if you are marginalized by this society or care about people who are, and are in a place with your mental health where you can do so, buy a gun and train with it.

i don’t say this lightly. i have wildly mixed feelings about firearms. a thread.

firearms are a tool that have far fewer pratical applications than their proponents (of all politics) tend to believe.

firearms complicate interpersonal relations and make power over each other far too easy to take. firearms will never bring us to a just and free world.

but we can’t build a just and free world if we are dead.

these people want us dead.

learning to defend yourself and your community is worth doing, and semiautomatic weapons like the pistols and rifles available to US civilians are effective tools for that.

theyre not good tools for making a revolution. firearms in general probably aren’t. i want a world of transformative justice and flat power structures and firearms work can just as easily work against that world, in anyone’s hands.

i’m not even talking about larger political advocacy for or against gun control and have no desire to take a stance about that right now. i’m saying that regardless of how you feel about them in normal times, or ideal times, if you care about people, buy and train with a gun.

this is not a call for offensive violence against our political rivals. this is a call for personal and community self-defense in a time of crisis, a crisis that no one thinks is going to get better anytime soon.

we win when we show better ways of living. in order to do that, we need to be alive.