Now, suddenly, they want to get rid of guns, too. The one thing I know is that we cannot stop guns. There is no point in discussing that; that is an immutable aspect of human nature. Children need to toughen up and learn how to care for themselves. They should learn CPR. And they need to stop using rude words when they respond to me, specifically, although I get to use those words back, as it will make them stronger and hardier.
If we let these kids have their way, soon there will not be danger anywhere. They will be able to go to school in the morning and feel confident that they will be able to come home in the evening. This is a radical thing to ask. I remember no such certainty. It is, therefore, undesirable. These children are weak. I do not want my children to live in a better world than the world that I grew up in, or the one we live in now. That would be to admit that things have progressed, and I do not admit that.
That is what conservatism means to me: the ability to pass the dangers and privations of my life on to the generation that will come after. The hope that their lives will be, if not actively worse than mine, then certainly no better. The idea that I suffered not because there were no better choices but because the suffering was inherently good.
If anyone were to think differently, that would be the real tragedy. Children are weak. They are whiners. They deserve my mockery.
If I were forced to spend a single day in which I did not insult youth, that would be the real tragedy. If I had to let any argument I disagreed with go unanswered, because attacking a child would be ghoulish—that would be letting them win.
I am sick of these children and their demands for safe spaces. Safe spaces! I refuse to modify my argument in any way to reflect the fact that what they are asking to be kept safe from is not words but bullets. I refuse to be silent even for a moment.
When I was young, children were seen but not heard. If children suddenly started to be heard, that would be the greatest tragedy of all.
March 29, 2018
This Magic Is Too Strong to Stop
IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT it was to begin with. A wallet. A pipe. A cellphone. It makes no difference. The phenomenon remains the same every time.
In the morning, it is very clearly a cellphone. Anyone who looks at it can see it.
In the afternoon, it is still very clearly a cellphone. It sends texts. It makes calls. Its screen lights up.
But in the evening, the transformation occurs. A police officer sees the cellphone, sees that the hand holding it belongs to a black man, and suddenly, quite without warning, it becomes a gun.
This keeps happening.
Suppose we close all the gun shows. Suppose we close all the loopholes. Suppose we take guns off the shelves at sporting goods stores. It will not matter, because of this mysterious phenomenon (observed mostly by police officers in the moments before an “officer-involved shooting”) where a completely innocuous object becomes, for a moment or two, a gun. It can even be a child who picks it up.
It cannot be that police officers do not know what guns look like. They seem perfectly capable of wielding them themselves. It is not that they do not know what cellphones look like. It can only be magic, and the magic does not change.
On April 4, it was a metal pipe. The man who held it was named Saheed Vassell. He was the father of a teenage son. It scarcely took twenty-seven seconds for officers to see the pipe transform into a gun. By the time he was dead, it had already changed back.
Later, when officers are called on to justify their actions in these deaths, what matters is not whether their fear was reasonable, but whether the fear was real. And what is more frightening than impossible sorcery? Fear brings a magic all its own, by which cellphones become guns and people “bulk up” to run through bullets. It transforms teenagers into Hulk Hogan, into demons. You cannot say for certain what object will mutate next. It could be a Bible. It could be a hand in a pocket. With a fear so immense, you are right to act no matter how harmless the target may seem—whether it is a cellphone, or a pipe, or a father, or a child.
That is what makes these deaths justified: that moment of fear, that transforms something ordinary—a father, an iPhone—and makes it deadly. If these things could not be, if there were no fearful magic involved, these deaths would be utterly senseless.
No, it certainly cannot be that it is not happening at all.
So it is clear we can never solve the gun epidemic in this country. It is not because we cannot pass the laws. It is because there is sorcery happening, and until we stop this sorcery, there can be no progress.
April 5, 2018
How to Sleep at Night When Families Are Being Separated at the Border
THE TRICK IS FORGETTING THAT they are children.
If you remember that they are children, you will not be able to go on with any of this. If you remember when you were a child, and frightened, and everything seemed impossibly big and loud and sharp and hard except a certain pair of familiar arms, this will have to stop.
The trick is forgetting that there is such a word as “child.” To remember words like “bad hombre” and “thug” instead. You do not have to say “animals,” if you do not want to. There are other ways. “To assume that just because of someone’s age or gender or whatever that they don’t pose a threat would be wrong,” Sean
