Stupid fucking machismo

  Hi, I'm BearLeft and I'm a gun person who is completely and totally ashamed by popular gun culture.

  It's all based on this hyper-masculine image of the independent self, a go-it-alone badass motherfucker who don't need no one else to know that he's a MAN'S MAN, BABY. No homo.

  There are a few major divisions within this ALL MAN ALL THE TIME world - there's the TACTICOOL ARMY MANS who swagger around like Real Twue Operators with their tricked out AR platforms in combat carries and so many pouches that Rob Liefeld rolls his eyes. The TACTICOOL ARMY MAN is gonna make sure that no damn dirty muzzies inflict their commie Sharia law on Real White Americans Who Are White Like Jesus.

See the pouches? The man has some kind of weird fetish

  Then there's SHEEPDOG IN SHEEP CLOTHING, carrying a gun all the time because YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THE BROWN PEOPLE WILL GET ROWDY AND YOU WILL HAVE TO PROTECT TEH WOMANS. The SHEEPDOG runs quickdraw drills and reminds me of Tackleberry from the Police Academy movies. Elaborate threat/response scenarios are planned out with the care and dedication usually reserved for sexual fantasies.

Seriously, that face should never be made outside the bedroom. And maybe not inside it.

Our culture at large is filled with rugged gunslinging heroes and anti-heroes, so it's not terribly surprising that some of the tropes would be brightly represented. John Wayne, Charles Bronson, and Clint Eastwood from the rise of the anti-hero. Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger for my own generation. A man who needs nothing but his wits, his gun, and  a pithy catchphrase. Bad guys all fall before his righteous fury. It's an attractive image, really. We all want to be The Good Guy, the unquestionable White Hat (even if the halo's tarnished, to mix my metaphors).

There are a lot of gun folk who don't subscribe to these stereotypes (yours truly included most of the time), but it's almost impossible to see them because of how... attention-seeking ARMY MANS and SHEEPDOG and their loudmouth, pushy buddies are. Guns are in, gays are out. Chicks need to be hot and naked, tofu is nothing more than a litmus test for finding who's not allowed in the club.

I was doing some link surfing and ran across an article by a somewhat prominent hunting blogger about the rising interest in hunting that's directly related to foodie/locavore/organic lifestyles (I talekd about this topic myself in one of my first posts here). I was excited to read it because it was from the perspective of someone "inside" hunting culture whereas the article I used as a starting point for my post was written from an outsider perspective.

I couldn't finish it. I just couldn't do it. The dripping contempt that this writer had for hipsters, leftists, and intellectuals was thinly veiled and more insulting for it. I'm sure that the author was trying to be enthusiastic for the people who were discovering hunting, but his overall attitude was something that makes me want to avoid anything that he and his company every do. I shudder to think about how his attitude affects people who are on the outside but curious about the inside. I especially hate cretinous right-wingers who use coded phrases and snark and think they're being SO CLEVAR THAT NO DUMB LEFTIST WILL EVAR FIGURE IT OUT BECAUSE DUMBOCRATS ARE DUMB.

There's a certain level of "you must be this tall to ride this ride" posturing that comes across in a lot of gun culture - you gotta sack up, sacrifice, man up. Be strong. I think that's a bullshit attitude.

As a culture, gun people are not going to sway many with such oppositional tactics, and in a lot of cases will harden potential allies against firearms and shooting sports. Especially with an activity like hunting (which contains a number of visceral actions, textures, and fluids), mocking people for their inexperience is fucking stupid and counterproductive.

Why in the name of Bob would anyone who doesn't look like they got hit by the Cabela's Camo Sportswear truck want to associate with an entire culture with gatekeepers who are complete and total assbags? There's a delicious Skittles rainbow of people interested in guns that don't get to see positive portrayals of themselves in shooting culture. These people are often met with hostile resistance or disdain when they attempt to participate.

As a quick mental exercise, conjure up in your mind the archetypical "gun enthusiast." What does your gun enthusiast look like?

I'd bet a dollar (Monopoly money!) that your mental picture is a chubby white guy wearing at least one piece of militaryesque clothing. If he speaks, his voice probably draws out vowels and softens glottal stops. What does it take to envision a Black person, or a woman. Asian? Queer? Is there a sense of cognitive dissonance that accompanies those thoughts?

In my mind, we need to be more supportive, more encouraging, and drop the friggin' lameass faux hero bullshit. If you want to cosplay Delta Force on your day off, that's A-OK by me; please for the love of all that is holy, don't be a dick about it. If you carry concealed, I hope that it's because you feel a legitimate need or calling to do so and not because it makes you feel powerful and enables weird rescuer fantasies.

Hi. I'm BearLeft. I'm a lefty, I'm a humanitarian, I'm a hunter and I think it'd be awesome if you wanted to join me on a range day.

Rape, gender and gaming

I'm diverging from my "gun" blog to talk about one of the biggest problems seen in gaming culture today. Namely, the overwhelmingly heteronormative cisgendered male experience and the difficulty that other perspectives have in getting taken seriously.

I'm a gamer. Tabletop, board, pen-and-paper, video, whatever. If it's a game I'm usually in. I love games and at one point even ran a video game development company (it tanked, I'm not very good as a CEO, I fear). One of my favourite things about gaming (video and role-playing in particular) is the ability to put your actual self o -hold and explore other potential selves. Especially with roleplaying games, you can be anything that your mind can conceive of. It's a powerful thing.

Video games give you a limited ability to engage in this kind of fantastical what-if - mainly because the you-protagonist is already defined for you. And that you-protagonist is almost invariable straight, white, and male. In games as far ranging as The Legend of Zelda,  God of War, and Halo, the protagonist is very much a white male (Leaving aside the argument that Link from LoZ is actually Hyrulian - his skin tone is within a few shades of mine). Super Mario Bros? While males. Mass Effect was hailed for its character chooser, allowing you to customze your character, to the point of playing someone of Mediterranean or African descent or even *gasp* A WOMAN. However, if you go the FemShep route, the romantic sublots don't change. You can still choose to get your mack on with A) Ashley the Human Marine, B) Lianna the Asari Scientist, or C) Nobody. You can either be straight or a woman in Mass Effect, but you can't be both.

From my own personal experience, my second ME character was a FemShep, and while fiddling with the "Randomize" button a combination came up that made her look almost EXACTLY like a real-life friend of mine. This pleased me at first, because it was a real kick in the pants to see my friend roaming the countryside, blasting baddies into their component atoms. Then I remembered that before long, romance would start to bloom - and the thought of guiding my friend's clone through same-sex interactions actually made me really uncomfortable. I deleted the character and have never run another FemShep.

 One of my very favourite games is 2008's Mirror's Edge, a brilliantly done first-person parkour/free-running game featuring the delightfully ethnically-non-specific Faith as our protagonist. I like this game for a number of reasons, including the fact that the game can be beaten without having to engage the computer opponents in combat (there's even an achievement for finishing the game without firing a single shot from the guns you can gank from the police), and that Faith's gender isn't a gigantic plot point. 

Presenting a not-white-straight-male perspective in gaming has really been difficult. I won't go too much into it, for two reasons: 1) The sheer recalcitrance of gaming culture at large to accept other perspectives makes me fucking sick, and 2) I could never to a better job of it than Anita Sarkeesian, whose "Damsel in Distress: Tropes vs Women" series at Feminist Frequency is an amazingly eye-opening and candid bit of journalism.

Mama Bear pointed me at a blog post by game design house FullBright, about why they're declining to participate in PAX's Indie Megabooth. Boiled down to its essence, FullBright has decided that statements made by Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade (the folks that produce the Penny Arcade webcomic and also host gaming mega-con Penny Arcade Expo) put Penny Arcade's morals at odds with FullBright's corporate ethics. Namely, Mike and Jerry have had come under fire for statements made about rape and rape culture, and people who are trans and/or genderqueer.

I support FullBright's decision. It's their brand, their product and they need to make sure that the people that they are associating with that brand align with what they find to be moral. The Penny Arcade crowd has fallen afoul of that, and thus the choice was made to not participate.

It makes me sad that this is the current state of affairs. For many years, Penny Arcade was a driving force for presenting gamers as a diverse and respectable group. In direct response to being called all sorts of terrible names by anti-video-game crusader and nutball lawyer Jack Thompson, the PA guys formed a charity called Child's Play, and its mission is to donate games and other entertainment items to children's hospitals the world over. It's one of my very favourite charities, and I'm honoured to have been able to work with them.

For years, Mike and Jerry have worked to show the world how awesome gaming and gamers can be, but they've hit some major bumps along the way (for example, they fucked up bad with the Dickwolves debacle). More recently, I've seen a major shift in tone and instead of being starry-eyed futurists that are all agog with the potential of gaming, the guys have instead turned into onion-on-belt old fogeys. Where there used to be cheeky wink-and-a-smile snark we now see some very real "I don't understand what these damn kids are doing, so they're obviously wrong. and probably dumb. STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE" commentary. There have also been some really negative responses to the transgender crowd. That's not the PA that I knew and loved, and I'm sad to see where it seems to be headed.

The genderfail stuff is really appalling to me, because that is something that has been very much against the official policy of Penny Arcade and PAX. For a number of years, I was a PAX Enforcer (one of their volunteer convention staff). In 2008, PAX was held concurrently in the Seattle Convention Center with Gender Odyssey, a convention by and for "transgender and non-gender-conforming people." PAX's policy on the other convention was very clear: Break Wheaton's Law and you get 86'd. As an Area Manager that year, I personally tossed two PAX attendees out for violating the rules. No appeals, no second chances. Out. To contrast that with some of Mike's public statements is jarring and hard to square in my mind. To be fair, Mike responded to the criticisms (and did so admirably well) but I think he still doesn't quite get it. There's a reason he draws the pictures and leaved the words to Jerry - written language is not his bag.

The gamer stereotype runs to two different forms: The socially maladjusted geek living in his parents' basement who spends all of his time immersed as other people, and the hyper-aggressive young man playing first-person shooters and spewing insults over voice chat. The truth is, while those two groups DO exist, they're not truly representative of gamers. The fastest growing segments of gaming are women, casual gamers, and older people. Gamers are actually an incredibly diverse bunch, with all kinds of different and wonderful variation. I know more gamers who are NOT straight-white-male, but the industry tends to act like these people don't exist. The culture, as well, works to disenfranchise these groups; some of the things being said to gay and/or female gamers is completely horrifying.

There are a growing number of games that explore the possibilities of alternate-perspective protagonists (and aren't just male fantasy wish fulfillment). The aforementioned Mirror's Edge, Rockstar Game's Bully, the upcoming Gone Home. All take and modify the "standard" protagonist in some way. Bully is a fascinating game to me, though I have yet to play it. Rockstar is more known for giving us the "Grand Theft Auto" open-world games that glorify sex and violence - sometimes at the same time, in the case of having sex with a prostitute in GTA3, then killing her to get your money back. Bully, however, drops the player into the role of a troubled young hooligan starting out at a new school. It retains the open world nature of the GTA series, but there are serious in-game consequences for preying upon powerless victims. Additionally, the romance tree is pretty open, the player is free to woo and smooch girls or boys, as desired.

I think that the rise of indie gaming markets will help bring about the cultural revolution that we need to combat these hurtful stereotypes and cultural norms. I look forward to the day when the introduction of a game with a strong female lead who isn't just a generic male hero with boobs doesn't make the news (and generate the controversy) that it does today.

Because, like Wil Wheaton says, "Don't Be a Dick"

The Future, The Present, and printing guns

  The shape of the world got a bit more spacey-agey on Friday, as Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed debuted the world's first 3D printed firearm, the Liberator. The intentionally provocative name references the FP-45 Liberator, a weapon designed by the US in WWII to distribute to resistance fighters in occupied territories. I'll pick up that thread later. 
  
  Anyway, in a twenty-eight second YouTube video (resplendent with swelling classical music and footage of B-24 Liberator bombers), we get to see the cutting edge of a new kind of distributed firearms manufacturing economy. The Liberator is made of printed ABS plastic with a metal firing pin, and a steel shank that brings it into compliance with the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 (a measure enacted in 1988 to address things like all plastic pistols, in the wake of the introduction of the Glock 17 - the first production pistol to feature a large number of plastic composite components). It's chambered in .380 ACP and is a single shot. 

Psychological torture "for the children"

  This past Friday in the sleepy little nowheresberg of Halfway, OR teachers at the Pine Eagle Charter School were gathered in the break room during a teacher inservice day when the unthinkable happened: Masked men broke through the door and began shooting the terrified people inside. Within seconds, it was all over.

  Pine Eagle Principal Cammie DeCastro's after-action report was blunt: Not many of the teachers would have survived had this been a REAL shooting. Only 2 of her 15 teachers "lived" through the exercise. After the time and training that the school had put into preparing for this event, she was disappointed in her staff's performance.

  You see, this was just a test. The shooters were members of the local Sheriff's office, the ammunition fired was all blanks. Everyone was in on the test... except for the teachers themselves

  WHAT THE FUCK? I mean seriously. When does it ever become a good idea to do what amounts to a live-fire exercise WITHOUT TELLING THE OTHER TEAM THEY'RE PLAYING? I am so frothingly angry that after this is written, I'm going to watch videos of ducklings and kittens until the urge to vomit goes away.

  I cannot imagine the terror of all those poor people as the reality of their situation dawned on them - it was happening right here in their little town of 288 people. Armed men were come to kill them. They watched coworkers being shot, they saw their own deaths advancing at them.

  And when the smoke cleared, they were told, "If this were an ACTUAL emergency, you'd all be dead for realsies!!"

  I'd have fucking hit someone. I still might. I'm impressed with the control of these people that they DIDN'T haul off and put the hurting on someone over this.

  I live in the state of Oregon, this is not particularly close to me, but this happened IN MY STATE. I'm writing to all of my elected representatives today, and asking that criminal charges be filed and that everyone involve dint he planning of this cruel, horrific farce lose their jobs.

Freedom, rights, the Second Amendment and slippery slopes.

  I'm a big fan of rights and freedoms. I think that I'm pretty lucky to live in a country where, for the most part, you're free to live your life the way you see fit. There are some restrictions, mostly in the name of "the public interest," and by and large I'm OK with those. My neighbour can't dump toxic waste in my garden, I can't drink a pitcher of margaritas and drive home. You can't cry "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre if your only goal is to incite panic. Restrictions like that help bolster us as a society and enable us to move forward without having to worry about needing to protect ourselves from quite so many dangers.

  I believe that the most effective government is not the one that is (metaphorically) positioned over the citizenry, pressing down on it - but rather the one that is structured beneath the citizens, boosting and bolstering everyone, giving them basic structure and support to freely seek their own goals and agendas. My perfect government is part cheerleader and part wire boundary fence; there to cheer you on and help inspire you to greater success, but also lurking at the edges of acceptable. It protects us from the most dire of circumstances - even if we've brought them on ourselves.

Words become speech, speech becomes action, actions become consequences

  I'm still reeling form the news coming out of Boston today. Explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon shattered the celebratory mood and reports are stating that two people were killed, twenty-two injured.

  I feel fortuitous that all of my people in the area are safe and accounted for - nobody was at the site. I know that it could have been much worse, but the idea that there are two beds that won't be slept in again, ever, is hard for me to deal with elegantly.

  It's far too early for us to know exactly what happened, who did this, what they wanted and why. It might be homegrown terrorism, it might be enemy agents. I don't know and at the moment, I frankly don't care. People who are trained in this kind of stuff will do their things and someday there will be an answer. I don't want to speculate because I think that's how we got here in the first place.

  I feel that rhetoric has been heating up a lot in the past few cycles. The sides are getting more polarized and the center (where I really, really want to be) is becoming the No-Man's Land of WWI. People are quick to anger and quick to point fingers.

"YOU DID THIS"

"I HATE YOU"

"WE WILL NOT COMPROMISE"

  These are wrong, terrible, hurtful things to say. When the most important word in the phrase "other people" is OTHER and not PEOPLE, we lose a very important connection to each other. It makes it easier to stop seeing people as... y'know, people, and instead start seeing them as some shadowy Enemy, some dangerous Other.

  That's how propaganda works. Check out the posters that the US designed in WWI and WWII. Look at the awful, racist caricatures that Dr Seuss drew of Japanese people to sell War Bonds. We stop seeing the enemy as Real People Who Are Just Like Us, and see them as dangerous, evil, ugly monsters bent on our destruction.This demonization helps us hate them, helps us want to hurt them, makes it easier to kill them.

Words become speech, speech becomes action, actions become consequences.

  What kind of world do YOU want?

Why I don't carry concealed

  I have made a conscious choice to not carry a gun. I support the right to do so, and will defend it vehemently. It's just not the right choice for me at this point in time.

  There are two major reasons for that - the first is that I don't feel that I live the kind of life where carrying a gun on a regular basis is a good part of my EDC (Every Day Carry) kit. Two pocketknives, a flashlight, and my Leatherman Wave, sure. A gun is just extra weight for a one-tenth-of-one-percent chance of being the right tool.

  The other reason is because I simply don't trust myself to carry right now.

  On the night of October 22, 2007, I was mugged on my way to work (I was working graveyards doing technical product support in Seattle). I'll paste in some of my LiveJournal post from the next day and then talk about what the last almost six years have meant to me.

Note: Pictures inline, might be distressing for some.

You don't have to be straight, you just have to shoot straight..

  Hello, World!

(more on our intro title later)

 Who are you?

   I'm called the Bear and I'm a liberal gun owner.  "How the hell does that happen?", you might ask yourself. It's actually pretty easy, and doesn't require any self-delusion or hypocrisy.

  I grew up in a small town, born into a family of hunters. I got my first rifle from my dad when I was about five years old. I shot my first deer when I was 11, after completing an NRA youth hunter safety course. I opted out of a military career and went into Information Technology.

  I like guns, I own guns.

  "But," you say, "what's this about you being a liberal? How does that mesh with being a gun owner and a hunter?"

  I'm glad you asked!