Thread by @JuliusGoat

THE GUN DEFENDERS

Last week a man stood on a street carrying an AR-15. It’s the sort of weapon that people who want to massacre schoolchildren most prefer to use.

The place he chose to stand was a pickup stop for an elementary school bus.

armoxon.substack.com/p/the-gun-defe…

He said he was doing it to protest new gun laws in Maryland, which would make it administratively a bit harder for him to carry this gun in the open. He’d need a permit.

And who can’t sympathize? Permits are inconvenient.

He also said that he believed that by standing there, it would deter crime in the area.

He’s a good man, according to him.

Maybe so!

He represents no danger to anybody but bad guys, according to him. As far as I know, he didn’t share his criteria for making those determinations.

Better hope he doesn’t decide you’re a bad guy, I guess!

We’ll come back to him.

Let me tell you about the trails I run.

When I run trails, I sometimes encounter people in twos or threes but mostly ones, and sometimes, as you might expect, some of those people are women.

I’ve seen pictures of me when I’m jogging; I’m 6’2” and 230 lbs. and even if I’m trying to smile, exertion turns it into a scowl. So, I do my best to seem as non-threatening as possible on the trail. I don’t know how good of a job I do, but I try.

I try to give people as much of their own space as I can, and make a little unobtrusive cough from a dozen yards back if I’m coming up behind so as to not suddenly startle somebody with my sudden presence.

Just little things like that.

This is not a big deal for me to do this, by the way. I am not looking for praise.

I happen to know that am not a threat in these moments. I just recognize that nobody else knows this about me.

I think this is a standard part of recognizing that other people exist.

It's also a natural response to my learned awareness that this world is a different experience for women who travel an otherwise-deserted trail than it is for me, because this is a world that has not prioritized women’s safety over men’s ease.

Because of this, I don’t get to live in a society where I will be automatically presumed by women to be safe, because to a certain extent, society will permit me to be a threat if I want to be one—and that is true whether I am going to be a threat or not.

To be clear, I don’t think the women I pass on the trail are usually actively scared of me. But I happen to know, from listening to women’s report of their own experiences, that they have learned certain things at a very early age that I have not.

Women have learned to be consciously aware of men in a way that I have never learned I have to be aware of women.

And so if any women do experience fear as I pass, I know this would not be an irrational response to my presence, even if I happen to know that I pose no risk.

And then there’s this, which I think is important: If anyone I pass on the trail feels fear as I pass, this isn’t something they are doing to me; it’s something I am doing to them. This has nothing to do with what I intend I notice. It is their fear, caused by me.

Again, I think this represents a basic awareness that other people are people, too, that their experience of the world matters, and that I am not the protagonist of anyone’s reality other than (maybe) my own.

A world where I could be automatically presumed safe as I pass on the trail would be a world where the ease of abusive men is not prioritized over the safety of the women who they abuse, so if I want to be someday automatically presumed safe, I might try to align myself w/that.

This alignment would, among other things, involve my entering into this basic awareness, and adjusting my behavior accordingly—just a simple awareness that women are people who exist and matter, which helps guide my behavior in tiny ways that cost me literally nothing.

Not all men enter into this awareness, by the way.

Ironically, these are men most likely to respond to any attempt to deliver this awareness by saying “not all men.”

You could almost think that they were acknowledging that not all men accept awareness of the existence of other people.

They mean something else, though, when they say it.

Now I’d like you imagine if I did something else on the trail.

I’d like you to imagine if, instead of trying to not be obtrusive whenever I passed a woman jogging the opposite direction on an otherwise deserted trail, I turned around and started following closely behind her.

Imagine if, when she exhibited any sort of fright or alarm, I was offended and enraged, because I expected her to automatically understand I did this not to threaten her, but to defend her against any potential threats, because I saw defending women on lonely trails as my role.

I think it’s clear that doing this would make me some sort of a menace, no matter what I said my intentions were; and I think it would reveal deeper, more disturbing intentions.

I think it would reveal my beliefs about whose perspective I did or did not consider valid, and even which of us I thought should get to decide about who got to feel fear, and why.

Now: let’s get back to the man by the elementary school bus stop.

armoxon.substack.com/p/the-gun-defe…

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armoxon.substack.com/p/the-gun-defe…