The Second Amendment is pretty clear, even if some people have found a way to muddy it to some degree. "[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The people. That doesn't just mean old, white dudes.
And the media has started waking up to this fact, but it seems the same media wants to use this as an opportunity to bash.
For those of us engrossed in it, that's just something many of us take for granted. We know better. We know that on any given day at any given gun range, you might well see the virtual rainbow that is American demographics. And most of us are, at worst, silent about it because it's just how things are supposed to be.
But the media wants to make a thing of it..
n a video posted to the Survival Sisters Facebook page, a little elementary school-age girl with immaculate braids and a blue T-shirt grips a machine gun, squinting into the sight.
The automatic weapon is huge in her tiny hands, but she holds it expertly, even if she has to balance it on a block of wood. As the video continues, she pulls back her finger and fires a practice shot. Music taken from the movie 300 swells in the background.
Cut to a higher-definition clip, taken years later. That little girl is now a young teen, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She stands confidently with her weapon, her yellow ear defenders and safety glasses matching a yellow shirt with flowers on it, and pumps round after round of ammo into an open field.
The huge bullets fly past the camera, one after the other. At one point, her father steps in behind her to gently steady her with a hand on her back. Once she’s finished with the round, she reloads and immediately starts again.
The video is titled, “The evolution of Naomi,” and it features one of the four Thrasher daughters — Naomi, Kennedy, Brooke and Charli — all of whom have spent their lives around guns. Now in their late teens and early 20s, the Thrashers started learning about firearms before they hit kindergarten.
Sounds great, right?
Well, not really.
Not everyone was happy to see four young Black girls on a shooting range when they first started out, Fred Thrasher tells me.
There were a “bunch of older white men” who took offense to seeing his kindergarten-age kids learning about gun safety while their father demonstrated with real firearms. Some of those white men approached him and said: “I’m going to call the NRA on you, because you shouldn’t be teaching that.” Some of them made aggressive comments directly to his daughters, telling them they were going to “make them eat dirt”.
Thrasher took a sanguine approach. “You should call the NRA,” he says he responded. “I don’t have to have a certification to teach my children a fact. Call whoever you want to call, because the NRA don’t regulate me… But it’s not even that you want it to be regulated. You just don’t want me doing it with my children, because they mess with your reality.”
There are, of course, other examples, including a trans guntuber named "Tacticool Girlfriend" who has bashed the gun community previously in the media to some degree or another as "macho" or "toxic."
The piece does note that gun ownership is very diverse, that people from all walks of life are owning and using guns regularly, but let's talk about the bashing for a moment. Why is it that was this a focus of this report?
Well, for one thing, it's a golden opportunity to make the gun community look bad, of course.
But the thing is, there are people like this, and we're not doing a good enough job of telling them to sit down and shut up.
Oh, I'm sure there may be some embellishments in these stories, especially years after the fact. I'm pretty sure that human nature is still going to rear its head and leave out any bit that makes people look bad and makes the other party look worse, but the truth of the matter is that if the encounter had been positive in the first place, that wouldn't be an issue.
Sure, it's easy to say that the people are lying, especially if you've never personally seen such behavior. It's also entirely possible this was the behavior of a jerk who's a jerk to everyone and has nothing to do with demographics. Yet if you're someone who is already the odd person out, that's going to stick out more.
Yes, it's easy to just say they might have been too sensitive, but as I'm seeing from working on an upcoming piece on a similar topic, that only goes so far.
Look, the media is recognizing that gun ownership demographics are changing, but they're also looking for a reason to bash us.
Don't. Give. Them. One.
