Outside the Law

Armed self-defense is scary. What other choice do we have?

Once upon a time I lived in a trailer in the Sierras, far northern California, about forty miles east of Jesus. It was beautiful, rugged country, but it was not a nice place, not a place people visit casually. I lived there because I was writing a thing, and because someone I cared about was stuck there and needed support.

When you live in a place like that you deal with people differently than you do in more settled places. At one point the person I lived with had a conflict with someone nearby. She was worried this person might be considering doing her a specific sort of harm. It was decided that I should invite this person out to go shoot guns. We had a pleasant, cordial time together, and also communicated that we were both armed and knew how to shoot. Things improved between us after this point.

Another time, a few years before this, I was bumming around rural Guatemala. I wound up renting one of several bungalows that was owned by one of Guatemala’s many weirdo expats. The place had a security guard, a local guy, and we grew friendly with each other. Sometimes we got drunk together. One night he showed us his 9mm handgun, which he fired off into the air once or twice a month, “So bandits know we have a gun here.”

Neither of these stories represent ideal social interactions. I do not believe, as some libertarians insist, that an armed society is a polite one. Any person with basic observational skills will tell you that the presence of weapons often increases the odds that those weapons will be used. But I also don’t consider my actions in California, or my friend the security guard’s actions, to have been irrational. We were in places where the law didn’t reach, and we took the actions that seemed most likely to improve our security.

I feel deeply conflicted, and anxious, every time I advocate for people to acquire and train with firearms.

I’m sure this sounds weird to those of the folks who see me on Twitter. I post about guns often. I like to shoot. And I also like to shitpost about my hobbies. But there is a difference between laughing about poorly made firearms (see; Taurus) and telling members of vulnerable communities that they should consider arming themselves for self-defense.

Way back in 2019, for the first season of It Could Happen Here, I talked about what I saw as the likely future necessity for leftist armed self-defense. The podcast wound up striking a nerve, and since then several thousand people have talked to me, in person and online, about the things it inspired them to do. I’m always happy to hear about folks who started mutual aid projects, got street medic training, founded food banks, etc. That stuff makes me feel like less of a shithead than I am.

But people also come up, pretty regularly, and tell me the show made them decide to buy a gun. Often, they’ve also started training with like-minded folks in their area. That scares the hell out of me.

I’m also fairly convinced it’s necessary.

I am writing this article the day after a horrific mass shooting at a prominent queer club and LGBT community space in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The shooter was the grandson of a January 6th insurrectionist and prominent California Republican leader. He had previously made bomb threats that ended in a police stand-off and multiple felony charges, which were dropped by the DA. His massacre was stopped, not by police, but by members of the community.

The Buffalo shooter, from earlier this year, was also a known quantity to law enforcement. There are so many stories like this, violent men who spend years advocating harm against different communities while the law looks the other way. Almost exactly a year ago, in December of 2021, another fascist gunman in Colorado murdered five people. He’d previously written books, popular with a chunk of the far right, in which he threatened a massacre that exactly matched the one he carried out.

The victims of these attacks all lived, and died, outside the law’s protection. The police in Colorado Springs have spent the last several years surveilling marches for racial justice and protests supporting reproductive rights. Their primary role in this mass shooting was to ensure the killer stayed safe and free long enough to open fire.

Matty Be Rad 🌹 @MattyBeRad

3.) In summary: - Colorado Springs police knew about the shooter at least a year before the attack, did nothing to stop it - CSPD spent time & money infiltrating, attacking, and harassing the left instead - Patrons of the club, not police, stopped the attacker 8/x

Anyone paying attention knows this specific shooting was incited by (among others) the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, which is operated by Chaya Raichik. She has spent months demonizing drag and other queer community events. She made posts attacking the queer community in Colorado Springs just hours after the attack. Chaya lives within the circle of the law’s protection. If she is ever threatened, law enforcement will act.

Her intended victims have no protectors but themselves.