Yes, you're allowed to yell at the gun lovers in your life
In case you needed permission, here's mine.
Of the countless cyclical conversations that happen on social media around mass shootings and gun violence generally, there’s almost always a tertiary discourse that happens about whether or not it’s okay to be pissed off (and how pissed off should you be) at the pro-gun people in your life. Feel free to swap “pro-gun” for “typically votes for people who tend to fall on the side of keeping gun access free and clear for anyone who wants one,” or however you define that. You know what I mean. In other words, if you know someone who votes Republican, how personally accountable can they reasonably be held for not only mass shootings themselves but what the rest of us experience as people who live in a society where mass shootings happen almost literally every day? Can you yell at them at dinner? Can you cut them out of your life? How indignant are you entitled to be in exchange for being on the morally righteous side of an issue? This is the debate that springs up eternally, and just as consistently, the debate itself becomes too painfully annoying to deal with.
There are predictable punctuating arguments that come up around this topic:
“Yes, if you vote for people who keep these guns available, then it’s on you and I hate you! And I’m gonna tell you! It’s good to yell at anyone who is wrong!”
or
"No individual voter has the power to actually impact what happens on gun policy, so no, keep your anger where it belongs and it’s not on your uncle.”
This is to say nothing of the extremely big-brained argument that people can’t be faulted for their own attachment to owning guns/retaining access to guns because they’ve been brainwashed by conservatives to truly believe it’s a matter of life and death for them to have personal access to the death toys. It’s this whole maybe the real victims of gun culture were the gun lovers we met along the way wormhole of just absolute nonsense that makes it functionally impossible to derive any actual answer from any question that’s being debated online. So allow me to give you a clear answer about whether or not you have a right to be mad—and to express that anger—to the individual 2nd amendment hoes in your life: big yes.
I don’t have an equally simple answer for a more sweeping (and more often debated) question that essentially boils down to: what issues are important enough to justify fucking up the vibe at Thanksgiving by taking your relatives to task over your differences around them?
For many people, there are no issues worth that getting pulled into a confrontation with anyone unless it’s urgently necessary. Not everyone thinks it’s fun to get hot from their seat on the moral high ground, and that’s great. I definitely don’t think anyone should ever feel obligated to engage someone about an issue they’ve chosen the unrighteous position on, so this whole argument isn’t aimed at you, if that’s you. Saying nothing is always an option and almost always the preferable option.
But after a lifetime of disagreeing with some family members on all kinds of issues, and being the kind of ferociously self-righteous and abundantly articulate youth I was, half a lifetime of arguing with them by choice, I do think I have an answer to the question: You can justify fucking up the vibe by calling out someone’s wrong opinion if two things are true:
The wrong opinion is a votable issue, meaning there’s some action they can take or not take that, at least in theory, affects the outcome of this issue. It’s useless to get your blood pressure up if, even in the best outcome, there’s nothing tangible that the other party can do with their changed mind.
The issue affects you personally. Only you can decide what that means and what degree of being affected counts.
For example, I would not consider it justifiable to scream at my American Conservative father for, say, a genocide happening by his ideological contemporaries in another country. It has nothing to do with the material conditions of my life and there’s not a single thing he could or would do differently in the event that I convinced him it was worth changing his mind on whatever topic it is. Great. I can leave all of that alone.
On the other hand, issues like abortion access and gun control…these things affect me. The math here is pretty straightforward: I have a 10-year-old who goes to public school, and I have a uterus that has, more than once, needed to be scraped out by an abortion doctor and, who knows, might need to be again. To keep my qualifications for argument clean, I won’t even mention the other kids or uterus owners I love and whose wellbeing I feel invested in. Even if we’re just talking about me and my health and wellbeing and safety, these are two issues that are both personally impactful and democratically actionable.
Which is to say, I’ve been fighting with my father about them for most of my life. Only now, it’s all very different. Now, being grown, having had abortions, including one that treated an otherwise life-threatening pregnancy, and having a child and all the blistering vulnerability of his existence, the difference between how I factor guns and abortion into my decision of who to vote for and how my father factors in those same things no longer feels like a difference of opinion—it feels, in a very real way, like a difference in how much my life is valued.
My own relationship to this issue has been evolving since I was 13, found out my dad owned guns, and refused to go to his house for our semi-regular weekend visits until he got rid of them. He was clear in his refusal to do so, laughed at me for being bothered, and after a few weeks of abstaining in protest, I resumed visiting, and thus the die was fairly fucking cast in terms of how I would interact with men for the next 20 years or so. Anyway, I was pretty actively uncomfortable with guns for as long as I can remember, for what felt like obvious reasons. I couldn’t understand not feeling instantly, viscerally frantic at the very notion of a gun, let alone its actual presence. Even in 1999, there was plenty of categorical demonstration that the presence of guns in the home makes it exponentially more likely for someone to get shot, etc. Even before I started to understand a greater context for the arguments for or against civilian access to guns, my own nervous system told me everything I needed to know about being around them. Sure, I was almost certainly subconsciously testing my dad to see if there was anything about his life that he would be willing to change, anything he would be willing to compromise on or sacrifice, out of deference to me, my feelings, my needs, but I also genuinely hated the idea of being in the house with guns. Both were true.
With the same kind of “this is obvious, why are we even arguing about this” clarity, I never quite understood the debate over whether or not it was fair to be mad at individuals for the broad state of gun access in the US and the cascading series of compounding horrors this access has wrought and the way that’s polluted the experience of being a person in the world now. Of course it’s simple: you vote according to what matters to you most, and if you vote for people who support the kind of access to weapons that allows mass shootings to happen as often and with as much deadly force as they do, then that means something matters to you more than the piles of dead kids this country amasses every year. Full stop, baby.
When it comes to abortion, and also guns, my dad’s defense as always been something like, “I don’t vote for conservatives because they’re anti-abortion or pro-gun, although I agree with those things. I vote for them because their policies are the most financially advantageous to me and my business. Gun and abortion are not the issues I vote for.” Which, when your daughter has just finished telling you that she would be dead if not for her access to abortion care or how her fears over her son being gunned down at school are destroying her mentally and physically, is not quite the defense you think it is. To say to someone you love I’m not voting in favor of your endangerment and harm, I just don’t care enough about those things to vote against them. It’s saying I’m not actively against you—I just don’t care about your life more than the size of my tax bill.
At some point, for a lot of people, that’s what it comes down to: can you peacefully break bread with someone who, by way of the only small action they’re permitted in this country, deprioritize your life and the life of your children? Again, I think you can peacefully break bread with them, if you feel like (as I do on most days) that, all things considered, the last thing you’re going to do is surrender even more of your energy to fighting with someone who, in defiance of their supposed love for you, is acting on the side of everything that makes your reality so shitty and terrifying, especially since you know that fighting with them will change nothing at all.
But also, if ever it does feel good or necessary to tell them exactly how you feel—if they ever happen to call you right at a moment when you’re having a hard time holding it in, and you’re alone and your kids aren’t around and you have the time today—then I think you are squarely within your right to do so.
It will surely not come as a surprise at this point to say I recently yelled at my dad about guns when he randomly called me as I was taking a break from work in the middle of the day and was at home alone. There’s no reason for it other than there was another school shooting a few days before, followed by a fake shooter situation at my own kid’s school; I was feeling particularly nervous and mad about how bad it feels to be a parent right now. There isn’t much to say about the conversation itself. We said the things we always say. Eventually we were yelling. Eventually I hung up, and spent the rest of the day thinking about how nothing has changed in my relationship with him over the past 20 years except that he’s getting older and neither of us wants to endure the prospect of him being elderly and then dying alone, which I would venture is why a lot of us keep parents in our lives when they’re the kind of people who, when we really think about it, have been passively hurting us with their shitty politics forever. But now the damage isn’t theoretically and future-tense—it’s coloring our daily lives. We’re drowning in it. More and more, playing nice with our anti-abortion, pro-gun relatives doesn’t just feel like sidelining our true feelings for the sake of keeping family interactions placid—it feels like punching ourselves in the face when we’re already on fire. Why would we do it? What sensible person would do it?
Even as I still periodically indulge in exchanges like this with my dad, even knowing how shitty it makes me feel, I would like to think my expectations are different in my mid-30s than they were in my early teens, and honestly they are. But it doesn’t stop me from reflectively engaging in the same cyclical routine: telling my dad how I feel, showing him where his “beliefs” cause me injury, and wondering if there’s anything he might be willing to change, to compromise, to surrender so that I can be a little safer, a little more whole, or even just feel like he’s on my side. I always know what the answer will be, and at least now, there’s no longer the still-looming promise of how his answer—no, you don’t matter enough to me—will mess with my self-worth and define what I come to accept from other people in lieu of healthy love. I’m on the other side of that gauntlet, which makes our exchanges way more low-stakes at this point. But the material impact of the issue we’re talking about has considerably higher stakes for me now that I’m a parent.
I wrote at length about the particular anxieties that have colonized my brain in the wake of the last few years of pandemic parenting, but when I say this shit is now a load-bearing wall in my life, I do mean it. It’s the air I breathe for now, so it’ll probably come up more than once. The guns are a big part of it. I send my 5th grader to school every day, and like every parent I know, I try to shake off the intrusive flashes every day. And it’s not just like, “man, I wonder if a shooter will show up at his school today” — the thoughts aren’t that concrete nor that impersonal. It’s more like being in the middle of a work meeting and realizing your mind has wandered off imagining getting a text from your kid that there’s a shooter at their school, and what you would say to them; how it would feel to be in that moment. You think about what they would see; you imagine how fast you would drive.
The thing about being a parent at this time is how physically harmful guns can be even when they’re nowhere near us. The fear after a school shooting is like feeling a fizzy electricity after lightning strikes, and after enough years and enough shootings and a growing feeling that this just happens now; it’s not an anomaly, but rather a feature of the landscape now. Now the air is perpetually buzzing. You can feel it all the time. And it has fundamentally changed what it means to exist and parent in the world—and what it mean to hold that experience in your tragically human body, which are not meant to hold these possibilities.
For parents, this is especially consequential, because we are quite literally wired according to the threat level we perceive for our kids. Our primal nervous system, programmed through millions of years of evolution to scan for any imaginable threat to our kids, short-circuiting and burning out from too many days in a row of shocking awareness of threats that we are powerless to neutralize. We just live with that kind of alarm. We eventually can’t break out of fight or flight, our sympathetic nervous systems perpetually stuck in the “on” position. We go to therapy and meditate and cut out stimulants and alcohol and sugar; we take supplements and medication and examine our own minds to figure out how our fried mental states are our fault so we can just fix it. Adrenaline and cortisol soak our insides and erode our intestinal lining. Our stress eats us alive. And all of this, when nothing has actually happened. This is just what it’s like to live as a parent in a time when it very reasonably could happen, and not enough people who could change things wants to. We know it’s not going to change. We do know that.
And throughout all of this, we have to still be parents. For me, I understand my role as mother in the age of school shootings to be largely about defending the integrity of my kid’s sense of safety. In the middle of all of this, how possible can I make it for him to still just be a kid who isn’t afraid, who sees nothing but possibility and wonder in the world, and who simply doesn’t see all of this? There are numerous mechanisms by which I try to accomplish this. It’s in the things I tell him and the things I decidedly do not tell him. It’s devoting myself to the art form of, slowly, in the right incremental doses over time, revealing the world to him slowly, preparing him to eventually be in it more completely, but not too fast. not too much. Only thinking about what is necessary and helpful and useful for him to know at any given point in his childhood. Never showing him how scared or devastated I am, never sobbing into his hair on an evening when I know other parents of kids his age are bracing themselves to spend their first nights as the most damned of all people, those parents who have outlived their children. I don’t look to him to hold up my feelings, which are massive and incurable even if it was his job to tend to them, which I’m diligent about remembering it is not. It’s my job to project confidence and safety and all of that to him, to make things like shooter drills seem casual and normal, as opposed to the nauseating signifier of an unspeakable potentiality, and I do all of this in little ways all the time, and I’m great at it. My tone is breezy and sure always. But it’s profoundly exhausting for someone with a frayed, dysfunctional nervous system and organs that feel like wet tissue paper.
In a perfect family, my kid would never be the one to hold me up around all of this fear and sadness, but maybe my own parents would. And this is why it is so personal. This is why it’s fine—in fact, it’s the only thing that seems normal to me—to be personally mad at people in your life who are supposed to love you but can still look at the pain you’re experiencing as a parent in the era of school shootings, to look at that damage you’re showing them, and respond by reciting some Rush Limbaugh bullshit, some talking points about how giving up one’s guns is how governments oppress people, etc. But what about everyone who is dying and everyone else who is decomposing from persistent fear? Isn’t that oppressive? And it’s real! It’s not theoretical! It’s my life and I have the therapy bills to prove it? It’s my firmly held belief that if you show someone the truth of what living with that fear is doing to you—if you show them exactly what that damage is; if you lift up your shirt and show them the open wound you’re living with every day that you try to shepherd your baby through this world—and they care about anything else? I would say you don’t owe that person anything, especially in that moment.
There is so much built-up anger and toxic energy that accumulates every day in this life, and there are almost no suitable places to put it, which is, of course, part of why it eats at us the way it does—we just have to keep it—so if being angry at people who value their guns and their imaginary war with the government more than they value your safety and health and peace, then…I mean, fuck them. Honestly, that’s what it comes down to. And if it’s someone who really should be prioritizing your safety and well-being more than anything, like say, your parent, then super fuck them. They’ve already broken the natural contract between parents and children—they’ve already forsaken you—so you don’t owe them anything. Feel free to not answer the phone. Feel free to answer it, yell, and hang up. Feel free to handle that however you want. At the very least, you should be on your own side. I’m on your side too. You and your fear and your kids and the hope you spin up brand new every day for them.