You do not need to own a gun to be an American. I know that it seems like real Americans kill things all the time, get really pissed off about paying taxes and gay illegals taking all of our jobs but most Americans I know aren’t shooting people (even the Americans I know who believe that gay illegals are taking all of our jobs). I don’t own a gun, will probably never own a gun and consider myself an American.

I vividly remember seeing Tank Man during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and thinking that the Chinese people had no power because their government hadn’t allowed them to be armed. I kept thinking that Americans would never tolerate their government using tanks to disburse a crowd.  That was my THM from Tank Man….Admittedly I was also mostly drunk in 1989. I kept thinking “if only those Chinamen had guns….”  Of course I was wrong. My thoughts about Tank Man are really irrelevant and will never be as elegant and personal as this:

… It’s this image [of the Tank Man that] came clearer and clearer in my mind and stronger and stronger, to say, this is what a human being can do with the face of human freedom and dignity in front of this violent power. That ultimate spirit of freedom will last longer than the strength of tanks and machine guns. … Where [are] Hitler’s Nazis? Where is the former Soviet Union? Where is Suharto’s Indonesia or Pinochet’s Chile? They’re all gone, and the Chinese Communist Party and its dictatorship will be gone. And the men standing in front of tanks will stay. … And that’s what this picture stands for me. …XIAO QIANG
Director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Here in the USA (aka USA!USA!USA!) I’m not afraid of my government driving tanks down Pennsylvania ave to stop the March for Our Lives this Saturday because the demons We are protesting are tremendously more subversive. Although the NRA seems to be a force of nature, with it’s crappy TV station and it’s omnipresent (in SE VA anyway) round stickers and it’s stranglehold on congress, it’s membership numbers are secret. Still,  the ancillary evidence points to pretty low numbers.   It’s real product is fear which isn’t as easy to quantify as membership rolls.

I have absolutely no idea how to abolish fear. It would be a lot easier to just get rid of the guns. In a perfect world, I would like to see a ban on any type of military style weapon meaning any type of automatic, semi automatic or any type of device that allows a gun to operate as semi automatic or automatic. I want to ban sales at gun shows, require extensive background checks for the purchase of a gun. While I’m at it, I want to ban all big game hunting. Wanna kill something big? Go kill those pythons in the everglades, the world will thank you.  I also don’t want anyone to own a tank or a nuclear weapon either OR have the means to make one.  I don’t even want the government to have these weapons.  If we aren’t smart enough to use diplomacy to solve our issues then we aren’t smart enough to have a country.

I don’t know if this march will do anything. But I was at the Women’s March and I saw Harvey Weinstein go down—-and I can’t help but to believe that there is a correlation there. So I’ll see you there, kids. And no…I will not buy you beer.