I Am from the No-Gun Culture and I Don't Speak Your Language

[Content Note: Guns.]

Via Atrios, I read this story about a restaurant in Louisiana that is offering a 10% discount to patrons who come in with their guns.

"I just need to see a weapon. I need you to be carrying a gun," says Bergeron's owner Kevin Cox.

That's right. The restaurant began offering a 10% discount a couple of weeks ago, for bringing in both your appetite and your gun.

"As long as everybody has a gun we're all the same size," says Cox.

The first thing I think is the thing I have written before: I did not grow up in the gun culture, I am not comfortable in the gun culture, I do not feel safe around a lot of people with guns, and I really don't want to be in public spaces where there are a lot of guns. And yet I am constantly admonished to be tolerant of the gun culture, with zero reciprocal expectation that people who love guns respect that I don't share their enthusiasm.

And the second thing that I think is that Kevin Cox does not understand what it is like to be a marginalized person who lives under a persistent threat of real harm. Because if he did—if he really understood by way of lived experience what it is like to live in justifiable fear of likely harm, as opposed to living in conjured fear of inventing boogeymen to rationalize arming oneself as if weapons can stop the erosion of unearned privilege—he would know that being "all the same size" isn't really the issue.

Those of the words of a very privileged person whose closest experience to being obliged to sit with fear is having a bigger kid steal his lunch money.

If he'd lived a different kind of life, maybe he'd understand that the solution to real violence, to genuine existential threats, is not the capacity to commit more violence, but an urgency to diminish the things underwriting violence in the first place. Fear, hatred, need. Things to which guns are not an answer, and never will be.