conceal and carry

Of the two men standing at the range lanes, guns arrayed on the tables in front of them, I want to work with the one who taught us safety. His belly stretches the cursive abolish ice looped across his gray t-shirt as he lifts a hand to the back of the woman currently shooting. He is murmuring encouragement. Except, he isn’t murmuring at all, he must be shouting, because we all have ear plugs and noise cancelling headphones on.

When they start I heard him ask if she has shot before. She replies that her dad tried to teach her, so she is nervous. She doesn’t have to explain why, the tension shakes her hand. She is white, in her forties, with a pink leopard print cardigan, tight dark denim jeans, and crisp chuck taylors. When she finishes and the paper target flies back down the lane, the instructor tells her to keep it and show her dad, saying what a great job she did, look at that bullseye.

I had seen his face recently on an algorithmically pushed video meant to convince me my own city is dangerous. He, a Black man, was yelling at a police officer to do something better with his time as they took down a community check point in the street. For a week or two, these check points popped up at intersections across the southside, roundabouts constructed from osb scraps and busted furniture, friendly neighbors waving through other friendly neighbors and alerting when a vehicle with ice agents tried to go through.

I haven’t wanted to write about the federal occupation, the same way I couldn’t make sense of the uprising in 2020 with words, I knew I would only be adding to the litany of traumatized social media posts groping for how to convey the scale and terror.

But the weight of a gun in my hand. The energy of a room full of thirty visibly queer, femme, black, asian, and latine people, both nervous and grounded. The private lounge of the gun range, rented to insulate us from the rest of the space, the faded leather couches, cop show playing on a tv in the corner, certainly not built for us. How we filled it anyway. What it means to be clear eyed and resolute when something you thought you’d never do becomes no longer optional. That I can write about.

Some people have spent the last three months protecting their neighbors because of hope. There is a story of birth pains, that there will be something after this that makes this worth it. This isn’t what keeps my signal alerts on or why I drop groceries off at night, leaving my phone at home. There is simply a moral clarity. Clear as a bell. Clear as a gunshot.

To enter the range lanes from the lounge, there are two doors. One needs to be closed before the other is open because of the noise. Three of us stand on this side of the doors, on deck, watching another two people take their test. 5 two handed shots, 5 with your dominant hand, 5 with your non-dominant hand, and 5 with the target at a greater distance.

An older white woman with long gray hair, stands wide legged holding her own gun, which in my head is a smith and wesson, a cowboy gun, six chambers that would spin around in a movie on a dare. When she shoots the action creates a vacuum around us, my body sucked in and slammed back into itself. I step back out into the small space between the range and lounge, taking advantage of a threshold, an in-between space where I can calm myself.

When I send my own dad the paper target, with a cluster of shots in the middle, he asks how it felt. Was I scared? Did I become suddenly more powerful? But it was like most heightened experiences, I watched myself less with feeling than to steady necessary breath. I watched myself divorced from myself, thinking not of a human I feared, but one I loved, and the word necessity. I think of the tools we have used to fight for each other throughout time, a stone, a guillotine, a gun.

A common therapy exercise is to map out your core values. I think of it as a map at least, each one a marker on the topography of my decisions. The one that drives me most strongly is integrity, it’s a compulsion really, to do as I say, to live in a way that I will be satisfied with when I die. Integrity is the opposite side of the coin of despair I have worn smooth. It made me naive, before I named it, because I thought this was definitive of living for people broadly speaking. Now I see the people who have joined the federal government for hate or money and see how fear wipes this away.

The person who set up the permitting class, a loose connection formed over decades, is a heavy lifter. We use the gym space she works at for the class portion. She also coordinates massive amounts of mutual aid, her face appears on social media and sends the barest of missives—it’s time, she says, to give more. That is what living in the occupation has meant. Every day I wake up and think, it is time to give more. The people who are dusty and bedraggled with this integrity, whose eyes are shiny with it, whose voices are hoarse, they are like beacons.

I took the class, in part, to be closer to her. This is part of why we’ve been able to hold onto our humanity, our integrity, in the city. It can’t only be me, we looked around and saw fortitude in each other, saw strength and it awakened such a hunger to be alive, to be more than labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. To become beacons ourselves.

I don’t think we won here, not really, inconvenienced the machine maybe, but they have terrible power. I do think we have experienced another shift of collective consciousness, one that everything in our society is built to force us to conceal. There is a weight to it, in our bones. Even those of us who knew, who experienced the fires and fear and the demand to live unbridled in the uprisings, even us, I think, realized we can do what has to be done. Can carry that which must be carried.