning inward, a desire to look out for oneself rather than engage in the messy, corny, frustrating work of trying to make society better for everybody. I thought that first line, guns are a personal answer to a collective problem. To me, it sums up like a lot of the American ethos.

in one sentence. And it also sums up, I think, like, why we feel, many of us feel so distressed by the moment because there is not a collective will to solve the same problems. And if we don't have a collective will to agree upon and solve the same problems, it feels more incumbent upon us to make personal choices and to say, okay, well, I guess it's on me. It shouldn't be.

That's insane. but I guess it is. And I don't know what to do. Yeah. And maybe this gun slash safety blanket is the answer. I don't know. What do you think about the difference between concealed carry and open carry?

Now that we're seeing people that are maybe going to protest, and by the way, perfectly legal in Minnesota to go to that protest with a gun, it's important to point out. A lot of people like to say, well, you know, he had a gun

and he shouldn't have gone to that protest. When it wasn't a protest, it was just a bunch of people on the street. If you watch that video, it was not that many people there. but two, it's actually perfectly legal to carry a gun there in a large group. That's not a thing that they would caution us against that in Illinois, but not up there. So it's important to know the laws where there actually are.

But one of the things that worries me when I see that sort of thing is concealed carry seems like a real dangerous thing. Open carry, at least there's the open threat of it to start out. And it's a recognized variable at the very beginning rather than a, a recognized variable mid-story problem. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Or suddenly the mid-story problem jump may be the thing that really pushes things over the edge.

How do you feel about that? Yeah, I can understand kind of both sides a little bit. To some degree, open carry creates like a... If you have people openly carrying, you don't necessarily know to call the police and say, this guy is a threat. He's got a fucking gun in this public space. so somebody can become an active shooter

in a way that feels more I don't know like they're walking around in plain sight do you know what I mean? That feels nervous making I think it also creates more people who are targets one of the realities is that a gun having a gun on you makes you a target for violence because somebody might want to steal your gun take it away from you you know so I think it also creates an open target

for some people at the same time And all of this is like embedded in the fact that gun culture is insane. Yeah. Right. So like the underlying problem is that gun culture is necessarily an insane and unsafe culture. If I'm concealed carrying, I can see the benefits to that, right? Like I, yes, it's a surprise gun. But I don't know.

It also feels like I should not have a fucking surprise gun, man. Like if I am a potential threat, you should be. you should know it before I walk into your store or your, you know, your business or you see me walking down the street. One of the problems we have now is that you have to assume that everybody's armed without knowing if everybody's armed. Yeah. And that seems like a real fucking dangerous place to put ourselves in. What's really crazy too is that we seem to forgive people too if they do act rashly when somebody isn't armed. We seem to say, well, they could have had a gun. Yeah. And then they got that person got murdered while they were acting weird. And that's

kind of on them. We blame the victim way too often when it comes to this stuff, which is why it makes me super uneasy. Which is why this whole thing, whether concealed, unconcealed, it makes me super uneasy because we're so used to blaming the victim that it makes me wonder if I'd ever be

feel like I could ever be in the right. Yeah. I don't, again, like I think the answer that we'll never do is that we all take all the guns in private hands, we put them in a great big pile, we melt them down. And, you know, everybody gets, I know like Australia did something like this

after the Port Arthur shooting. I don't know that they, I don't know that they did as deeply as taking, because I know when I talk to people down there, they said that some people still do have like varmint guns. Right. But for the most part, that sort of thing is not a,

it's not something that you just have access to semi-automatic rifles like we do. Right. We have access to guns that are real, real dangerous. Crazy guns. Real dangerous. I mean, a semi-automatic rifle that shoots, you know, what is it, 7.62? Is that the gun? Or 2-2-3 rounds?

These are big bullets, man. That's like a huge. I mean, each bullet is like three inches long. It's just huge. And people on, you don't know, fucking anything about inches are like how many, how many centimeters is that? I don't know, it's this far. But in any case, it's a big bullet. It's not a little, it doesn't have a tiny amount of powder in it. Right. It's got a big, juicy amount of powder in it. It can go through, not just you, but like your whole house. It can shoot out the back of your house after you shoot it through a human being. And these are perfect. I could go today and buy a weapon with a caliber that can shoot through my entire house and probably kill someone across the street.

I can do that right now. I could drive somewhere. I might not be able to get it today. I might have to wait 48 hours for it. But so what? Yeah. That's 48 hours. And then I can have a gun that I can literally like,

shoot through your entire car. Yeah, I was watching a video when I was, when I was doing some, some research and feeling like that sense of like irrational vulnerability. And I was doing some research on like home defense rounds. And they set up drywall just, you know, because your house is mostly made a drywall. The walls are mostly drywall unless you hit a stud, right? So they set up drywall and they set up like five walls made of drywall. And they shot some of the most common weapons that are used in like home defense or self-defense into those pieces of drywall to see how many would go through. And like a 9mm pistol went through them all. Five, five, that doesn't surprise me. A shotgun goes through them all. A 223 round goes through them all.

The weapons that are available, like, and the 223 is like the caliber that's part is, is typically used in the AR platform. And you can get, you can also get very easily, you can get magazines that hold dozens of rounds of ammunition. And you can lay down just an immense amount of fire as just a layperson, just shooting. And you can just fucking buy it. You don't have to be trained. You don't have to be, you know, it doesn't be anything.

And even the training that we do, and I think this is telling of the police, too, the training that we do focuses often very heavily on how. Not when. So we spend a lot of time figuring out how to fire the weapon, how to be good at it, how to build sort of this technical shooter proficiency and way less time and energy on when an appropriate time is to use that gun. So we're like even when you go to the training, what you're doing very often is getting good at how to use it, but not spending equal or more time on when to use it. What they should do instead of the pistol shooting it through the center mass is they should have. that old video game where the things spin and it's an old woman. Yes.

And the target spins and it's a, it's like a terrorist holding somebody with like a gun to their head and you've got to shoot them. That feels like it'd be even better because at least it could train your, your quick twitch muscles on when to shoot and when not to shoot. Yeah. I think most, I'm kidding, of course. That's a stupid thing to do. Don't send me your message.

But I, but I mean, to some degree. Well, I mean, anything's better than what we got. Anything's better than what we got. Any kind of discussion about it is better than what we have. Because we have nothing. We have nothing. And we are one of the, we're one of the most, one of the most difficult places to get a concealed carry.

And we have essentially nothing. It's the easiest class you could possibly test. No test. There's no test. It's a class with no test. There's no test. I don't have to pay attention. It's harder to get a driver's license.

Buy a lot. So much harder. Yeah. So much. There's so many things that you have to be licensed for that are harder to do than be, than get a gun. And a gun can kill somebody. with no effort.

Little kids can kill adults with guns. Sure. That happens all the time in our country where a little kid will find a gun and murder their parents without even knowing that they did it. Yeah. They're wildly easy to use and uncomplicated.

Here's an interesting piece, and we can sort of close out. I just want to read this last piece here about sort of the cognitive dissonance of it all. This is about Charlie Kirk. I came to an inflection point in my gun journey the day Charlie Kirk was killed. After I learned he'd been shot,

his alleged shooter texted some texted some hate can't be negotiated out to a roommate and possible partner referring to Kirk's anti-trans rhetoric, I struggled to imagine what might come next. For a moment, I was glad to have my gun. It felt like a security blanket as I worried about escalating political conflict

and calls for retribution against the left. But as my social feeds surfaced video after nauseating video of the shot that killed him, I lurched forward in the opposite conclusion. The reality of gun violence is so gruesome, so devastating, so antithetical to a good human life, I could not watch that video and visualize myself behind that gun. That is one of those things that, you know, like, this is all theoretical. But where the rubber hits the road is a real dangerous place.

Right. And that's a place that I think a lot of people don't like to think about that piece. They think about the planning on the leading up to, the planning of buying the shelves, the planning of having it where you need to get it, but they don't think about what happens when everything, when the rubber hits the road, when something actually, when a trigger actually gets pulled, what happens? What's the devastation behind that? Yeah. And that's not something you think about because it's so easy to end somebody's life with a gun. It's so easy. It's literally a calorie of energy to murder somebody with a gun. There's nothing. It takes no energy whatsoever. All you need to

do is point straight and like have a tiny switch in your finger and you can murder somebody. And that's it. And it's a, it's a, this is something that I think we're going to be talking about for a while, at least until they take away this right. Yeah. And then someone will come knocking on our door. Well, no, they won't because there's also no gun registry. So nobody knows who has what. I guess that's true.

There's no gun. There's no real gun registry. No. Yeah. There's no national gun registry. So nobody knows, nobody knows who has a gun. Yeah. All right.

That's going to wrap it up for our long form. I don't know that anything got decided to us. No, it's just talked for a while. It was worth talking about, but I don't know that anything was really revealed in that except for a ton of cognitive dissonance. But we're going to, you know, this is cognitive distance. So you got to roll on it sometimes. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue.

It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble toil and trouble, pseudo-quazia alternative, acupunuating, pressurized, Stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night infotucatainment Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, wizards, vaccine nuts. shame in healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands.

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