Fuck You and Fuck the Gun You Rode in On

Bill Hyde kneels before the names of highschool friends etched in The Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall on June 11, 2016. Hyde was serving in the Navy during Vietnam, so he never went in-country. "I don't know if it made me lucky or made me ashamed," Hyde said in an emotional moment. He continued: "We all lost ... lost a lot of friends there." The Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall was in Reitman Park in Longwood, Florida, June 5 through June 12, 2016. The memorial is a 3/5th replica of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington DC and bears the names of more than 58,000 people who served and died in the war. (Jordan Krumbine / Orlando Sentinel)

I didn’t want to write this.

Really -- I was happy to take a break from blogging this week and instead put my head down to finish my (currently 70+ page) outline for an upcoming novel.

I was perfectly content to just be quiet because gun control and politics are not my expertise. I’d rather be talking about creative, writing, narrative structure, and why I don’t give two shits about season four of Stranger Things while simultaneously agreeing that season one was one of the greatest gifts of television.

I’d rather talk about how, at the end of 2020, I finally nailed down my top four favorite films (The Wizard of Speed and Time, Brigsby Bear, I Heart Huckabees, and the Station Agent, in no particular order) and how last night I finally nailed down the fifth: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

I’d rather be working on the multiple writing projects I decided to simultaneously tackle — surely, in a moment of pure, lucid absurdity, just for the variety of it and to see if I could. (I wrote over 12k words last week, spread across all of these projects. It was neat.)

But tragedy has a way of taking the wind out of our sails. It’s a shitshow for everyone, especially the families dealing with immediate loss, and for creative artists who are already dancing along the nihilistic edge of an existential abyss ... seriously, what’s the fucking point of any of it?

After the Buffalo shooting, I turned to my partner and said the same thing I say every year at this time: “’tis the season. And if you think that’s bad, buckle up, baby.”

Thoughts and prayers.

What can we possibly do?

Handwringing, handwringing, handwringing.

And then Uvalde happens.

Fuck all. These shootings are more predictable than hurricanes.

And here was my response as we watched the coverage of murdered children (moderately embarrassing? Fuck it, here we are ...): “Over 500 people died of COVID yesterday. Over 600, today.”

I didn’t want to write this because I don’t feel like it’s my place to say anything or that I have any ground to stand on, but since the people we’ve put in charge continue to refuse to do anything, fuck it, right? I’m just a nobody from nowhere, a writer and creative wizard, and a human being who’s having a hard time dealing with this world right now.

The guns have got to go.

And if the people in charge won’t do it -- in this bold, frightening new age where personal responsibility is the only responsibility -- it’s time we do it ourselves.

Look, I don’t like that this is where we’re at. I don’t like that COVID and climate change have shifted all social responsibility for action to the individual, allowing our legislators to sit back, collect paychecks, and do absolutely nothing.

Worse, I don’t like that, at the end of the day, American media needs to become the number one target in our war against guns.

Guns are more protected than humans in this country, which makes sense since guns outnumber people in the United States by over 67 million (as of 2017 … surely that number has to be way worse, now).

And we’ve let it happen. We’ve allowed it to happen -- passively, intentionally, I don’t fucking know, but I’ve been right there with all of you -- participating in the fetishization of guns in our media.

And before you raise your cackles at a tired “blame the media” argument ... fuck off.

Columbine drew distinct parallels with The Matrix, and if that’s too nebulous or conspiracy-theory-ish, there are still a handful of murders that are tied directly to the movie. Aurora had overt threads connecting it to the Dark Knight. And every movie and television show that flat-out fucking fetishizes firearms, turning them into cool, desirable toys instead of grounding them in the cold reality that they are tools of murder, continues to inspire a culture where weekly mass shootings are the norm.

Please remember: my argument is that we’re fetishizing guns and murder. It’s an effect that gets more dangerous the more it’s exponentially compounded. So while we could find all the reasons to dismiss a direct connection from one mass shooting to one piece of media, the crux of my argument is that it’s our pervasive culture of fetishizing firearms, normalizing kill counts, and ignoring the complex, nuanced impact our media has in a society where AR-15s are the norm.

And since AR-15s are the norm, the body count is so high, and no one wants to do a damn thing about it … maybe it’s time for drastic measures.

Let’s face it: we need to deplatform guns. It’s high time, and fortunately, we don’t actually require do-nothing legislators to make it happen.

I’m not coming to this position lightly, nor am I oblivious to how quick conservatives have been to blame movies and video games. But, c’mon, their quickness has nothing to do with insight or intelligence (intellectual or emotional) and everything to do with deflection, moving targets, and shirking responsibility. And there’s no better example than the fact that conservatives have rallied around stigmatizing fucking doors as the latest culprit in this tragedy of mass murders.

Jesus fucking Christ, this has got to stop. We have to deplatform guns -- and while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and deplatform senseless mass murdering in our media. I’ll get to why, and how Stranger Things season 4, John Wick, and The Suicide Squad can all go fuck themselves ... but first, let me tell you about me.

I grew up homeschooled and sheltered, in an evangelical, homechurching, Rush-fucking-Limbaugh-every-drivetime kind of house in southwest Florida. My entire family swings conservative -- most relatively extremely (like, if I saw that name was in DC on January 6, I’d shrug and say, “Sure, that makes sense.")

I stand entirely apart from my family, politically, religiously (fuck you and the horse you rode in on, thankyouverymuch), socially, creatively, and any other way you could possibly imagine. I could probably argue about how vital oxygen is, and someone would push back. It’s a joke, but it’s also probably true.

Worse, I have no idea how this happened -- how the indoctrination never took and those fucked up values never stuck -- but I’m desperately thankful that it did.

Because if we’re going to take personal responsibility -- again, the only kind we’re allowed to take, apparently -- and deplatform guns -- again, because the people we pay to take care of this shit won’t do anything -- we have to be brutally honest. And that honesty inevitably leads to this:

You conservatives are the fucking problem.

Yes, modern media fetishizes guns and mass, violent death -- but you conservative fuckers are the ones addicted to it. You go through goddamn withdrawal if you don’t get your weekly fix, shooting up, getting high, and then literally cumming, jizzing your thoughts and prayers in the faces of the victims’ families in the worst fucking money shot our culture ever invented.

And you know what? You NRA-cucked, conservative cuntbags: you’re right about one thing. Guns aren’t the problem. And, yeah, like I already said, media isn’t the problem either.

Conservatives are the problem. And I don’t even care what you want to be called. Republicans? GOP? Q-Anon? MAGA Trumpers? Nationalist, populist, racist fucking supremacists?

Doesn’t matter. You’re the problem. And even if you don’t agree with the whole of the conservative platform, if you align yourself with this party that has demonstrated its values and what it stands for over and over and over again, you are fucking enabling the ongoing mass murder of our children, our neighbors, our friends, and our families.

22 in Uvalde. Over 600 that same day to COVID.

And Republicans let it happen.

They needed their fix.

And since we can’t send them to rehab, we need to move on to other options to get these asshole back on the wagon.

Like maybe, you know, deplatforming guns. Yes, it’s extreme. Yes, it violates “freedumbs”. Yes, it’s exactly like the entire house going dry because one person is an alcoholic. And yes, lives are literally hanging in the balance.

But I was telling you about me, right?

Let’s go back to 2016.

I was working at the Orlando Sentinel and hustling on Saturdays as the pinch-hitter photographer. On June 11, the scheduled assignment was a touring Vietnam memorial in Longwood, a little north of Orlando. There wouldn’t be a story attached to the photo, so I was flying solo, and my job was to shoot some photos, grab some names, and build a gallery.

Somehow, that weekend starting with a Vietnam memorial is both deeply profound and depressingly ironic.

Things went sideways when my assignment was interrupted. Like I said, I was the pinch-hitter photog, so if news happened, I was rerouted. News had happened, and I was sent to The Plaza Live Theater near downtown Orlando. Christina Grimmie, “The Voice” singer and rising star, was shot dead after her performance the night before.

To be a little clinical, there isn’t much to do on an assignment like this. I grabbed some exteriors of the theater and then covered the presser from Orlando police. I didn’t even pay that close attention to the details of the presser too much -- I was primarily concerned with shooting photos and capturing video. Those photos are still in circulation across the wire.

That was June 11. Tragic. Horrifying. A dramatic jolt from the routine.

Then came the 12th, and over the following days, weeks, and months, I would be as steeped in the trauma of mass shootings as my colleagues and every other news reporting agency who have had the unlucky privilege to run this gamut.

First up: the kneejerk obits for the Pulse Nightclub victims that were haphazardly thrown on video in the immediate hours and days that followed the shooting. I appreciate being quick, but these people had been murdered, and the professional quality of the Orlando Sentinel’s video team at large bore a stronger resemblance to a middle school A/V class than a professional media outlet.

I did what I could to clean up those first videos and do justice to the victims. But the real work -- the good work -- came later.

There were 49 victims. 49 obits. Stories were told and revisited -- 6 months, a year, two years later. Putting aside those first kneejerk obits, I personally cut the full roundup obits.

I cut the immediate roundup of “what we knew so far” on June 13.

I cut the story about the doctor and his bloody shoes.

I cut the fucking bodycam footage of Orlando police responding to the scene and pushing into the nightclub.

I didn’t just see the trauma of this mass shooting. I poured over it, frame-by-frame, because that’s what I do as a video editor. And for most John Q. Public, after all the jizzing of thoughts and prayers, the tragedy fades and we move on with our memes and television shows, all the movies fetishizing guns, broken political systems, and the happy little distractions of having all of everything, all of the time, in the palm of our hands.

For my colleagues and me, this tragedy -- this horrifying blip on June 12, 2016 -- continued to unfold. Every story told, every anniversary remembered, the tragedy continued. Our job was to keep telling the story, whether or not anyone cared to pay attention.

Between June 2016 and October 2017, other tragedies unfolded, but the big one for me -- another one that I poured over, frame-by-frame, story-by-story, was the murder of Orlando police officer Debra Clayton and the related death of Orange County Deputy Norman Lewis. Clayton was shot and killed outside a Walmart, just a few miles from where I lived at the time. Lewis was killed in a motorcycle crash while searching for Clayton’s killer.

Kneejerk obits. Thoughtful recaps. Capturing a livestream of the funeral and turning around a same-day edit that included the excellent work of our staff photogs. Of all the frame-by-frame traumas of video editing, the one that sticks out the most was an interview shot by my friend, Red Huber. It was an eyewitness account of Clayton being shot, and I just remember going over and over that footage, struggling over what and how to cut, and always wanting to make sure this woman’s story had the space to breathe.

Guns are dumb. They give entirely too much power to the wrong people, enabling them to do entirely stupid things. 

A year and change after Pulse -- in that horrible Mass Shooting Season of the year -- Las Vegas happened, and the Kill Count Crown was stolen from Orlando.

While I was personally grateful for the distance from the Las Vegas tragedy, the stories continued to be unpacked, just the same. 

Guns are fucking stupid. And we desperately need to stop fetishizing them. And I should know: before Orlando Sentinel, jumping back a few more years, I was freelancing for a small Orlando-based gun retailer, taking photos of inventory that made those guns look cool as fuck.

I really fucking hate myself for that.

I chalk it up to being young, needing work, and a healthy amount of cognitive dissonance, separating the creative act of taking photos from what this piece of shit actually fucking represents.

It haunts me. I have no idea if one of the guns I held for purely photographic and creative reasons went on to take a life -- or even multiple lives, because yes, the gig had me handling a bunch of assault rifles, too.

Yep, it really fucking haunts me.

I suppose this is how I make up for it: drawing the hard-line. Committing to this fundamental value. Guns are dumb. And if you personally fetishize them -- or enable the fetishizing of firearms -- allow me to invite you to fuck right the hell off. I had a recent freelance client -- unrelated to guns! -- that danced around a contract for months, all while his blatant fetishization of firearms infected my (already toxic) LinkedIn feed.

Fuck it. Enough is enough. I’m not interested in doing business with that. Disconnect, unfriend, block.

Because we have to fucking deplatform guns. It’s the only thing left to do.

Conservatives can’t help themselves, and they will drag this entire country down with them -- they’ve already done it with climate and COVID, and we’re just too dumb to see that they already did it with guns a long time ago.

Politics aren’t going to work. Reason is bullshit. “Conversations” don’t fucking matter. This late-stage capitalism will kill us all like the insidious virus it is, so let’s take some fucking individual responsibility and stop giving money to people, media, and corporations that fetishize guns and mass, senseless violence and death.

Good Guy Keanu Reeves feels like an unfortunate target, but fuck it. John Wick exists because of Keanu, and if you’re looking for a better example of the fetishization of firearms, you can’t really do better than the John Wick franchise (or The Matrix franchise that preceded it).

Keanu Reeves needs to stop making these movies. He has other options. And lives hang in the balance. If Keanu Reeve tells the gun-fuckers to fuck off, would it matter?

Lives. Hang. In the balance.

It’s worth a shot.

When super-liberal Alec Baldwin accidentally kills someone on the set of his film, you have to wonder: what the fuck is wrong with us? There is absolutely no reason to be using real guns -- we have the motherfucking technology, assholes! But no, we need authenticity. Realism. And we need a goddamn fucking armorer managing those useless fucking firearms -- tell me again how this isn’t fetishizing guns? All that’s missing is a fluffer to keep the pistol hard until the camera is ready to shoot the gun blowing its load.

Conservatives can’t help themselves, and if super-liberal Alec Baldwin needs to make movies with real guns, maybe the rest of us can’t help ourselves, either.

Season 4 of Stranger Things opens with a disclaimer that doesn’t stay on screen nearly long enough to read. It apologizes for all the dead children in the opening scene, positing that the scene was filmed a year ago, and there was no way of knowing that the show would debut immediately after yet another school shooting.

How could they have possibly known?

How could they have possibly predicted such a horrific coincidence? The imagery of dead children in a school-like setting mirroring the real-life tragedy that happened only days before the premiere?

When the odds are in your favor, it’s not a fucking coincidence.

When The Suicide Squad plays off accidentally killing good guys as a punchline to a shitty joke, it’s not a coincidence.

When it keeps happening, over and over and over again, it’s not a coincidence.

But then again, maybe we are that doomed. It’s not like anything has changed.

Maybe we are that addicted. It’s not like we can tear ourselves away.

Maybe we’re just getting what we deserve.

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