Eight years ago, someone shot twenty-seven people in my hometown, most of them kids. No clear reason ever materialized, insofar as “reason” is a word you can use to describe such an act.

The closest thing to a reason was simply that he was an extremely angry white dude and that he channeled this anger into mass murder.

In the years since, my politics have grown increasingly radical. Over the last few months, my family has become gun owners, mostly due to the increasing danger of violent white supremacists targeting us for being openly queer. These nazis too are angry white dudes.

One of our guns is an AR-15, the type of weapon that most of the gun control debate has focused on in the past eight years, to the point of moral panic. I’ve written about the foolishness of those efforts previously. https://twitter.com/elsandifer/status/1330332772435693568

The AR-15 is an imposing weapon. It does in fact readily enable you to kill a lot of people, especially in versions unlike the NY-legal configuration we have. I understand why people find it a very scary thing, especially if they haven’t handled one.

For my part, I would have no problem with wide-ranging gun control that massively disarmed the police and repealed the Second Amendment. Weaker measures, however, seem at best pointless and at worst to actively inflame the paranoias of angry white dudes.

And that, in the end, is the thing. I’m not scared of guns. I’m scared of angry white men. Guns make angry white men scarier, but they’re scary without them. They’re a fundamentally harmful and destructive force in the world.

America has an angry white dude problem. And it is by a vast margin the most urgent political issue in the country.