Are you considering purchasing a gun?

We hear gunshots all the time in our neighbourhood but someone got an assault rifle (is that a thing? The ones that shoot off 100 rounds in a few seconds) recently and loves to play with it somewhere on my street at 2 am once a week or so.

I'm very anti-gun but lately, I've wondered if that's just my privilege. If I was a minority with every motherfucker trying to kill me, including the police, I'd probably have a very different attitude.

So, maybe I'm no guns for white people, now?

This week a friend had jury dury and was called into selection for a murder trial. During questioning of the 70 potential-jurors there, some 40+ said they owned a gun. In Portland!

― Kim Kimberly

i mean you gotta understand, portland is _west_, historically pdx has had a strong firearms culture

i'm extremely fucking white, but i'm also trans, and i've had to adjust my feelings about firearms over the past few years

i grew up in a liberal, strongly anti-gun family, and it probably saved my life. the single biggest factor in my being alive today is means reduction. i will not own a gun. i will not learn to shoot a gun. (i'm dyspraxic and half fucking blind anyway - based on my memories of shooting bb guns as at boy scout camp, i doubt that arming me would be tactically effective)

but. and.

it's dangerous for us out here and i'm not sure allies necessarily understand how dangerous it is. there are a lot of us and sometimes we congregate in groups and we're always very careful not to announce where those groups are publicly. opsec is really important. it's not like everyone here supports us - there are a lot of proud boys here - and it would be pretty easy for someone to decide it was time for them to make a dent in the local trans population.

having people in the community who are able to put up effective self-defense in those situations makes me feel a lot better about leaving the house and being around other trans people. my dinky little container of pepper spray isn't going to do a lot, in a situation like that.

are we going to start some, i don't know, war on the cis like tucker carlson seems to think we are? uh, no. a lot of us are frustrated that we're in a situation where our basic physical safety is under constant threat and the cis people who have the power to do something about it are responding by shrugging and telling us "haters gonna hate", but no, memes like "trans day of vengeance" are wishful thinking, the same way i don't actually know anybody who owns a guillotine. mostly, you know, mostly we just hurt each other. is the sad truth of it.

Portland is as much a hotbed of white supremacy as the rest of Oregon. I've never encountered more outright fascists in any other state, and I've been in a lot of them.

And I haven't seen anybody carrying a gun since I've been here, so it's not like I'm feeling particularly paranoid or like I need to "defend myself".

That's the crux, right? No one needs to open carry because everyone knows there are people out there packing. Which begs the question, how many of those people are actually carrying? It's like Beware of Dog signs; the presence of a dog is secondary to the implied threat.

Portland is a singularly odd example that I don’t think gets understood by a lot of pundit-y types elsewhere because the local history and geography is different than most cities, including the major American cities where most pundits and media commentators live in/around. This was very apparent during the Uprising when you had media folks based in NY/LA/DC/ATL transposing the racial histories and dynamics from their locations to Portland, which had a slightly different one.

My read is that because Portland never sprawled the way the rest of the US did due to the Urban Growth Boundary instituted in the 70s, you didn’t get white flight the same as other cities. White flight here is like 5 miles away. You can bike it. We had redlining same as everywhere else, but the scale was different. Portland and Oregon has its own particular racist-ass history from its creation that differs from other states.

Stuff is allowed to pop off here in ways it’s not in other places. Also you have the Gods Guns & Gays crowd living effectively on top of the urban cosmopolitan “Progressive” types, so that clashes.

as a portlander, i'm really well aware of the city's racist history - i think most of us are. i think portland as a city is struggling in terms of trying to deal with the unusual form of institutional racism put into place through the city's history. like, we _didn't_ have "redlining" same as anywhere else - we kept black people out of the whole city. honestly, i think you could make the argument that portland is still experiencing a form of redlining. portland has historically had an unusually low black population, and gentrification exerts ongoing pressure. due to systemic economic inequity that's been in effect throughout american history, gentrification disproportionately affects black people.

anyway, i could be wrong about any or all of this - if anybody has better knowledge or experience i welcome corrections. that's just how it looks from my limited perspective.

Unrelated to that particular strain of observation, I've found on my visits that Portland can be a pretty contrarian "don't tell me what to do" sort of city. I was shocked on my most recent trip, a few weeks ago, at the sheer amount of graffiti and junk piled on front yards. I asked my friends why isn't that shit cleaned up, at least make an effort, everyone would benefit, and she was like, it's hard to force people here to do anything. See also: no fluoride, shitty public schools etc.

Unrelated to that particular strain of observation, I've found on my visits that Portland can be a pretty contrarian "don't tell me what to do" sort of city. I was shocked on my most recent trip, a few weeks ago, at the sheer amount of graffiti and junk piled on front yards. I asked my friends why isn't that shit cleaned up, at least make an effort, everyone would benefit, and she was like, it's hard to force people here to do anything. See also: no fluoride, shitty public schools etc.

― Josh in Chicago

it makes more sense when you look at the people whose job it is to tell people what to do

graffiti? who's going to deal with that shit, the cops? portland has some of the most racist cops in america, and this is fucking _america_ we're talking about. that's saying a lot. they're all buddy-buddy with the proud boys. and who's going to do anything about that? our landlord mayor ted wheeler, who literally got tear-gassed trying to "talk to" the police three years ago and refuses to do anything to hold them accountable? he got re-elected, by the way, everybody hates him but he got re-elected because in america, god bless america, we have a two party system. we changed our electoral system away from first past the post, finally, so maybe things will get better in the future, but in the meantime? nothing gets done because we fucking hate the people who are in charge of getting things done. fuck ted wheeler.

i say bring on the graffiti, property values are too fucking high here anyway. nobody can afford to buy a house here, and our mayor, you know, he's a fucking landlord.

The flip I heard from my friend was that because property values are so high, no one has any incentive to clean up, especially someone that has been in their home for so long that they've seen its value rocket magnitudes over what they originally paid for it.

yep, same conclusion whatever perspective you look at it from :)

honestly, i think you could make the argument that portland is still experiencing a form of redlining. portland has historically had an unusually low black population, and gentrification exerts ongoing pressure. due to systemic economic inequity that's been in effect throughout american history, gentrification disproportionately affects black people.

didn't Portland become whiter in a recent census (2010 maybe)? which iirc (no sure thing) made it unique among larger American cities for that period

I'm no expert in this, but redlining did happen in Portland: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=11/45.513/-122.826&city=portland-or

that said, for anyone who isn't familiar with Oregon history, I assume this is what you were referring to Kate: https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/

yeah honestly i'm only vaguely familiar with the historical context, i should probably do some more reading up, particularly since it is a unique and complicated history. i also only showed up here in '17, and while in portland terms that makes me a native in real terms i have _no idea_ what portland was like in the '00s

It’s a new day and I am not considering purchasing a gun

I think there's a PDX thread somewhere to discuss these issues btw

agree with brimstead

I do have a .22 ruger revolver but it would take me about 15 minutes to get it ready to shoot the intruder so I'll probably just use the ironwood stick behind the door

I stayed with some of my gf’s family in the california sticks last night, and they had a rifle (in a case) just lying on the living room floor. other than when I lived in vermont a decade ago, I can’t remember the last time I was in the same room as a gun, and I couldn’t imagine having young kids and being around it like that

I'm not considering purchasing a gun, but in my darker moments I wonder if there will be a tipping point where all the gun owning people around me become organized and start kiling off their perceived enemies, and will I regret not also being armed at that point.

yes I believe that is on the NRA brochure

I still have the .22 single shot that I got when I was 12, more recently this revolver

Part of why I keep them is some weird 'end-times' apocalypse fears, but without YouTube I wouldn't be able to clean a rabbit anyway

We own a gun despite my pacifist nature because in early 2017 I got “martial law” vibes and we lived in the sticks. A biracial gay couple. We have neither cleaned nor taken a look at the thing in years at this point, because we moved to a good city.

The gun store in my town is next door to the herbalist. That's not a euphemism for a pot dispensary — there are at least three of those in town that I know of, but they're all on the highway; this is an actual herbalist, a lady who moved here from Humboldt County in California.

For a while, my town had a gun store that was next door to a military recruitment center. I remember thinking it was just a little too on point, but I guess one could argue that it was best to keep the violence compartmentalized.

That particular gun store keeps moving because my townspeople generally hate its existence and are not quiet about it. But perhaps the proprietors feel like they're owning the libs in some important way.

If there were practical reasons perhaps my attitude would be different but I suspect it's yet more culture-war bullshit. Weird how a piece of technology becomes a cultural signifier / way of life thing.

Like, I don't have bumper stickers and t-shirts declaring my affection for my blender. And it's a very good blender!

YMP— the funny thing is that gun store caused a huge uproar in the surrounding neighborhood the first time it opened, but then it moved to a new location and there didn’t seem to be a peep of protest at the new site. I’m sure the owners were disappointed at the lack of response; you’re right that they seemed like “own the libs” types.

This weekend was the first time since moving to rural Montana that I have seen anybody carrying. The first time was at a diner where I went to pick up my lunch to go; there was a guy in front of me in line at the cash register who had a pistol in a holster. He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers and looked sort of like a high school teacher on his day off. The second time was this morning at the grocery store; the guy in front of me in line at the bakery counter (the donuts at this grocery store are incredible, to the point that they're a local attraction) was an old man with a chest-length beard, baggy jeans held up by suspenders, and a revolver on his hip.

My immediate thought in the diner was a) why do you need a gun to come to the diner for lunch? and b) if you're worried enough to need to wear your gun to the diner, you should be exhibiting more situational awareness, because I could easily walk up behind you and stab you in the neck with this knife I have on my belt, just because you're not reading me, a fellow middle-aged white man, as a threat. Again, these dudes seem to want to be conveying the message that they're ready for whatever, but they're really not. A sudden attack from an unexpected quarter would find them totally unprepared. Shit, I probably could have slid past diner guy, said "Excuse me" like I'd bumped into him by accident, and taken his gun.

Yeah, but then he might shoot you with his other gun.

checkmate

my other gun is a ferrari

nah shit's performative, you know? i got rainbows all over everything, he got a gun. it's a _lifestyle accessory_.

I passed a guy at the grocery store in civilian clothes who had a Glock on his hip and extra magazines on the back of his belt, the first time I've seen someone out of uniform carrying that I can recall - maybe a civilian but he also looked like a 5'9" thumb so maybe a cop?

A sudden attack from an unexpected quarter would find them totally unprepared.

nah shit's performative

both absolutely otm

I'd see people open carrying a lot when I lived near Idaho and my first thought was always how easy it would be for me to take their gun away when they weren't paying attention.

I wonder if they got kind of a rush the first time they went outside with a holstered weapon, even though it's pretty well-accepted in their communities.

Once while living in Arizona, I saw some guy ride up to a 7-11 on a bike and he had what looked like a .357 sticking out of his pants waistband. I couldn't believe it didn't fall out while he was riding.

I'll bet the cashier at the 7-11 really loved seeing that guy walk through the door.