I wish the toy collector types wouldn't talk about their guns like magic wands. A coworker once asked what I'd do if I came home and an intruder was already there with a knife out. The answer is I'd probably die. A gun isn't going to stop something like that if I only have a second or less to respond.

Armed teachers aren't going to do anything either. Self-defense does not begin and end at owning a gun. But for the toy collectors, that's all it is. Do you own a gun? Ok, you're good. Completely safe and no one will ever fuck with you. They can't fathom a world where simply having a pistol doesn't make you warden of life and death.

That's what I find most unserious. Their guns are a totem. I own a pistol because I look kinda gay and punky so I'd rather be protected against someone following me home because they think I look a little too gay. I don't want that to happen and I don't have elaborate fantasies about home invasion.

And if someone ambushes me, my Beretta isn't worth shit. The average person can pull out a gun and fire from the hip in about 1.5 seconds, maybe less than a second if they're really practiced. If I'm panicked it's probably going to take longer than that.

I think there's a particular brand of white suburban derangement where they all believe being white makes them honorary cops

So coming from a rural area with lots of gun owners, id say the level of seriousness roughly correlates with how much they actually use them.

If they're out hunting, practicing, or some kind of sport shooting on a regular basis then they probably don't have too much ridiculous gun crap except maybe pink camo handgun for the wife.

If they just have the guns because they like the idea of being a redneck and are scared of black people stealing their squatted f350 and 70" tv then they probably have the gamer led gun cabinet and dumb tacticool shit.

we can sometimes wash our ushankas.

no we can't. never

A depressing amount of "gun guys" I've met are petty and le petite tyrants in the making. They got their hands on one source of lethal force and it went straight to their heads.

the zero-gravity environment of the boring suburbs whose numb inhabitants nurse more and more fevered dreams

This reminds me of a passage mentions in Fragments

Of course, all societies are to some degree at war with themselves. There are always clashes between interests, factions, classes and the like; also, social systems are always based on the pursuit of different forms of value which pull people in different directions. In egalitarian societies, which tend to place an enormous emphasis on creating and maintaining communal consensus, this often appears to spark a kind of equally elaborate reaction formation, a spectral nightworld inhabited by monsters, witches or other creatures of horror. And it’s the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war. The invisible worlds surrounding them are literally battlegrounds. It’s as if the endless labor of achieving consensus masks a constant inner violence— or, it might perhaps be better to say, is in fact the process by which that inner violence is measured and contained—and it is precisely this, and the resulting tangle of moral contradiction, which is the prime font of social creativity. It’s not these conflicting principles and contradictory impulses themselves which are the ultimate political reality, then; it’s the regulatory process which mediates them.

A lot of dudes really want to be Raven from Snow Crash. The logical endpoint is everyone walking around with suitcase nukes that have RGB lighting.

If you see videos or posts talking about "rotating" their EDC, they're not serious. They're just consooming product and LARPing. Like it's one thing to be chasing the "perfect" gun if you're competing in high levels, but that shouldn't really influence the weapon that hypothetically saves your life lol; like if you're concealing a $1200 pistol every day, you're doing something wrong. And a lot of people never reach the point in competition/proficiency where it even matters. It's the equivalent of audiophiles buying $500 crystals for their $6000 hi-fi setup but they never touch an instrument or engineer any sounds. I don't like glocks, but a guy who has 100,000 rounds through the same glock is likely more proficient and deadly than the guy who buys a sig, guccis it, replaces it with a gucci glock the next year, then a gucci M&P the next year, then a gucci hellcat the next year, etc.

i saw this absurd action-spy thriller movie a few years ago where the opening scene involved some foreign assets (russians being sneaky) having a "safe house" in the suburbs, some two story house in a sleepy neighborhood. in the scene in question, some counter-intelligence apparatus is tipped to its location and decides to move in with like some very innocuous looking undercovers asking to use the phone while probably like 30 heavily armed/armored people in a rapid response force are deployed in all directions, but out of sight. the house has like 3 guys in it and like all this surveillance equipment and a bunch of computers doing computer stuff.

anyway, the house residents decide to play it cautious and the leader says "we're blown, burn it" and as everyone is preparing to walk out the back, this guy opens a panel in a closet to flip a switch. when he flips the switch, an overhead sprinkler system activates with emitters in every room of the house except the basement (which leads to the backyard). as the occupants are walking out into the backyard, the emitters are misting everything with gasoline or kerosene or whatever. like 20 seconds after that starts, magnesium sparks are showering into the rooms and everything goes up.

the movie was extremely stupid, but i remember when that scene happened i was like, "oh dam, they aren't playing"

it made me think about, if i was fully crazy and rich (but not stupid) what kind of automation i would want to put in to a typical suburban home to turn it into a redoubt during a seige. personally, i think the move would be to appear as "normal" and "not hardened" as possible from a quick assessment, but make much of the house a killbox. like secured doors/windows, bars/strike plates as is typical in some places, but the "crazy" would be to have hidden access doors to a crawl space where you could disappear/reappear at will. and like low lighting, except one could maybe strobe rooms from below to disorient invaders. naturally, like several million dollars worth of the highest-end signal jamming equipment to be activated once the trap is sprung, to fuck with incident response command outside. also, landscaping with big rocks that would act like bollards to prevent some kind of a armored vehicle ramming its way into the house.

and, when the jig is up and it all gets too crazy, a tunnel i can crawl along with an oxygen tank that leads like two blocks away to a poorly lit area where a little shitbox is waiting, after i've pulled the cord that mists the house with some accelerant and sparks it.

anyway, i don't get the gun storage, brandish, display fantasy thing either. it feels like more of a religious ritual with symbolic attachment than anything else. guns are kinda one-note to me and boring. i'd rather talk about a hidden doorway or DIY home automation, if we're gonna get all jacked up about home invasion fantasies. hell, entry door securing is more interesting to me. like security bars and speakeasy slots. people will spend thousands on a piece, but totally accept a front door that some bozo with a pry bar can pop open or some pig with two heart attacks can kick open. that's what makes me think the gun thing is more of a religious talisman than anything else.

Not everything must be serious at all times

Revisionist!

we can sometimes wash our ushankas

REGRESSIVE!!!

So much of US gun culture is deeply unserious

FTFY

I agree with everything but I doubt that anyone will be able to open a gun safe in time to defend against a home invasion and I don't think LED lighting changes anything in that regard

i think that's fair yea

I think that's fair. Guns are just funko pops for men with an extra serving of masculinity issues.

(they should have slowed down the speed though)

The DEMOCRATS want to take away our FREEDUMBS (to have sweet raves in our gun lockers)

Not to generalize too broadly (but also to broadly generalize), American culture as a whole is the act of taking something that at one point had a legitimate reason for existing, stripping that reasoning away due to time and context, then replacing it with an imitation of reasoning, but what is really just a Trojan's horse.for bourgeois and consumer (market) ideology.

Now, this has been pretty universal since the foundation of this country (see Enlightenment 'freedom' as one of the first casualties), but if you are at all online the pervasive nature of it is in your face for your entire online experience outside of places like Hexbear.

I saw something very similar during my time as a “member” of Antifa—a lot of very cringe-y shit, like this person I would crash with occasionally who would spend their entire disability check every month on airsoft/LARP-tier black bloc gear and BudK-tier melee weapons.