What we suffer.

For years we have suffered the argument that concealed-carry and open-carry are lawful expressions of your second amendment rights.

We have suffered smug neckbearded men in tactical vests wandering around neighborhoods and into restaurants brandishing AR-15s and assuring us that nobody should feel threatened by them despite the repeated instances of this exact same weapon being used to massacre schoolchildren, concertgoers, families in churches.

We have suffered Kyle Rittenhouse engaging in vigilante tourism in Kenosha, killing two men with his rifle and becoming a cause celebre for his actions, gathering money, fame, speaking engagements, and an acquittal for his actions.

We have suffered an incident of a man in Colorado walking around with a rifle and police telling alarmed callers that there was nothing they could do about it under current laws until he started murdering people, which he eventually started to do, killing two before law enforcement could arrive.

We have suffered ongoing mockery about how much gun violence Chicago has despite its “strictest laws in the nation,” even though those laws were in fact dismantled by legal challenges and the spikes in violence began afterwards. We have suffered having to put stickers prohibiting guns on the door of every place of business because we have been made to assume being armed should be the default status of everyone shopping for sneakers or watching their children jump on trampolines.

And then yesterday we suffered witnessing a man legally filming abuses by government agents, legally offering assistance to a woman who had been assaulted by these agents, legally carrying a firearm in its holster as per the laws of his state and the license he had legally obtained, being pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by these agents, and having said gun removed from his person before being shot ten times while he laid on the ground.

We suffer the obvious lies of the bright-eyed psychopath at the top tier of this nightmare, a woman who like most serial killers began by murdering animals, trying to convince us that this man, a nurse who worked to heal war veterans, was a hardened assassin who came to the scene with death and insurrection on his mind. We suffer the grinning, gas-throwing imp of the perverse who oversees and validates all of the worst impulses of his goons repeating these lies. And we suffer the combination of automated comment bots or deluded relatives who rush to spread these lies while desperately assuring themselves they are good and pious people.

And the only conclusion to draw from these years and years of experiences is that whatever the right to bear arms used to mean, in the hearts and minds of those who obsess over it now the right to bear arms only means the privilege to kill, and the freedom to decide who does or not deserve death at one’s own hands.