I saw a reddit post of someone who put pulsing RGB light strips inside their gun safe, and while I don’t hate the look (they should have slowed down the speed though) I just had to have a little dread-laugh at the idea of trying to find what you want in there hungover at 3 AM by gamerlight. Rushing through the dark to a gun safe in fear of your life while the sounds of pursuit draw near already sounds like a level of terror bordering on the psychedelic. If I was experiencing that primordial state, and I got my safe open and it suddenly filled the room with a glaring rainbow light that said:

spoiler

party-blobparty-blobparty-blob HEWE’S YOW WEAPONS UWU, KIWW OW BE KIWWEDparty-blobparty-blobparty-blob

I actually think I might puke. It would feel like some mocking hallucination. I might wonder if I was already dead. I certainly would not feel more prepared for anything.

I feel this way when I look at a lot of gun things online. Obviously there’s a representation bias there, where people without opsec needs, people who like to share their cool stuff, and people with too much money -or all of the above- are more likely to post online. Therefore the most prolific gunposters are also the ones most prone to doing epic internet shit to their guns, I get that. And I also get that there’s serious guns and there’s fun, weird range toys. Not everything must be serious at all times, we can sometimes wash our ushankas. And I will first say that I’m not in regular contact with any part of the gun world that isn’t online. I’d like to be, but ammo is expensive. So this is a largely vibes-based analysis with an internet skew. That said, my opinion is this, so much of the gun culture I see online, in stores and at ranges is deeply frivolous (whatever) and childish (troubling). Yeah I know, astronaut-1, but it feels like theres been a qualitative shift in the vibe. I’m not sure how to encapsulate it other than by saying that American gun culture, being mostly a consumer culture with military and police crossover (which brings extra brainworms from the Micheal Bay movie slop propaganda sphere) was ripe for Marvelization, and it has Marvelized to an intense degree.

Maybe I’m just applying a new label to a timeless dialectic: some people have always done silly shit to their weapons, and some people have always scoffed at it for reasons of solemness or something, like I am now. It just seems like the level and style of dumb shit that we specifically are doing now could only come from a culture so enamored with living vicariously through fictional warfare but so generally insulated from the real thing. All this shit could only exist, be sold in the zero-gravity environment of the boring suburbs whose numb inhabitants nurse more and more fevered dreams, are subjected to massive media campaigns of psychological conditioning to make them dream, to sell more stupid gun shit. The second you subject it to the gravity of a real life and death struggle, it become absurd. When you’re menacing a drag story hour with your rifle and your bros, all your fascist meme patches are doing their job: instilling in all decent people the fear of being murdered by a fucking loser, which is worse than just regular getting murdered. But in an actual shootout, how are those baby yoda pepe patches gonna look covered in your friend’s offal? How are you gonna look then? Like a toddler. Like a big, out of your depth baby, which is what you are, and do you really wanna die looking like that? Be immortalized in crime scene photos as the corpse wearing an IFAK labeled “emergency bacon”?

Don’t get me wrong, while this is mostly a right wing/centrist/apolitical dumb guy who thinks he’s the boondock saints phenomenon, nobody is immune to it. It’s seductive, you find a cool thing and you want to put it on your cool thing, and then smash cut to the slim but real chance of you fumbling with your 12 pound rifle in the middle of the night, half-remembering how to operate 6 different attachments and praying the little Mechanicus incense brazier you hung from the barrel doesn’t clank against anything in the dark.

I don’t really have a conclusion, other than the obvious one in the title. I guess my conclusion is “know your toys from your weapons, and keep them seperate”. With the way everything has been accelerating, I feel a special kind of disgust that such an unprecedented moment of omnipresent crisis be met with the fucking tired, stale, insipid, oafish symbology of the gun-as-toy collecting, chemtrail fearing moviebrains who accuse everyone else of being sheep and not taking the responsibility of self-protection seriously.

  • i saw this absurd action-spy thriller movie a few years ago where the opening scene involved some foreign assets (russians being sneaky) having a “safe house” in the suburbs, some two story house in a sleepy neighborhood. in the scene in question, some counter-intelligence apparatus is tipped to its location and decides to move in with like some very innocuous looking undercovers asking to use the phone while probably like 30 heavily armed/armored people in a rapid response force are deployed in all directions, but out of sight. the house has like 3 guys in it and like all this surveillance equipment and a bunch of computers doing computer stuff.

    anyway, the house residents decide to play it cautious and the leader says “we’re blown, burn it” and as everyone is preparing to walk out the back, this guy opens a panel in a closet to flip a switch. when he flips the switch, an overhead sprinkler system activates with emitters in every room of the house except the basement (which leads to the backyard). as the occupants are walking out into the backyard, the emitters are misting everything with gasoline or kerosene or whatever. like 20 seconds after that starts, magnesium sparks are showering into the rooms and everything goes up.

    the movie was extremely stupid, but i remember when that scene happened i was like, “oh dam, they aren’t playing”

    it made me think about, if i was fully crazy and rich (but not stupid) what kind of automation i would want to put in to a typical suburban home to turn it into a redoubt during a seige. personally, i think the move would be to appear as “normal” and “not hardened” as possible from a quick assessment, but make much of the house a killbox. like secured doors/windows, bars/strike plates as is typical in some places, but the “crazy” would be to have hidden access doors to a crawl space where you could disappear/reappear at will. and like low lighting, except one could maybe strobe rooms from below to disorient invaders. naturally, like several million dollars worth of the highest-end signal jamming equipment to be activated once the trap is sprung, to fuck with incident response command outside. also, landscaping with big rocks that would act like bollards to prevent some kind of a armored vehicle ramming its way into the house.

    and, when the jig is up and it all gets too crazy, a tunnel i can crawl along with an oxygen tank that leads like two blocks away to a poorly lit area where a little shitbox is waiting, after i’ve pulled the cord that mists the house with some accelerant and sparks it.

    anyway, i don’t get the gun storage, brandish, display fantasy thing either. it feels like more of a religious ritual with symbolic attachment than anything else. guns are kinda one-note to me and boring. i’d rather talk about a hidden doorway or DIY home automation, if we’re gonna get all jacked up about home invasion fantasies. hell, entry door securing is more interesting to me. like security bars and speakeasy slots. people will spend thousands on a piece, but totally accept a front door that some bozo with a pry bar can pop open or some pig with two heart attacks can kick open. that’s what makes me think the gun thing is more of a religious talisman than anything else.