Saving family and country from "deranged" men... hmmmm

A middle-age white male pulls his pickup truck up next to my truck when I’m jumping down, ready to go into the store and use the bathroom. He let’s me know that he’s followed me several miles so he could read everything written on my truck. And I can tell immediately he’s going to tell me he agrees with everything except the gun statement and sure enough he does.

“We need guns to protect our families, and guns to protect our nation,” he fervently tells me. I wonder if he’s armed right now.

I ask him what he danger is protecting his family from?

He says “from a deranged person (man, I interrupt and he nods) who wants to attack my wife or my kids.”

I don’t want to ask him if he thinks there are lots of deranged men around because my definition of who’s deranged is certainly not his. But it’s the belief that there are deranged men around who are conspiring to attack his family.

I try to point out that statistically, it is mostly male family members who end up shooting especially womyn inside the home, or children overriding gun safety ‘precautions’ and shooting themselves or each other.

He doesn’t care about possibilities – he’s determined to be the cowboy of the house and at the ready to shoot individual he determines is deranged.

Ok, so what about our nation, how are guns protecting our nation? He immediately grins and says bigger fire power, others are afraid to attack us. I ask if he knows how many nations on earth we’ve attacked. He gazes into the cloudless sky and recounts WWII, Viet Nam, and Afghanistan. When I tell him since 1801 we’ve sent our military off this continent and around the world to attack, occupy, colonize over 150 countries – and mostly countries of color.

He grins again and says “see our guns protect our nation.” To which I say “Our guns conquer and commit genocide on almost all people on the planet.” He shrugs and says he doesn’t care as long as we’re safe.

I leave him with my usual “are you not sick and tired of men and boys killing us and each other in this country?” to which he gives that helpless shrug and grin, to which I then say, “of course you’re not because of your limited thinking but there are people, mostly womyn, who know that this is NOT the right or even preferred way to live on Mother Earth. And we will take over, I promise.”

I can only know that because he’s willing to talk, my words will worm their way into his consciousness and at some point – hopefully not when his son figures out how to access his dad’s guns or when his son goes off to war and returns broken – he will think about this conversation.