I watched 10 Oakland Police officers watch a woman of color and mother of two bleed out this morning. I watched them watch her die.

She was my neighbor. Her name was Maria. About two months ago, her ex beat the shit out of her and she escaped to her front porch and was crying. When I heard her screaming, I got out of bed, pulled my big boots on, and grabbed a baseball bat. I chased her ex off with the bat and then took care of her and stayed with her while the cops questioned her. I met her kids. I knew her.

She moved out of the house and the abusive ex stayed. I hadn’t seen her for over a month.

At around 5 am, my husband and I woke up to screaming and yelling. We both thought we heard two men fighting and threatening to kill each other. I personally will put myself in a lot of danger to help a battered woman but I really don’t want to get involved in a fight with two dudes who are probably stronger than me and threatening to shoot each other. I stayed in my bed.

Then there was screaming. A lot of it. Then there was silence. Then there was a man screaming. He was yelling, “Oh my god, why did you do that? You’re bleeding!” and so I assumed someone had been stabbed. Then the cops came.

I’ve been doing Copwatch for a couple of years now. I unfortunately had every single one of my cameras stolen in a home robbery in December, so I couldn’t tape anything. But I could watch. So this is what I saw from my front porch.

I saw Maria laying on the ground by her house. I saw at least 10 police officers walking around the house, one taking pictures, all of them shining their flashlights around. Some were talking to the upset ex. I heard him tell them that she tried to climb through the back window and cut her arm on the glass. Obviously I don’t know if I believe that cuz, you know, he BEAT HER two months ago, but that’s kind of irrelevant.

I thought she was dead already. I thought this because no one was in any hurry. They were taking pictures of the front of the house while she was on the ground. Not once did I see anyone crouch down to check on her, to talk to her. They stood above her and shined their flashlights over her body. That image will stay with me for the rest of my god damn life.

It took 15-20 minutes for an ambulance to come. I should have timed it, that was a rookie mistake, but like I said, I thought she was dead already. The fucking idiot cops had parked their cars in the middle of the street so the ambulance had to park half a block away and I watched them LEISURELY stroll up to the house with a stretcher and then LEISURELY stroll back to the ambulance. I basically only really knew she was alive when I saw that 1. she wasn’t in a body bag and 2. she was moving on the stretcher.

I live across the street from a children’s hospital. I mean, literally across the street. I mean I live 25 yards away from a children’s hospital.

I watched the cops watch a woman die this morning. A black woman. A mother of two. A domestic abuse survivor. I watched them watch her die.

A neighbor told my husband this morning while he was walking the dog that she didn’t make it. The neighbor, also a single mother of two and a woman of color, said to him, “I guess it’s not like the movies where everyone rushes around and they save you right there on the ground.” My husband nodded but didn’t say what we all know to be true:

“They do if you’re white.”

I think the popularity of anti-gun positions amongst liberals has its roots in the things that are most valuable about the ideas of the left.

The left is built on ideas of fairness and justice, specifically in defending the weak from the strong. Such ideas feature prominently in the founding documents of American government. We favor the voice of the people, while constraining tyranny by the majority through specific proscriptive components of the Constitution. We began with the intention to protect minority religious views and practices. Later, we added protection for racial minorities.

We attempted in the 1930s to install protections for the poorest among us and to bolster government’s ability to act in the interest of the people rather than to be bullied by the development of corporate powers so great that they outweighed the will of the people.

I suggest that the word bully is critical to the ethos of the left. I think that the ethos of the left is to oppose the power of bullies. When the perceived bully is government, we restrict the powers of government. When the perceived bully is a force that seems too strong to be addressed by other means, we turn to a statist approach; using government, the effort in which we come together for the common good, as a tool to restrict the power of that perceived bully.

I’ll state briefly that the argument to restrict government power for the sake of “freedom” has been adopted in recent decades by pseudo-libertarians seeking to regain the power that capital had over government before our efforts of the 1930s. The success of this approach has been disastrous for our society, but that’s a topic for another time. I’m not interested in discussing a marketing scheme as though it were an earnest ideology for good.

Back to bullies:
This notion of protecting the weak from the strong is, I think, the root of the anti-gun position held by many liberals in current US politics. To many, the gun is the symbol of the bully. The cop who deals injustice to the weak, the Klansman, the Nazi, the corner thug, the imperialist government acting on behalf of moneyed interests, all use the gun as a means to exert power over their victims. Counter-examples of the gun being used to defend the weak from the strong are comparatively rare in the personal experience of those living today. Arguably, the last personal experience of the gun being used to defeat bullying evil that was shared by many Americans was the second world war.

You may notice that people speak of gun owners as fetishizing guns. Guns are force and power and it is the bully who fetishizes force and power.

Those advocating most loudly for gun rights in contemporary American politics are also those who decry any effort to limit their ability to bully. They are “Christian” homophobes. They are racists. They are people who to a great extent confirm the suspicion that bullies are the ones who want guns.

That is the perception we are fighting. Our fellow liberals who fear and hate guns feel that way because of the values of fairness and justice that we share with them. That special fear and loathing and resentment that shuts down debate, I feel that way about bullies too; as much as I try not to slip in to that place of anger, I do, we all do.

Try to remember that when speaking to and about those who would curtail our rights of gun ownership. They are on our side too.

Coming up Broadway from Downtown Oakland, blasting Flatt and Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Breakdown. We felt that the streak of redlight intersections was impeding our getaway, but turning down the rattling bad pavement of the first block of Piedmont avenue shook the car side-to-side enough at moderate speed, close to the banjo rhythm. Bouncing off potholes and swinging right on West MacArthur was enough to elicit a WOOOOOHOO! in unison. Those coppers couldn’t catch us in our moonshine getaway-mobile! We disappeared down a side street and quickly parked and shut the lights off. We were safe and we had won. Then, we went inside and put our box of leftovers in the fridge. Domestic outlaw bliss.

I refuse to remember you next year. You will still be here. I insist.

I have hands and mind and the will. If need be, I have guns and knives and boots and bricks and I know where to get torches and pitchforks. All of these things I have are for you, because I refuse to remember you next year. You will still be here. I insist.

You are quiet and I have not heard enough from you lately. I hope you are ok. Are they mistreating you? Are you mistreating yourself? I have a comfortable couch and quiet conversation and a glass of brandy and a bowl of soup and a loud laugh. These things too are all for you, because. I insist.

I spend the time I can surrounded by boxes full of other people’s memories. I am nearly a professional rememberer. Whether you slip quietly away, surrounded by those who love you, or you fall in the fight against those who would see you suffer, I will collect the box of things that others can remember you by. I am not afraid to remember you, but I will not remember you next year. You will still be here. I insist.

ETA: The specific mention of soup is a shout-out to a brilliant piece by a brilliant friend. I’ve added a link so that everyone knows the reference, because it is such a good one.

Such a great joke with such a tiny audience.

By Morgan Collada

Cherríe Moraga’s essay, entitled “Still Loving in the (Still) War Years: On Keeping Queer Queer,” is a two-part essay that was first published in 2009. The first part is a brilliantly written critique on the mainstream gay rights movement’s focus on marriage equality. The second part is a misguided and misinformed attack on the trans* community in general and the transmasculine community in particular.

Read the rest, do it!

Last night, no, the night before, we read her poetry aloud in bed. I thought about writing something like this.

Winchester 1897 action closed

When you work the slide on an 1897 Winchester, all sorts of things happen. A friend once described it to me as “The damned thing sticks out its tongue and bats its eyelashes at you.” The bolt slides out of the receiver and cocks the exposed hammer. The cartridge lifter swings out of the bottom of the action. Parts seem to be sticking out everywhere. If you’re not careful, it’ll take some skin off of your thumb. By comparison, working the slide on almost any pump shotgun designed since seems to do nothing but make noise.

Winchester 1897 action open

The Krag – Nobody says Jorgensen. It’s like we’re on a first-name basis with the rifle. Poor Jorgensen doesn’t get his share of the design credit. No, it wasn’t Christine. No, I don’t know if there’s any relation. – is exquisitely built. It is known among afficionados of such things to be the smoothest functioning bolt action rifle ever built. It also has a feature that I think is one of the neatest things ever; the magazine is completely wacky.

Krag action, magazine open, bolt closed

The Krag magazine runs horizontally under the action. It feeds in to the action on the left side and the magazine is loaded from the right side. To load it, you open the door on the right side that also retracts the magazine follower and dump in a handfull of cartridges and snap the door shut. It’s like a cartoon of how a complex machine is supposed to work; open the door, drop in a large number of improbable items, close the door, ?????, stuff comes out of the other end of the machine! All of those vertical magazines on all of those other bolt actions may be cheaper to manufacture and easier to load with stripper clips, but that will never be this cool. Never.

Krag action, magazine closed, bolt open

I won’t explain why I find all of this mechanical intricacy so compelling. If you don’t get that, you just don’t. These things are just beautiful to me. I will, on the other hand talk a little about why all of this stuff happens in the eighteen nineties.

Several factors come in to play at once: There was lots of money around to make these things; the nineties were like the nineties, there was an economic boom not unlike the dot com boom. Smokeless powder was a new technology that allowed/required redesign of firearms to take advantage of its properties. One of the important properties of smokeless powder was that it did not foul the firearm with combustion products the way black powder did; this allowed for much more complex mechanisms to work without being jammed by soot. This was also before Henry Ford (who gets too much credit, but everyone knows who I’m talking about). Designing for ease of manufacture without the use of expensive hand fitting was in its infancy; John Browning had just designed the 1894 Winchester, which was a brilliant simplification of the more complex 1892 Winchester. Minimizing parts count and machining procedures would not come to dominate industry for several years.

All of these factors contributed to a moment when designers went wild with complexity and a manufacturing style that could only be called decadent. Dozens of parts were fitted by hand like those of fine watches. Levers and buttons and pivots and ratchets and latches ruled the day. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the best example I can give of this design style. If that car had been equipped with a rifle, it would have been a Krag.

The Krag was quickly replaced in 1903 with the Springfield, a Mauser style vertical magazine bolt rifle. The 1897 Winchester was replaced in 1912 by the Model 12, although the 97 would continue being made for many years. Both of these replacements are the beginning of firearms technology we readily recognize as modern.

I appreciate the elegance of more minimal design. I appreciate design that maximizes production and reliability and reduces the price of technology and high quality goods for the largest possible number of people. Those are the factors that have ruled manufacturing to a greater and greater extent over the last hundred years. I appreciate how much those priorities have improved the quality of a great many people’s lives. On the other hand, given unlimited resources and no priority other than my own pleasure, I would design things like these guns.