“Guys, guys! We’ve been getting it wrong since 1868!!”

I'll bet Tim Scott loving all the decisions he's made in his life still.

just the tip. We'll just soak the ad tracking for a bit.

rip

eef dat watah wet... ees go' gaytahs.

They're experiencing a fundamental cognitive dissonance. Their life-long proximity to their weapons has inculcated them with the belief that the weapons are safe and keep them safe. The horror that a family member could be irreversibly un-alived by the weapon is anathema to that "safe" belief they have. Frankly, it's preventing them from properly grieving and living their lives.

It certainly helps to explain why there's significant push-back to common-sense gun control - some Americans experience profound reliance on the presence of a weapon to feel a "normal" sense of security and well-being. It's tragic, and there's no easy way to interrupt the establishment of that totemic objectification of weapons.

Edit to add relevant quote from the piece:

...she steers a car that has, among other things, a loaded gun in the glove box. It’s a 9mm — the same caliber that killed Kimi — but while her anger bothers her, guns don’t. She doesn’t feel nervous around that gun or any other gun. She’s more scared of not having one. She still has a child to raise, and what if there’s an intruder, and that intruder has a gun, and she doesn’t? How would she recover from that? How could she live knowing she could have protected Jaxon but had decided she was too afraid to have a gun?

Joel, the great-grandfather who left the gun out, lives at the base of a small hill in a quiet three-bedroom house. “It’s always quiet here,” he says one afternoon, ... There are so many things he could be doing. The pool and garage need cleaning. He has a treadmill he doesn’t use. And a work shed where he has assembled thousands of bullets and where he would like to assemble thousands more. He loves guns so much he sometimes falls asleep thinking of them. But then it’s morning again, and he’s walking past the room where it happened, past all the pictures of Kimi, and sitting on the couch where the thoughts start over again. Was the trigger defective? How much pressure did it take to pull it? How could a little boy have fired a 9mm pistol?

The whole article is a nice read, and every paragraph reinforces the thesis of the piece: that family is fucked-up

Headline next week: Meta has said it will expand its hate speech policy to cover more uses of the word “Nazi” when applied to white males on its platform.

Congrats!

you might be looking at an entirely different kind of portal.