By Don Hall

When Stressed Out People Also Have an Unlimited Access to Guns, They're Likely to Use Them

The next year is one when we all need to calm the fuck down some. Dial the bickering down some. Chill out on the Twitter feuds. Not so much because life in society would definitely be easier if there were fewer nosey people trying to control others, not even that we'd be able to solve more of our problems working together than at each other's throats but because without some of that calm, we're going to kill each other.

The United States has more guns on the street than we have people. Lots of freakin' firepower in this country. Stressed out, angry people who also happen to possess that sort of deadly force shoot people.

The stats are damning. The question on the minds of so many is Why the rise in violent crime?' There are an awful lot of suppositions relating it to the protests of 2020, to the pandemic, to the economy. The protests, under normal the-world-is-perpetually-on-fire conditions, might have been like other protests but when we added millions of bored, horny kids who said to themselves "Hey. I don't like the cops or racism and there are prolly some hot social justice types going outside while I've been stuck in my bunker since March. Why not?" the thing became the largest mass protest in history. That resulted in a whole bunch more folks seeing that and going out and filling their quarantine huts with recently purchased firearms.

Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo became lauded as serious thinkers instead of just another pair of pseudo-scientific grifters. Trump cemented himself as the least equipped leader during all of this in a cascade of tweets and stupid things spoken. Under any other circumstances The 1619 Project would be greeted as an alternative version of history to consider rather than one designed to replace the flawed, revisionist version most of us grew up with. Tucker Carlson went from being the annoying leader of the campus Young Republicans and suddenly pivoted into a brazen white supremicist who makes Ben Shapiro look like a nerdy male version of AOC.

As someone open to befriending individuals from all spectrums of belief, I've had a few compadres mildly insistent that I should own a gun. I almost always tell them the same thing to indicate my disinterest—I'm the kind of person who, if I owned a firearm, I would likely use that weapon and I never want to be someone who has used a gun on someone else.

Granted, the anger management issues of my youth are tackled and I'm no longer that raging Hulk-beast. In fact, not much makes me genuinely lose my shit angry anymore that perhaps my stance on guns is a bit outdated. I'm still not interested. I mean, I also don't own a shovel. Not that I don't want to be the guy who uses a shovel but because I generally don't have a use for a shovel sitting in my home office typing shit.

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger

And you don't take a completely irrational population, after spending a few years in lockdown in fear of an invisible virus and prone to yelling at each other for either wearing or not wearing a cloth mask in a Sbarro, and give them unfettered access to the largest arsenal of personal weapons in history. It's just dumb. It's dangerous. It's catastrophic.

"The world is on fire."

It's a common refrain these days. I think, from my vantage, that the world has always been in some state of "on fire." The only genuine difference is the burning is amplified by the internet. The world was on fire in the 80s but we mostly only knew about the multiple bonfires in our smaller circle of information. In 2022, that one time the crazy lady screamed at the Dunkin Donuts guy because he insisted she wear a mask would never cross our line of sight but today there are numerous insane anti-vaxxers doing this, caught on a smartphone, and projected a billion times over.

There have always been a bunch of wars, a bunch of diseases, a bunch of crackpots muttering to themselves about the conspiracies concocted from inside their spider-infested brains. It's just that now we have to face the reality that there were always more of them out there, beyond the borders of our narrow existences, than we thought were possible.

In eighth grade there were killer bees coming to America from Africa. I saw it on the news. I freaked out. I created my own makeshift bee-keeper costume and wore it to school until the principal insisted I stop wearing it as it was a distraction from the purpose of going to school—which if you watch Euphoria is fucking, taking lots of drugs, and feelings. Maybe three mentions of the killer bees (which magically did not materialize in Kansas) on the local news. If I had been able to track in real time a daily update on the killer bees from Africa, I might never have taken that outfit off and been diagnosed with a sort of media induced PTSD.

I might have even bought a flamethrower. Cuz bees, you know.

Growing up, I was privileged to live through the end of Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and resignation of the president, the gas crisis in 1976, the election of Ronald Reagan. In every school, we practiced duck and cover techniques that were only taught to give us something to do when the inevitable ICBMs came down to level the planet. I watched on television the Challenger Space Shuttle explode in mid-air. The Iran-Contra scandal. The Ethiopian Civil War. The Iranian hostage situation. The Soviet-Afghan war. The McMartin Trial that started the hysteria about pre-school teachers performing Satanic rituals with kids.

The world has always been on fire. The amplification of those myriad horrors has us all jacked up. So many of us buy guns. We are surrounded when we go to the grocery store or gym or church by freaking out just under the surface people lacking coping skills or perspective with the capability to pull out a life-ending weapon over the last bag of bagels.

In the parlance of my 1982 Vice Principal Tom Restivo, we need to get our shit together and get it packed tight. Calm down, take a breather, get away from the internet once in a while, take a fucking walk, chill out, smoke some weed, and stop buying guns.