Tag: violence

American Nightmare

Paul Fidalgo

It was sort of like a nightmare, in the sense that time seemed to both slow to a crawl and flash by in the blink of an eye all at once. I was at first distracted, playing a video game, the president’s upcoming address to the nation up on our television. I didn’t really want to listen to it, as even hearing his voice is enough to drain a good month or two out of my lifespan. So I played my game and resolved to just let him talk in the background.

I don’t remember the exact moment I was wrenched from my pixelated reverie, but I remember almost dropping the controllers and suddenly gaping at the TV. It had taken my brain a few moments to start assigning meaning to the words coming out of the president’s face, and I experienced this odd sensation of understanding piece by piece, like Lego bricks being placed on on top of the other to eventually reveal a form. The last brick clicked into place, and I felt the realization morph into horror.

When he finished speaking, promising to use the force of the U.S. military to murder protestors, time sped up again. Even though I knew what I’d just heard, I needed confirmation. I jumped about the internet for reaction from experts just to be certain that I understood what had actually just happened. Was I inflating it in my mind? Was it actually just nonsense and we had nothing to worry about. But no, it was as bad as it sounded.

And then time slowed down again as Trump performed that bizarre lumbering toward St. John’s Church. I assumed he was going to go inside so the cameras would see him pretending to care about what happened there, and maybe perform some perfunctory pseudo-prayer. Instead, he stood there and held up that fucking Bible, held it like he was showing off a stain on a dinner plate, held it like he’d never actually grasped a book in his life. His flunkies soon followed, standing in a line on either side of him, staring sternly at nothing in particular. It was just a photo-op. And not in the sense of going into a diner to be seen chatting with the locals, but more like a photo shoot. The damaged church was just his backdrop, the Bible his prop—a prop that no one on the set thought to tell him how to use or what to do with it.

This was grotesque enough as it was. Crass and tasteless, it would have been funny under another context. And then we found out what he did to execute this moment of ugly absurdity.

He’d had the peaceful protesters outside the White House tear-gassed and hit with flash grenades. It had been happening while he’d been speaking. The very moment Trump was promising to attack U.S. citizens with the forces meant to protect them, he was demonstrating his willingness to do so a few steps away from where he stood.

It’s been about twenty-four hours since then, and like most people with a functioning conscience, I’m still in shock.

But I also want answers. I’ve read all manner of condemnations of the president’s words and actions in the form of tweets, articles, op-eds, and so on, and that’s fine. But I have not seen one word—not one word—telling me what anyone is going to do about this.

I’ve written about this before, but the urgency is even greater now. Surely, there are mechanisms through which someone in a position of power can thwart the president’s massacre-fantasies before they become real.

I don’t even mean anything as dramatic as removing the monster from power, though that would be my first choice, and I will kiss on the mouth every member of the cabinet who has a hand in invoking the 25th amendment, should they do so. But can Congress curtail Trump from wielding the military this way? Can military leadership consider Trump’s demands illegal and refuse to act on them? Can governors take a stand? Can business titans threaten to pull campaign funding? Can someone do a convincing enough impression of Vladimir Putin so that it would fool Trump into thinking that his idol was telling him to stand down?

Right now, all I hear is my own pulse throbbing. There was apparently a resolution to condemn Trump in Congress, but of course Mitch McConnell wouldn’t allow it. But who cares about resolutions? Our hate only makes Trump stronger. Someone needs to actually stop him.

But no one is. And we’re supposed to rely on the election to save us. I have very little faith that Trump and his allies won’t prevent that from happening in the first place. Either way, we don’t have that much time.

His supporters are ecstatic and ravenous for blood. His enablers are lying down for him and throwing roses in his wake. He’s got the allegiance of law enforcement and the might of the armed forces at his whim, and he’s exalting in his action movie fever dream. And he’s coming for us now.

It’s not a theory. It’s not a dream. Wake up.

The Brutalization of Women in Video Games, and its Apologists

Paul Fidalgo

Note: Comments are disabled on this post because life is too short for what I’ll have to sift through, and I don’t like comments sections anyway.

I so appreciate the work of Anita Sarkeesian, the media critic whose Feminist Frequency series of videos examining the portrayal of women in popular culture are always enlightening, eye-opening, and more often than not, troubling in what they say about how far we are have to go as a society. I hadn’t seen a new video in a while, but I had caught wind online that there was one recent episode that was creating quite the dust-up, so I tuned in.

“Women as Background Decoration (Part 1)” is deeply upsetting. It is upsetting because of what it tells me that I did not quite grasp before. I knew, of course, that hyper-macho violence was glorified in too many video games and that women are usually cast as mere prizes at best; purely sexual objects to be gawked at and won. But since I don’t play modern console games, particularly the subset of “gritty” or “mature” titles like Grand Theft Auto or Hitman, I had no idea how backward and ugly a place the world of gaming had become, especially in regards to the portrayal and utilization of women.

Sarkeesian’s video, briefly, is a careful, and remarkably cool and studious examination of the use of women non-player characters (NPCs) in games. Suffice it to say, there is a plethora of examples of women characters primarily appearing as prostitutes, slaves, and barely-sentient sex toys, all without personality beyond their desire or willingness to pleasure male characters, being beaten, stabbed, shot, thrown like projectiles, and even run over by a steam train. And that abuse, more often than not in these examples, is rewarded, with additional money, power-ups, or “achievements unlocked.” One example from a Grand Theft Auto title: Lure the prostitute, purchase the prostitute’s services with your money, gain a health bonus for the sexual act, and then shoot and kill the prostitute to win your money back.

I have not yet watched Part 2, because I don’t know if I have the stomach.

What I want to do here is tackle a few of the points that came up when I first expressed online my horror at what I had learned. The response was perhaps more troubling to me than what I saw from the games: the angry defense of this kind of content, and mostly-irrelevant sideswipe attacks on Sarkeesian to somehow invalidate her observations. For expressing my disgust at the content of these games and my appreciation for Sarkeesian’s work, I’ve been fairly relentlessly (and often obscenely) trolled on Twitter and attacked in other online outlets.

Issue: Sarkeesian’s Veracity

First is the assertion that Sarkeesian misrepresented the games, claims that she was being dishonest about what actually occurred in one or two titles, or that she didn’t give the full context of what could be done in a given game, and that this cast a pall over the entire project and its conclusions. A complaint was made that in a certain game where Sarkeesian shows player brutality against an NPC woman, it was not also noted that any object or person in the game could be treated the same way. In another, I was told that in the Hitman sequence, Sarkeesian had somehow “doctored” the scenario to allow for the brutal behavior of the player, and that it wasn’t a normal part of the game experience.

This seems an extremely flimsy thing to take issue with. Sarkeesian herself addresses this concern generally, saying that the mere ability to treat women (or anyone) in a violent manner, intentionally programmed by the developers (this isn’t in the game by accident, folks), is an implicit invitation to do those things, and that in the game world it’s acceptable behavior. Why defend the intentionally-added ability to brutalize women at all? Why not just call for the exclusion of such a capability? Why excuse it?

But let’s now for argument’s sake grant the more general complaint of inaccuracy, willful or not, by Sarkeesian. You’ll get no disagreement from me that the documentation of this kind of stuff should be as accurate as possible, with no lillies gilded. So if Sarkeesian did get some things wrong in her video, I hope she’ll correct them. But how many errors are too many so that the overall point of her video is no longer valid? If her video is, say, 90% accurate, don’t we still have a big problem? What if she’s really off-base, and is only getting half, 50%, of her claims correct. That still means that in the other 50% of the games she talks about, players of mainstream interactive games are being rewarded for some sick, awful, horrid, medieval shit.

Still a problem, wouldn’t you say?

So fine, take Sarkeesian to task for anything she got wrong, but I cannot state this strongly enough: It doesn’t change the fact of the problem at hand. Sarkeesian the Personality becomes a distraction to the real issue. But isn’t that always the way.

Issue: There is No Evidence That Video Games Have Any Effect on Behavior

First, that’s not the point. Even if it was true that there is zero connection between viewing or participating in virtual violent or abusive behavior and the actual real-life committing of that behavior, we as a culture should demand better of ourselves. We should reject it because it glorifies and rewards the worst of what our species is capable of. (This is not the same as banning it, by the way, which I oppose.) The fact that we don’t mimic it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to celebrate it.

But more to the point, there is plenty of evidence.

Here’s Barbara J. Wilson writing in journal of The Future of Children, a project of Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, on the affect of electronic media on children, emphasis mine:

[Rowell Huesmann] argues that a child who is exposed to a great deal of violence, either in real life or through the media, will acquire scripts that promote aggression as a way of solving problems. Once learned, these scripts can be retrieved from memory at any time, especially when the situation at hand resembles features of the script. The more often an aggressive script is retrieved, the more it is reinforced and becomes applicable to a wider set of circumstances. Thus, children who are repeatedly exposed to media violence develop a stable set of aggressive scripts that are easily prompted and serve as a guide in responding to social situations. [ . . . ]

In support of social cognitive theory, numerous experiments show that children will imitate violent behaviors they see on television, particularly if the violence is rewarded.

Wilson notes that television’s effect “is larger than any other single factor that accounts for violent behavior in youth.” And that’s just TV, a passive medium. TV is not participatory like games are, where this behavior is explicitly rewarded, it’s often the whole point. More on that later.

Defenders of misogynistic game content will counter that these games are not aimed at children, and legal only for adults to purchase. Because of course kids never get their hands on these, and therefore we can all wash our hands of responsibility, right? Whew! Solved.

If you want a more cross-generational take, here’s forensic psychiatrists Vasilis K. Pozios, Praveen R. Kambam and H. Eric Bender writing in the New York Timesalmost exactly one year ago:

There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. [ . . . ]

The weight of the studies supports the position that exposure to media violence leads to aggression, desensitization toward violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence, particularly in children.

In fact the surgeon general, the National Institute of Mental Health and multiple professional organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association — all consider media violence exposure a risk factor for actual violence.

My fellow skepto-atheists hang our hats on scientific consensus on hot-button issues like climate change. Funny how this same consensus does not seem to count when the ability to brutalize women in video games is critically examined by a real-life woman.

Issue: Men are Treated as Badly as Women in Games

Several folks told me that the issue of women’s treatment in these games was moot because men get treated much more violently overall, as of course the vast majority of the violence in games is done to male characters, player and non-player alike. But again, Sarkeesian addresses this (it can’t be that her critics haven’t actually watched her video, can it???). She notes, correctly, men have the chance to be anything and everything in game worlds: yes they are the targets of brutalization themselves, but not exclusively. They also get to be heroes, conquerors, geniuses, villains, all-powerful warriors, etcetera, etcetera. Women are mostly relegated to background, prizes, sex objects, and targets for abuse. There are a very, very few exceptions to this, but clearly making an equivalence over the portrayal of male and female characters is ridiculous.

Issue: Games Portray Life as it Really Is

One fellow defended in particular a sequence from the game Red Dead Redemption in which a wild-west gunslinger binds a prostitute, throws her on his horse, takes her to the train tracks, leaves her there, watches her get squashed by a passing locomotive, and unlocks a game achievement as a result. He’s rewarded. The defense of this was that we shouldn’t judge games for portraying life as it was really lived during different historical periods, when there were different norms, social structures, and ways of life.

Holy shit, I thought.

First, I’m pretty sure that tossing women in front of speeding trains was not something that was done in the normal course of everyday life at any time in human civilization, but hey, I’m not a historian of the 19th century American West, so maybe there’s something I’ve missed.

But more importantly, games like Red Dead Redemption and Assassin’s Creed and even Call of Dutyare not history courses. They are not academic presentations of Life as it Once Was for educational purposes. I’m pretty sure that if you complete one of these games, you can’t then transfer your achievements-unlocked as college credits. They are mass market, popular entertainment – interactive entertainment – aimed at young men and boys. I shouldn’t have to spell out the difference.

Issue: Critically Acclaimed Popular Entertainment Features This Same Content

I will definitely grant that many of our most beloved and well-regarded movies, books, and TV series portray women as badly as these games do. The apologist then says that if you take issue with the games, you have to take the same issue with The Sopranos and Game of Thrones and whatnot.

Well, for one thing, I do take a very similar issue with them. I can’t watch Game of Thrones because I think the show’s portrayal of women in abysmally bad. I’m not interested in whether the show is trying to portray some version of European history (and as far as I can tell, Game of Thrones is a fantasy, again, not a history course) or that it’s making a “comment.” I think the creators of popular entertainment, particularly in the form of a wholly made-up fantasy world, can make the affirmative choice to do better by  women. Game developers no less.

And just as I’m uneasy about the glorification of violence in games, I was uneasy about the glorification of violence in The Sopranos, which I stomached, barely, for the show’s other redeeming qualities.

But the real difference here is that TV shows and movies are passive entertainment. The viewer simply watches. In games, the viewer is a player, and the player is taking part in these activities. We watch women treated horrendously as a matter of course in The Sopranos, but we don’t cause it to happen. We don’t play the role of Tony Soprano and then by our own will beat the shit out of a women who’s bruised his ego. In a game, we can, and they do.

Issue: Sarkeesian Has an Agenda and Just Wants Attention

Who cares? I want attention too, and so does everyone else who publishes content online or anywhere else. Apologists for the games’ content have an agenda, and want attention paid to them. The people who expend enormous amounts of energy and time attacking her personally have an agenda. Spare me.

The Point

I got more blowback about my support of Sarkeesian than I have for almost anything I’ve ever said online. It’s upset me, caused me incredible stress, and made me question the moral moorings of some of the people I know. (I even took a day off from Twitter to cool off! Which is hard!) Considering that I, a straight white male, got some crap about my reaction, I am in a perpetual state of shuddering-to-think of what Sarkeesian herself must put up with, or what any other woman puts up with when they challenge the idea that they shouldn’t be portrayed so awfully, that violent misogyny should not be celebrated and rewarded.

Tonight, I learn that Anita Sarkeesian has gotten such a barrage of horrifying threats against her own life and that of her parents, that she’s fled her home.

Because she critically examines an ugly side of video games.

I equate my humanism with compassion. I think that humanism is really a way of trying to build a life-stance and worldview in which one aims to feel something for others’ plights, to have empathy for those different from oneself, and to behave accordingly. In the attacks, trolling, and defenses of the indefensible I received from an online community of self-professed humanists, I saw no compassion. Only an atavistic desire to shake compassion off, to deny any responsibility to it, and to maintain an ugly status quo that is comfortable for them.

Often it was done in the name of “skepticism” or “evidence.” I saw no evidence of compassion or humanism in these responses.

In modern civilization there is simply no excuse for manufacturing entertainment that holds up the brutalization of women as virtuous and worthy of reward. None. It’s not necessary even if the aim is to create the most suspensful, pulse-quickening adventure game. The only reason to do it is to titillate a certain demographic, and make them feel more powerful than the automata women placed in the games.

And I think it’s not worth it.

Special thanks to my friend Kristyne von Eerie for her help with this post.

This Isn’t Self-protection; It’s Cosplay

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Image by Aaron Campbell
Alan Jacobs asks us to consider the influence of the first-person shooter video game genre on the minds of young men, in particular the young men adorned in combat gear in Ferguson, Missouri:

What is it like to have your spatial, visual orientation to the world shaped by thousands of hours in shooter mode?

I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces … Note how in Ferguson, Missouri, cops’ dress, equipment, and behavior are often totally inappropriate to their circumstances — but visually a close match for many of the Call of Duty games. Consider all the forest-colored camouflage, for instance … It’s a color scheme that is completely useless on city streets — and indeed in any other environment in which any of these cops will ever work. This isn’t self-protection; it’s cosplay.

My heart dropped into my stomach as I read this. I never got into this style of video game, so it’s hard for me to put myself in their place. (I can tell you that I would have given anything to don a sword, sheild, and magic boomerang and live the adventures of Link.) I don’t think Jacobs is by any means claiming to know the degree of influence these games have had on these men (or even to know for sure that they played them), and nor will I.

But the prospect nonetheless horrifies me, the very idea that the discontent of the people of Ferguson, manifesting in the form of protest demonstrations, somehow offered these men an opportunity they did not even realize they were itching for: the chance to live their video games. And not Tetris.

People immerse themselves in video games all the time. I go through spates of being addicted to Civilization games, but I don’t then begin to see my life as a series of hexagons to be conquered by recently generated military units. To my knowledge, Angry Birds doesn’t compel anyone to attack pigs or become obsessed with catapults and slingshots.

But there is something particular about the 3-D first-person shooter that may have a different effect on the psyche, as its whole aim is to visually immerse a player in a world as though they were seeing through the character’s eyes (thus the term “first-person”), and almost always in a tense kill-or-be-killed situation (thus “shooter”).

More Jacobs:

The whole display would be ludicrous — boys with toys — except the ammunition is real. The guns are loaded, even if some of them have only rubber bullets, and the tear gas truly burns. And so play-acted immersion in a dystopian future gradually yields a dystopian present.

What is is like to be a first-person shooter? It’s awesome, dude.

This hypothetical (and again, it’s just a hypothetical) frightens me. The implications are grotesque – that young men armed to the teeth may be drawn to live out a first-person shooter fantasy, that they could consider a civil protest (not an invasion, not a riot, not a crime spree) the appropriate scenario in which to act that fantasy out, and that these black residents of Ferguson were alien enough to these men that they could take the place of the zombies and Nazis and extraterrestrials in their minds, as some percieved existential threat.

But the young men on the ground don’t make the decision on their own to advance, to fire into homes, to terrorize noncombatants. Someone presumably older and more experienced would be giving those orders. The zeal with which they are carried out certainly matters, but is of course entirely speculative. I wouldn’t bet these older commanders are big on Call of Duty, and are scratching a wholly different itch.

For Mother and Father, In Equal Measure

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Patrick Stewart magnificently describes his efforts in combatting (and his childhood experience of witnessing) violence against women. Watch the whole thing, and then read on for some thoughts.

Perhaps most moving to me is his discovery of what had moved his father to be violent toward his mother: PTSD brought on by his time in World War II. It is this revelation that brings him to a new milestone in his own campaign for the cause, wherein he gives his time both to Refuge, a nonprofit that provides safe houses to women, and Combat Stress, a group that works with those suffering from PTSD:

So, I work for Refuge for my mother, and I work for Combat Stress for my father, in equal measure.

As I have written here before, I suffer from PTSD myself, not from combat of course, but from the combination of a violent assault near my home when I lived in Washington, DC, and many years of relentless mockery and bullying from my middle and high school years. Obviously, the scenarios are starkly different, because my experience had almost nothing to do with any expectation that I be the aggressor, as it is for soldiers. But it does cause me to behave in ways that I would not otherwise, taking over my rational brain and my empathy when a threat is detected. It makes me understand how trauma can cause a person to act in such a way that they themselves might not recognize. It does not excuse it by any means, but it helps to explain it, and provides a point of potential repair so that it stops.

And one more note: I found myself watching Stewart’s body language, and it told its own story. Note how early in his answer, he hugs himself, tightly. This is classic defensiveness — as an actor, I’m well aware of the unconscious tendency for folks feeling insecure in front of an audience to brace or hug themselves to provide a bit of armor from imaginary danger. For Patrick Freaking Stewart to do that tells you something about how raw this issue is for him. Later, of course, he opens up very wide, his arms far out, exposing his face and chest, telling me he there finds his ground, finds his purpose, and it carries him to a courageous state. He is no longer defending, he is affirmatively acting. Not theatrically, but acting as in doing something.

(Hat tip to Kylie for the video.)

Big Bucks to be Made When Middle School Becomes an Urban Warfare Training Academy

Paul Fidalgo10 Comments

From Liz Halloran at NPR, we get a story of the Rocori school district in Minnesota which is spending $25,000 on, wait for it, bulletproof white boards.

“The timing was right,” Rocori school board Chairwoman Nadine Schnettler tells us. “The company is making these in response to the Newtown shooting, and has been making similar products for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The $300, 18-by-20-inch whiteboards, produced by Maryland-based Hardwire LLC, “will be an additional layer of protection” for students and teachers, she says.

It’s not just the conversation about guns and school safety that’s changed since Adam Lanza gunned down 20 students and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December. It’s also the plethora of products, including training programs that in some instances advocate fighting back, that are being marketed to school districts that are typically cash-strapped but desperate to prove they’re doing something to provide better security.

It’s amazing how wonderful for business these massacres are. So much money to be made from selling guns, ammo, armor, security systems, and the like. Not that anyone’s exploiting anything, of course. Just listen to one of the school board members explain:

Schnettler, who voted in favor of using $25,000 from a capital improvement fund to purchase the whiteboards, says that in hindsight she would still do the same.

“I don’t believe it’s a waste of money,” she says. “The chief showed us how to use it offensively — to block penetration of bullets through door windows, or to knock the gun out of the intruder’s hands.”

Holy shit, what? This is now the expectation? Underpaid English teachers or 5th-graders shitting their pants in mortal terror are now supposed to disarm an automatic weapon-wielding maniac with a writing surface like they’re Captain Fucking America?

Well, if this is how we’re going to do things, let’s not pussyfoot. Let’s give the faculty exploding erasers, give the staff riot gear, and give each kid a bulletproof backpack insert. Oh wait, that last one is real. You know, for when shooters target their Hello Kitty book bags.

Of course, budgets are tighter than ever, so all of this will have to come at the expense of something else. I’m thinking, perhaps, learning.

Yes, yes, so public schools essentially become poorly-equipped military bases. It’s a tough thing to swallow. But hey, it’ll be great for the economy, and when the next shooter comes, we’ll all just buy more shit.

Gun Culture, Running Roughshod

Paul Fidalgo14 Comments

Josh Marshall speaks up for the legitimacy of the opinion of folks who hate guns:

It’s customary and very understandable that people often introduce themselves in the gun debate by saying, ‘Let me be clear: I’m a gun owner.’

Well, I want to be part of this debate too. I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. And I have my own set of rights not to have gun culture run roughshod over me. . .

It’s a sign of how distorted our politics have gotten, and how the right really has defined the terms of debate on so many issues, that somehow loving guns is the only way to be taken seriously on the subject of their regulation. I don’t have to speak well of, say, child labor, and highlight its positive aspects (ask Newt Gingrich), or claim to have some experience with it in order to have the credibility to make a case against it.

More Marshall:

In the current rhetorical climate people seem not to want to say: I think guns are kind of scary and don’t want to be around them. Yes, plenty of people have them and use them safely. And I have no problem with that. But remember, handguns especially are designed to kill people. You may want to use it to threaten or deter. You may use it to kill people who should be killed (i.e., in self-defense). But handguns are designed to kill people. They’re not designed to hunt. You may use it to shoot at the range. But they’re designed to kill people quickly and efficiently.

That frightens me. I don’t want to have those in my home. I don’t particularly want to be around people who are carrying.

What a liberating piece of writing. Go take your murder-weapon-in-waiting somewhere else.

Hence the Gloom

Paul Fidalgo5 Comments

The Economist‘s Lexington blog:

As for the National Rifle Association bumper stickers arguing that only an armed citizenry can prevent tyranny, I wonder if that isn’t a form of narcissism, involving the belief that lone, heroic individuals will have the ability to identify tyranny as it descends, recognise it for what it is, and fight back. There is also the small matter that I don’t think America is remotely close to becoming a tyranny, and to suggest that it is is both irrational and a bit offensive to people who actually do live under tyrannical rule.

The argument put forth? How about no guns at all?

I am not sure that tinkering with gun control will stop horrible massacres like [Newtown’s]. And I am pretty sure that the sort of gun control that would work—banning all guns—is not going to happen. So I have a feeling that even a more courageous debate than has been heard for some time, with Mr Obama proposing gun-control laws that would have been unthinkable in his first term, will not change very much at all. Hence the gloom.

This is where I am. The thing to do is to have a society in which no regular folks have guns at all. But it won’t happen here. No matter how many “likes” you give that Facebook meme.

We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.

Paul Fidalgo3 Comments

The president on Sunday, in Newtown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftlT41LpIOY&feature=player_embedded

Full text here.

Almost unbearable to watch, for the heartbreak.

A few quick observations:

You can see the gravity of sadness — almost the literal gravity — weighing on this man, as though the force of grief itself is pulling on his face. His hair is whiter than ever.

I’ve never seen him more sincere than when he said, “We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.”

And the line that reminds me why I’m a kid person, the child who assures the adults, “I know karate, so it’s OK; I’ll lead the way out.”

200+ Years Ago

Paul Fidalgo5 Comments

MG Siegler:

Honestly, I don’t give a shit that you think you have the right to own a gun because someone 200+ years ago said you do to prevent (or allow for) an insurrection or whatever. If this issue is going to be solved, you’re going to have to agree that in the 21st century, maybe your right to own a gun isn’t as important as people — children — living or dying.