On Embarrassment

I don't have good ideas anymore.

I mean, I have good ideas in theory. Sometimes people tell me they're good. But it's kind of a leap of faith to believe it, and that leap can take some time. But ideas are time-sensitive, and usually by the time I have a sense of what might be worth pursuing, it's too late. So I make a lot of plans that I believe are going to go quite badly, in the hopes that I'll be wrong. I'm not wrong as often as I'd like to be.

What I have learned, in this process, is that my experience is made up of emotions, not events. Events are simpler to deal with. There are fewer moving parts in the world Out There than there are in the world within. Emotional logic requires very long sentences, and people generally do everything we can to avoid those. Observation requires more patience than it does insight. Honesty requires more focus than it does courage.

Honesty and observation have brought me to this: happiness that will not freely offer itself to you, happiness-in-misery, requires a staggering, terrifying, infuriating vulnerability. In practice, this means pain, pain, and more pain. In practice, this means failure. In practice, this means envying the dead; but death will not come. Not yet.

I spam the living fuck out of my various social media accounts. Sometimes it's because I'm proud of stuff; sometimes I'm trying to build my #brand. Most of the time, however, I'm just reaching out to feel anything at all. Sometimes it's too painful. Sometimes I have to withdraw. Never for long, though; time isn't something I have an infinite amount of, so I can't afford distance. I can't afford armor.

It's really hard.

That's a short sentence, but it's essentially all I'm trying to say here. All the violence and poetry in the world can only color that sentence. That's what's true right now. Life is frustrating, and painful, and hard. There's nothing to be done about it. Just breathing, and being, and feeling time making its way over and around me.

It's 2016.

Fight.

Smash is the way you deal with your life

To remember gaming, from my current vantage point, is to remember the never-agains.

Most are the provenance of aging--finishing 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. before the school bus arrived in the morning--or even time itself, and the frustratingly irreversible nature of human experience. No experience can be experienced again, of course, and irreversibility is not sufficient for any kind of profundity. The never-agains are more qualitative, the moments where my ability to grok the text, to play with it, to move with it, and the social space it enabled, approached the sublime.

For years, fighting games were my genre of choice. I'd always played, but fighters were something else: the only competitive genre I'd ever really been interested in, and arguably the only competitive activity I'd ever been interested in. Now sufficiently schooled to delineate the difference between the genre itself and my experience with it, I can say that the latter peaked with the release of Street Fighter Alpha for the PS1, a seemingly arcade-perfect translation of an arcade game I'd never had the opportunity to play. New aesthetics, new narrative hooks, new secrets, and (as far as the combined skillsets of our limited audience went) near-perfect balance. With the possible exception of some of Adon's supercombos--which, in retrospect, kind of foreshadowed the weirdening of the series that would continue in the sequels--it was an exceptionally parsimonious design: a place for everything, and everything in it's place.

My brother and I were both living at what is now thought of as my parents' house, and it's hard for me to imagine why I didn't think of that as a constitutive element of the game, like the hardware or the TV we played it on. A relationship of sufficient patience to handle intense, recreational hostility, and play it with a sense of humor. It shaped my ideas of game design for years, and my place within games culture. Fighting games were an identity, and a conditional one at that, with every victory making me wonder what a vague intangible concept like "skillset" or "play style" actually meant. What did it say about me that I could overwhelm with the impossible combos or unmanageable screwdriver throws, but never be ready for the opportunistic sweep when I rose from the ground? Fighting games are a machine for practical narcissism, bathed in dopamine and smelling like an IHOP at midnight or a river in rural Ontario.

Eventually, my brother moved out. Eventually, I did too. And while my feelings on gaming had been cooled somewhat by the ongoing tragedy of my personal life, it still seemed sensible to drag my N64 to my dorm. I'd heard GoldenEye 007 multiplayer was kind of a thing with the kids in those days.

I was pleased and surprised to find that I lived in a dorm specifically enamored of Super Smash Bros., which I had thought of as a somewhat obscure title. I'd been surprised it existed at all, upon its announcement, and was even more surprised to find that it was a lot of fun. I'd only played it solo.

I'd never get myself up to speed, exactly, but I played well enough with my group. Smash was a continuity, a reminder that genres and living arrangements changed, but experiences could be remade, that no never-again need ever be the last never-again. With the first Smash, I walked into a liminal clique already in existence, and found a place to bury my overflowing anxieties and be who I still thought of myself as being, instead of the brooding mystic I tried to play or terrified lunatic I actually was. A gamer was a thing I could be. I could be pretty good with Link, or Mario, or even Yoshi. It would get me through an evening now and then, to feel like I was moving in the same direction as everyone else, at the same speed.

When Melee came out, I was nearing the end of undergrad. Once again reeling from an implosion in my personal life, but pleased to find I had something of a life to fall back on. Inevitable grousing aside, it was better than the first one in almost every way: juicier and more subtle, with more variety and fewer cheap tricks. The larger cast was mostly welcome, although the unlockables did gesture toward roster inflation. As far as I know, there's no agreement on exactly how many characters you can put in a fighting game before they start feeling too much like each other; in my experience, the number is about 14, with the attendant margin of error. Despite Melee being better, it never aroused in us the same level of passion, as measured in profanity and inappropriate sexual remarks, as did its predecessor. We had Monkey Ball for that.

Still, as I moved toward Massachusetts in what I laughingly thought of as my adult life, Smash stuck with me. As I got deeper into nerd culture, I got a better sense of the breadth of Smash fandom, and the energy that enervated it. But the break between Melee and Brawl was a long seven years, and while I was excited about the new release, I no longer had any friends who were into fighting games. Under the circumstances, it had been a lot easier to reevaluate my genre preferences than crack the crushing inertia that permeated that doomed little apartment on Elm Street. I played it a couple times, but it was tough to commit to it without the promise of eventually being able to play it as part of a group. Maybe I just didn't like being reminded. At any rate, the issue was rapidly rendered moot; as my girlfriend became too ill to spend much time out of bed, the Wii was repurposed into a Netflix delivery system, where it has since remained.

I find, with two new Smash games on the way, that I had been ready to forget about the series, to relegate it to an obsolete identity of all-nighters, anarchism, and gnostic Christianity. I find that I had expected to be someone new by now.

A friend has already given me a download code for the demo. I try to remind myself that it's a game, a text, not a time or place. It's not an identity. It's not youth or potential or hope. It doesn't mean buying a Wii U, and it doesn't mean the attendant cognitive work involved in trying to make having purchased a console worthwhile. It doesn't mean caring. It won't hurt to remember. I can play.

New Moon

It's been a month, and I should probably update this thing.

My mind has been everywhere except games this for the last couple of months. When it did manage to wander there, it usually took a nap while I did the contemplative, one-thing-at-a-time thing, which lends itself quite poorly to writing. It's been a poor month for narration. A good one for long car trips and bonfires and sleeping on strange new couches, but crap for this word-after-a-word thing I try to do here.

There's been other writing, here and there. Back in June, I wrote a piece about the Santa Barbara shooting, out of a vague, anxious sense that I should do something to help. People waited in line to give blood after 9/11; I guess everyone finds their own way to feel useful. Personally, I dealt with 9/11 by taking a weird, serious detour in what was supposed to be a lighthearted short story about the apocalypse. Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes writing can't get in the way enough.

A new follower on the Twitter had a question about DBT, having seen it referenced in the most recent post, and it reminded me that I really need to set up a best-of page or something, so people don't wander in to be greeted by dense, sporadically emotive Community recaps. In the meantime, in an effort to keep myself honest, some things in the pipe:

• More Community, obvi. I've apparently had the notes for Social Psychology sitting ready for cooking for an entire month now.
• Something substantive about my experiences with DBT. Currently trying to figure out if it might be two articles fighting for independence.
• Semiotics and UI in turn-based strategy games, because gaming is Serious Business.
• I dunno, something about guns, probably.
• More posts explaining how and why I haven't been writing.

Undisciplined Platinum members will have access to the various works in progress that make up my textual life, of course, but the rest of you will have to wait in line like everyone else. In the meantime, July is over, and you, like me, survived another month. Sit with that thought for a moment, taste the air in your nose and throat, note the tension and creeping pain in your fingers and wrists, and selah.

You're alive. Do something fun.

Fuck everything, let's write about Buffy.

Writing is going passably well this year, if only in terms of ambition. I'm hoping to have a few more Gratuitous Link Posts, as I poke myself into various other, more widely read sites. At the moment, I'm completely blanking on something I need to have written in a week or so.

My brain, naturally, is keen on thinking about absolutely anything other than the topic at hand. Fortunately, the internet is a thing that exists. Also, alcohol.

Today is the 17th anniversary of the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer--the latter, real Buffy, mind you--and our acknowledgment thereof inspired this exchange:

@NicholasYanes @RealSMG @kyleismoody @Wordbeast @PapaKennMedia - Calm yourself sir, Angel was the better vamp but Spike was the better man
— Toni Sanchez (@TheToniSanchez) March 11, 2014

I'm sure eventually I'll write up the whole "Catholics are from Mars, Calvinists are from Venus" riff about the ways Angel and Spike embody differing concepts of redemption and holiness, but I wasn't planning on giving it a lot of thought tonight, until some sort of floating cube posted this. Quotation of note:

Suicidal feelings are not the same as giving up on life. Suicidal feelings can often express a powerful and overwhelming need for a different life. Suicidal feelings can mean, in a desperate and unyielding way, a demand for something new.

Which brings us to Spike. (Spoilers for two shows that went off the air a decade ago.)

Vampires, in the Buffyverse, are established as a demonic entity animating a human corpse. The extent to which a given human's identity survives the transition is a matter of some debate. The soul, whatever the fuck that is, goes away, that much is agreed upon. It seems to boil down to free will and conscience; a vampire is the cruelest, most selfish parts of yourself brought from deepest repression to the surface.

Free will is trickier. Spike, the subject of an experiment by a researcher specializing in operant conditioning, is prevented from acting on the anti-social urges we care about. He can't be evil, and he can even manage a very specific type of good, by default, since his love of power and violence allow him to hunt and kill other supernatural entities. He even learns to "love" Buffy when his obsessive desire to kill is converted, through positive and negative reinforcement, into a desire to make slashy slashy sex with her. Still, he can't quite maintain the illusion, and he betrays his allies at every opportunity. If he sees an angle for personal gain, he simply isn't able to not play it. He sells demon eggs because there's money in it, even though Buffy might kill him for it; he tries to rape Buffy because he wants to and feels he has the ability to do so. (Lest anyone bring up that it's offensive that this hearkens back to rape culture narratives about men being slaves to their sexual desires, I'll remind us all that Spike, not being human, isn't a man. Do try to keep up.)

The trouble is, Spike's darkest evil, at the point where we meet him, isn't terribly evil. His first act, upon becoming an immortal, bloodthirsty killing machine, is to see to the care of his aged and infirm mother. When he joins the gang for a century or so of torturing, killing, and eating their way across Europe, he gets bored with killing, and is delighted to hear that there's something out there that will put up a decent fight. When he decides to go after one of the relatively few humans who could actually kill him, is Spike seeking out valor--something his extended sires seem quite wary of--or is he engaging in suicidal ideation?

It's worth considering, not only because seasons 5 and 6 are thick with suicide imagery, but because the ultimate claim to Spike's morality is that he seeks out the restoration of his soul. The demon knows that the return of the soul will go very badly for it; when Angelus returns in S2, killing the only person he believes capable of restoring his soul is one of his first priorities. From the demon's perspective, seeking out one's soul would be akin to suicide.

Angel is so rapacious and cruel that his evil redounds upon itself and makes him heroic; Spike is so inherently white-hat that even the blackest evil can't quite drive the heroism out of him. (Egad, that does not sound right. Leaving it there anyway. I've got shit to do, can't spend all night editing.) So one possibility is that there's just something off about Spike's conversion to begin with. The trusty Dr. Girlfriend (ABD) offers a viable fanwank: a vampire is a demon setting up shop in a human, and Drusilla--a prophetess--didn't really fit that description to begin with, let alone after Angelus' tortures had driven her out of her mind, leaving an empty, supernaturally elect shell. This would explain why the line seems to get a bit wonky after Dru: not just Spike, but the nerd-vamp who's "human" enough to be incinerated by the Judge, and possibly Harmony as well, but seriously, fuck Harmony.

At any rate, Spike does some stuff it seems he ought not be able. In the S6 finale, after driving his motorcycle to--Africa? Is that where he goes? On a motorcycle? In one night? What the fuck?--he meets up with some sort of demony...thing. We're led to believe he was going to get the chip removed; that's how Joss reputedly told Marsters to play it, supposedly, although Marsters later said he'd always played Spike as if he'd had a soul. Hence, the most common way to interpret that event, the seemingly canonical interpretation, is that Spike asked for the soul, and used vague enough language that we, the audience, misread it. But how is it that he's able to intentionally bind his own will in the first place?

The suicide analogy is the simplest answer: that annihilation is as close as a vampire can get to authentic moral choice. A closer reading of Spike's interaction with the demon that restores his soul offers some alternative explanations.

We see Spike's arrival on the scene, and the camera doesn't cut away except during fight scenes; it doesn't seem likely that there's conversation we don't see. The demon seems to be expecting his guest, and they've presumably had some contact before, but it's never established. In fact, the encounter is never spoken of again for the remainder of the series. If we expand the possibility that the demon knows Spike is coming because of some precognitive or telepathic ability, a new interpretation becomes possible. Perhaps the demon gives Spike what he wants, but not what he asked for; perhaps the vampire can only seek its own annihilation at an unconscious level. (Alternatively, perhaps the demon just ignored what Spike asked for and gave him a soul because why the fuck not?)

It's an interesting case study in metaphysical fanwanking, but my favorite is a simpler causality, and why discussions of ambivalence and suicide always make me think of this scene. Spike stands at a crossroads, not quite one thing or another. He can experience neither the joy of authentic love nor the thrill of recreational murder, and it's killing him. The difference between the two is, from his perspective, entirely irrelevant. I suspect he doesn't particularly know what the demon's going to do to him, and he doesn't much care. It's not about making life better. It's worth dying just to make it different.

Talkin' X-COM Blues

About a week ago, I got bored with being scared and angry all the time, and I said to myself, "Self," I said, "#FuckEverything. Let's play X-COM for an entire week." I've had better weeks, to be sure. But I've had worse weeks as well, many of them recent.

I'm on the periphery of gamerness at the moment--amusingly, now that I'm the industry news guy at SFP--and I can barely be arsed to keep track of the new console news. Something feels very after about everything these days, and I can't remember ever being as indifferent to new developments as I am now.

Sometimes, dear reader, there are simply no more fucks to give. This is time for comfort food gaming. These days, I try to avoid the really obvious candidates: your Final Fantasy Tactics, your PS2-era actioners. Basically anything I've already played on the DS. When people ask what I've been doing all these years--or how I deal with the constant inflow of uncertainty and terror--I resist the urge to answer in list form. The block of my time from somewhere in 2008 to somewhere in 2012, I remember mostly as a series of DS games: Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Dawn of Discovery, Populous. Final Fantasy Tactics is a gimme. Clash of Heroes, I could play for-fucking-ever. Ditto Dawn of Heroes, because apparently brilliant, genre-breaking puzzle-strategy games are wedded to the "of Heroes" concept. The World Ends With You, I restarted several times, going a little bit farther into the postgame collection each time. I avoid it now mostly out of concern for the health of my screen. (Seriously, "Scratch"?) The most recent was Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, the 3D-but-not-really tactical strategy game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop. There's a lot to love about Shadow Wars, from the flexible level design, to the elevation of bodies-in-motion over of point-and-shoot, to a story so stupid you'd think Tom Clancy had written it himself. I avoid it these days because, at 98% completion, my options are to attack the 2% of the game that's so ridiculously difficult that even the FAQs have no real clues, or starting from scratch. Replaying an old game isn't quite like rereading a favorite novel or walking a beloved path, but even if there's authentic novelty to be had, it feels like an indulgence I can ill afford.

So I'm glad to have X-COM: Enemy Unknown. The Firaxis remake, not the 2K Australia FPS that's apparently never fucking coming out. (Also, there might not be any chicks in it.) Glad not only because I've wanted a viable way to play X-COM for years, but because comfort food gaming benefits dramatically from games that are old and new. The stuff that got lost along the way is minor, and the new tricks are, for the most part, improvements. But this is less about the game, and more about the way the game makes me feel, assuming they can be separated for the convenience of that sentence. We might not have to write so much stupid shit about "story" if we went full reader response and said that the way the game made us feel was the game, but then, there's something inherently repugnant in reader response theory, in the idea that we make the text in our own closed worlds. Primarily, I suspect, because it denies us the chance to bend our knee to Authority, and consequently exploit His power for our own purposes, but also because it raises the possibility that our understandings of a text only agree by coincidence: that two people use one word to describe two concepts, and mistakenly think that they've shared something.

The world ends with you, after all.

I have another one of those irritating "story" posts coming, and I shan't dwell there tonight. But tonight, we are not rational, and tonight, we are not light, and as I watch those brave little scientists and engineers and soldiers--the sheer moral weight of not only their mission, but of the mere scale of their cooperation--and I think, where am I in this bleak-but-meaningful world? Whither the humanities?

You know. Because I'm an asshole. (I also use hashtags in my internal monologue.)

But seriously. Whither cultural studies? Whither ethics, if you've already accepted that the descriptive and the normative differ only in the sound of one hand clapping? Whither history? Whither incest, water reclamation, a messy abortion read over a caesar salad?

I have some very convincing daylight answers for each one of these, of course: that the function of the liberal arts education is to help a republic maintain itself through educated citizenry; that the model was derived from methods for educating clerisy; that critical theory is born by accident, an unanticipated mutation of an attempt by English capitalists to ensure the allegiance of the middle class amid the waning power of the Anglican church. But at 3:25 AM, I throw in my lot with Crick: the fact of the question's existence answers it. "Why?" demands history. "What" demands semantics. "How" demands ethics.

How ought we live? (What was she fighting for?)

What ought we do? (What am I fighting for?)

What am I willing to do to survive? (What are you fighting for?)

What constitutes the lower limit of "survive"? (If we get through this, I'll tell you.)

Because I settled on a truth today, that's always going to be true. I would do anything for my friends. Which I think is how everyone in the world feels. Which finally makes me understand new games journalism.

O, Death

When I woke up yesterday, I remembered that I had plans. As such, I ate first one, then a second meal. I showered. Shaved off my beard, and hacked off most of my hair. Put down my filthy eyeglasses and put in my contacts for the first time in months. And I ventured out into the night.

WiG Boston was meeting at Tommy Doyle's, and while I rarely turn down the opportunity for beer these days, I was more interested in that night's presentation, by one Zoe Quinn, developer of the recently released "commercial-ish" Depression Quest. I ran through it a couple of times in preparation, and I urge all of you to do the same, after a quick perusal of the trigger warnings.

The design is inspired, and I'll not detract from your depressing experience by describing it in too much detail. Suffice to say it captures very well the most game-like aspect of depression: the persistent sense, no matter where you are, that it's Too Late.  My experience with the game, in particular, was very positive: I am in way better shape than our unnamed second-person protagonist. My actual situation, perhaps, is a lot trickier--Depression Quest with a side of Silent Hill 2--but as far as coping mechanisms, motivation, and willingness to ask for help, I'm pretty good at this shit. Then again, it's new to our protagonist. I've been in the field since I was nine years old. "You merely adopted the dark," I wanted to tell him, unintelligibly. "I was born in it."

I'm grateful for the experience. There aren't many things that make me feel a sense of competence these days, let along mastery. And I do call my family when I can't bear to talk to them. I do go out when I don't feel like it, and half the time it goes quite badly, but I keep at it. I slog forward, maintaining the faith in what I can rationally discern, the command to treat the self like an other and the other like the self; I hope in the absence of hope. I plan for tomorrow, ignoring the visceral certainty that I've ruined my life.

So apparently I'm still good at something. Perhaps MITCO can help me find a strong verb to put it on the resume.

Absent from DQ, for reasons entirely sensible, is the impetus that follows, the empty altar in the church of Too Late. I've had a good deal of time on my hands, these past few years, and the philosophical wand'rings have proceeded apace. When someone you love is sick for months at a time, and the doctors can't tell you why, you get pretty familiar with death. You learn a lot about death, but you learn even more about fear.

And this, dear reader, is what I've learned in that time: the fears of death, rational and not, are perhaps too easily confused. The irrational, pre-verbal fear of death is, in practice, inferred from fear of pain. It is overwhelming, at times. It's stronger than almost anything else we can feel, but it's not deep, and in focused bursts, it can even be brought to heel. The rational fear of death is a trickier one; as has been noted by the talented and famous, nobody has anything bad to report about the stretch of time before their birth. Why should we be concerned about going back?

Because we experience death, over and over, during life. We experience it as loss, and loneliness. And the idea of death sticks to us, blinding us to the fact that the only person at the funeral who's guaranteed not to feel lonely is the one in the box. There only two people in the entire universe, after all: you and everyone else. Morality begins with the acceptance that you are always and forever outnumbered. Written in that fear is a social contract, perhaps the first of its kind; a promise issued daily to everyone we love, everyone we know, everyone we meet. I will keep your fiction, we promise, that tomorrow will be the same as today. Turn away from me if you like. I will continue to exist. I will maintain your reality.

I will be.

It's 4/20 Somewhere

A few months back, I went to MIT's GameLab symposium, ran into old friends and new acquaintances. The content was interesting, of course, but aside from finding myself suddenly in the same room with Peter Molyneux--and becoming very self-conscious of all the smack I've talked about him all these years--I mostly remember the breaks, and the reception, and the repeated catch-ups and introductions. I was exhausted, having been up late reminiscing with an old Tori room friend until the wee small hours of the morning, and found that I lacked the enthusiasm to be embarrassed about how things were going. So when people asked how I was, I didn't find a way to change the subject, or inflate pipe dreams into viable projects. I simply answered, in as friendly and earnest a manner as I could manage, "I'm terrible. How're you?"

The feeling is strangely liberating. Doris Rusch, of Akrasia and Elude fame, advised me to write a novel. It's a tall order, but I suppose she does have credibility on the topic. Tell you what, Doris. You make a game about writer's block, I'll throw 60,000 words into something from the Goofy Vampire Shit file. Who knows, if housewives can masturbate to it, I could finally be writing for a living.

If you'll bear with me, you'll find that you've been bearing with me for the last two paragraphs, because I haven't bothered to introduce the topic of this post, which is the Newtown shooting. I begin with the symposium to bring some context to my initial reaction: shock and disbelief. Specifically, shock and disbelief that people were rending their garments over a rampage shooting in America. The fault here is clearly mine; my capacities for shock and grief have been stretched a bit thin recently. To put it succinctly, I feel badly.

The thing is, even had I not been operating from a place of sullen amorality, I think I still would have been surprised at the extent of the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending. Because, honestly, if I reacted to every rampage shooting with the pity and anger and incomprehension of Columbine, I'd have either moved out of the U.S. or stopped reading the news years ago.

I promised to post exactly two things about this, because, as noted here, I gave at the office, and don't have a whole lot to say on the subject that's either original or interesting. The first was this, because it's the logical starting point for what interests me about the current cultural moment. There are a lot of issues in play right now in American politics, but gun control really isn't one of them. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it hasn't been in play for the decade or two; we'll have to see how the current kerfuffle plays out. If I'm not mistaken, the most significant changes wrought by the Columbine shooting, aside from the ongoing militarization of our schools, was a change in Wal-Mart's inventory. Since then, the most notable gun-related policy shift has been the expiration of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly (and oddly) referred to as the Assault Weapons Ban. This is not the brutal, gunless dystopia we were promised, and like his failure to crash the stock market and cripple American capital, reflects badly on Obama's willingness or ability to destroy America as he promised.

This has not stopped gun control opponents from making impassioned, heartfelt, deontological arguments, but I admit that I'm not entirely certain who they're hoping to reach, because gun rights are under no real threat. Congress can barely pass popular legislation, let alone "culture war" shit. Not only are "guns"--the entire broad category of ballistic weaponry, apparently, from the flamelock onward--not going to be banned, but no congressman is going to even introduce legislation to that effect. The most that's going to happen, barring a massive sea-change in Congress' perception of the electorate, is a ban on certain high-capacity magazines, and possibly the return of the PS&RFUPA. (That law is a lot of fun to type.)

I am, as a rule, deeply suspicious of principle, so when I see people making wide, generalized deontological arguments about present-day politics, I start asking whether the application of said principle can be defended on any grounds other than the authority of the principle itself. There are plenty of reasons one might prefer to live in a society that has few restrictions on private ownership of weapons. Hunting and home-defense remain perennial rhetorical favorites. Less commonly asserted is the value of corpse-free recreational shooting itself, which is to say, pleasure. A lot of people think guns are fun. Pleasure is a legitimate social good to be considered and weighed alongside others. This is an issue that can be dealt with through standard, boring democratic means.

What I find more concerning is the obfuscatory argument-by-invocation, the assertion that the second amendment takes democratic processes off the table. We can live in a society of freely available weaponry if we want to, but the second amendment does not obligate us to. At least, nobody claimed that it did until the 1960s. Regardless, it would be disingenuous to say that this ties our hands. The 18th amendment made alcohol illegal, but we didn't throw up our hands and say that the Constitution prevented us from drinking. We repealed that motherfucker. Ok, first, we continued drinking alcohol in huge quantities, helped subsidize aggressive organized crime syndicates that would then proceed to infiltrate our law enforcement operations, and started wearing really wonderfully fashionable clothing. But then we repealed that motherfucker. We, collectively, can do what we want. Some of those things might require more than a simple majority vote, but nothing is forever off the table. That is ok. That is how republics do things. The Bill of Rights is not the Decalogue. God will not wither our souls if we make bad policy choices. We will simply have to live with bad policy choices until we decide to change them. The argument from authority is not sufficient. If the Founders are worth listening to, we can discern that fact that the policy merits of their ideas, not the fact of their capitalized mythic identity.

This is not to say that we should take constitutional restrictions lightly, nor do I mean to suggest that more restrictive gun control policies would have uniformly positive, predictable outcomes. Conversely, that is not to say that trendy nihilism is the appropriate response. Yes, it is true that we cannot prevent all violence, all evil, everywhere. It is true, it is obvious, and employed effectively, it can add a meaningful rhetorical flourish. It seems to have every quality but that of being useful. We also can't prevent death, not indefinitely. But I still take the trouble to eat every day, and I take care when I make left turns. That utopia is unavailable is not, in itself, an argument that the status quo is the best for which we may hope. Chalking it up to original sin is not a policy prescription. Despair, like hope, is not a strategy.

Related, arguing that it's in poor taste to discuss policy, that it's "too soon" and sensitivity to the victims demands that we stammer awkwardly and change the subject, is a classic small-c conservative move, the first and most beloved argument to obstruct the democratic process. Yes, the media coverage is sure to be traumatic to many. This can be mitigated somewhat by consideration on the part of individual journalists, but in wake of a tragedy of this magnitude, I sincerely doubt that our contribution to the survivors' misery is more than negligible, in terms of total abject horror. If you're interested, you can test it out yourself. Find a parent who lost a child to accident, suicide, or murder, and tell them how lucky they are that they didn't have to see references to their pain in the media. I'm sure they'll agree that they have much to be thankful for.

As nice as it would be to bend the entire culture to sympathy for the victims, there are many, many children who haven't been shot yet, and they matter too. It would be nice if we could collectively and unobtrusively sit shiva with the victims' families, but we do have stuff to do. The supplication for sensitive silence is a specific application of the more general use of "politics" as a dirty word, denoting arguments over outcomes that are meaningless to all but the players directly involved. Politics, says the meme, is for politicians, a species of humanoid insect in flesh masks. It's despicable the way people keep trying to polticize the ongoing threat of random violence, as if the means by which we make collaborative decisions about how best to ensure our well-being could possibly have anything to do with preventing violent crime.

Thankfully, we are having that discussion. Sadly, in the main, it's not going terribly well. The gut reactions seem to mostly involve "banning" things that are already illegal, a matter not helped by the bizarre insistence that a problem that is partially technological be dealt with at any level of technical specificity. Semi-automatic and automatic are not synonymous; fully automatic weapons are already illegal, and have been for some time; the term "assault weapon" is a vague term describing semi-automatics that look like assault rifles. We've been playing first-person shooters for twenty fucking years now. It's not unreasonable to expect people to know a bit about guns.

On the other side of the aisle, Prohibition and the drug war are not the only times the government has attempted to ban things. As far as similarities go between alcohol, marijuana, and semi-automatic rifles chambered for .556 rounds, the fact that people have wanted to ban them is pretty much it. The risk factors, means of production, and moral economy differ entirely. Similarly, the argument that "criminals can always get guns" is somewhat specious, in that the availability of illegal guns is a function of the availability of legal guns. I rather doubt that criminals have set up underground factories into which they import raw materials and produce illicit weapons. It seems like that sort of operation would be much easier to find than, say, a grow house. (It is worth noting that, yes, 3D printing might make this reality in a few years. The meme might be more true by then.) The trade in illegal guns does raise some concerns about the efficacy of state laws in a country with 48 easily-transgressable internal borders. It also suggests that, if such a policy were enacted carelessly, we do run the risk of disarming the criminals last.

Ah, but here we hit another vocabulary roadblock. It's not insightful to point out that only criminals use guns to commit murder; it's tautological. Unless we legalize murder, it is not possible for non-criminals to commit murder. But people do commit murder, without first conducting a syllogism to see if it's ok. It seems that our definition of "criminal" errs heavily on the identity of the "career criminal," an odious symbolic individual who, for all his faults, isn't usually interested in getting himself killed for no particular reason. Criminals--those ruthless, rational, career criminals we're concerned about--tend to want to live. If they didn't, the money wouldn't matter very much, and they could just find inexpensive ways to kill themselves, like being insufficiently deferent to police.

Right, the police. The state's instruments of democratically authorized violence, a vitally important job that we've decided should be treated as a low-skilled, low-paying position. Conservatives and anarchists alike espouse the importance of being able to shoot it out with the police; curiously, the conservatives also eagerly argue that police should have no checks on their power whatsoever. The anarchists have the edge on this one, ideologically, but it's not a solution to the problem of a culture that too frequently allows bullies, vigilantes, and psychopaths to wield coercive power. I'll head off my mother-in-law's objection early, by noting that, yes, fewer than 100% of police officers are perjurers, rapists, murderers, etc. In fact, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm willing to bet that it's much, much less than 100%. The problem is that anything north of 0% is way the fuck too much. A state-authorized criminal is extraordinarily well protected, and their existence undermines public safety much more dramatically than comparably violent free agents. Furthermore, systemic problems in our legal system perpetuate rape culture, and poorly conceived, poorly implemented laws have created an underclass in which sex workers, immigrants, the homeless, etc. can expect no police protection whatsoever, putting them at an extraordinary risk for abuse both public and private. There seems to be no lobbying offensive aimed at making it easier for these folks to arm themselves, to defend themselves from violence at the hands of police, just as the shooting of Trayvon Martin did not lead to an NRA statement urging black teenagers to carry firearms to avoid street harassment. This absolute right to self-defense seems oddly haphazard in its application. But making it easier for people to shoot cops, or to shoot cops and get away with it, is not actually a solution in any reasonable sense. 

That the most egregious, unthinkable acts of violence cannot be entirely prevented is not a reason to give up on addressing the more prolific, ubiquitous acts of violence in American life. I think, should we actually do the work, we will likely find that the two are not entirely unrelated. I see no reason we couldn't have a sane, reasonably safe society and relatively unencumbered access to firearms for those that want them--there are fewer examples in the world than there used to be, perhaps, but, as Chesterton said, society is a human invention. "Could" is a very, very wide word. The question is what types and qualities of risk we're willing to tolerate, by binding or loosing. We can deal with this at the level of actual trade-offs, goods to be weighed against one another.

Finally--I swear--the emphasis on the more grandiose episodes conceal as much as they reveal, and aren't likely to lead to good policy. Rampage killers are, by definition, the most difficult to deter. They can be made less deadly, which would certainly be a worthwhile goal. But preventing rampage shootings is going to involve a hell of a lot more than vague generalities about mental health. It will involve dealing with the general patterns of violence in our culture, the role of privilege, and an awareness of the amount of psychopathy we're willing to let slide as long as you're a white guy from a decent neighborhood. It will involve economic justice, improved law enforcement, and a reduction of a hundred different risk factors. It will not happen overnight, and we'll need to make adjustments as we go. Fortunately, we have a technology for doing exactly that, and it works pretty well when we don't live down to our representatives' suspicions of us. It is the work of politics.