Editor’s Note: I have been pleasantly surprised on how much the World Cup has been enjoyed across America. I have heard very little instances of violence, but I hate that I even have to think about that.
I’m returning to Japan soon, the placed that taught me so much about customer service, quality management, and what other cultural norms are like. It is a society built on strong group expectation of common decency and respect. It is the only country I’ve ever visited that I would feel minimal concern with our kids traveling by themselves.
I can’t say that for my own country.
I was once in a gun safety course, trying to understand something about the culture from the inside. I noticed one man who had trouble following basic instructions. Not nervousness, not unfamiliarity with the format. Something more fundamental, like he was missing a few marbles. At the end of the day, he walked out with the same piece of paper I did.
That stayed with me. Not as an aside about one person. More of a window into a system that has no serious mechanism for saying no.
The last twenty years have seen the democratization of media, with one unfortunate outcome being to fuel fear and distrust of each other. Weak healthcare support and lax gun control enforcement also contributed to the issues. Now, rising gun ownership among what we call liberals or Democrats is adding to the American gun culture.
The framing in most coverage treats this as irony, or progress, or at minimum, a political realignment worth noting. What it actually is, is a confession.
When people who spent years arguing for fewer guns decide they need one, they are not changing their minds about the danger. They are deciding the danger is close enough that waiting for common sense is no longer reasonable.
The shift accelerated with Trump's second term and now we have people killed by officers of our own government. This feeds into yet another argument that guns might be needed not just for personal self-defense but to resist government tyranny.
That is a remarkable predicament because it tells you exactly how far the degradation has gone.
This is the gun saturation loop and it has been running for decades.
More guns in circulation produce more fear. More fear produces more gun purchases. More purchases produce more saturation. More saturation produces more incidents, more accidents, more confrontations that escalate beyond what they would have without the weapon present. The incidents produce more fear. The loop closes and opens again, a little wider each time.
The people selling this as freedom have confused the word with its opposite. What we have built is not a nation of armed, sovereign individuals. It is a nation where a conservation officer I once worked alongside told me, plainly, that the proliferation of weapons had simply made his job harder and more dangerous. Not safer. Not freer. Harder. He was not making a political argument. He was describing reality.
What we cannot do is pretend that more guns on the left solves the problem that guns on the right created. That argument leads nowhere except to a higher body count and a more heavily fortified version of the same fear. The loop does not break because both sides are now inside it.
There are two things that need to be tried: re-split gun control from hunting rights, and making the full cost of this saturation visible. Not the emotional cost, though that is staggering. The financial cost. The constant security apparatus in schools. The metal detectors, the active shooter drills, the fences, the guard towers (sounds like prison, doesn’t it), the liability insurance, the hospital bills, the officer-involved shootings and their legal aftermath.
The price of turning every public space into a threat environment is suffocating social cohesion.
This is where I wish we could have national ballots for issues, just like we vote for the presidency. Put the right to hunt, and the right to carry a weapon into a parking lot, a church, or a classroom on the ballot. Make Americans choose between these things, not between slogans. My guess is that more people than the gun lobby would choose differently given a real option. I believe hunting rights would be re-avowed, but I also believe the necessity of gun controls would receive similar support. The lobby knows this. That is why the subjects are purposely mixed and the option is never offered.
The man I remember from the training room did not represent everyone in that class. But he did not need to. One certificate issued to someone who should not have received it is not a fluke in a functioning system. It is the system working exactly as designed, which is to say, designed to say yes to almost anyone who wants a gun.
I still think about him sometimes with the specific dread of knowing his card is in a wallet somewhere right now, next to a driver's license, indistinguishable from anyone else's. That is what saturation actually looks like up close. Not a stockpile. Not a militia. Just a man who could not follow instructions, walking out the same door I did, carrying the same permission to carry and if need be, shoot fellow Americans that the media and gun industry most likely are telling him is the enemy.
A Barbaric Problem in American Hospitals Is Only Getting Bigger (The Atlantic). A friend who works as an ER nurse sent this, and it matches everything she has told me for years: patients waiting in hallways for beds that do not exist while hospitals treat boarding as an unsolvable weather pattern instead of a policy failure. It is the same logic used to explain away every symptom of a system nobody has decided to fix.
On leaders needing to be well-rounded (BuzzFeed general knowledge quiz). I wish "the genius" was checked a little more with tests like this. See how you do.
Plug-in solar and the electric bill (The Wall Street Journal). Plug-in solar is the panel you hang on a balcony rail and plug straight into the wall, and Europe has installed millions of them while we were still arguing about permits and spending public funds on coal and gas. The part that should bother you is not the technology. It is how long American rules kept something this simple this far out of reach.
Kids need protecting from more than one thing (YouTube). This is a bit raw but it does make you think. Florida pediatrician Dr. Saju Mathew has mde the case that unrestricted social media access is developmentally damaging kids through engineered dopamine loops that fragment attention before it has a chance to form. Think about it for a second. Insted of kids playing outside with neighbor kids or reading a book, they are getting sucked into purposefully controlling apps and media. The freedom argument against regulation does not hold up on inspection. The platforms kids are on are not neutral pipes. They are built to maximize engagement at the expense of the people using them, and the youngest users have no defenses against that. If you need a benchmark for what reasonable looks like, the great irony here is that China's domestic version of TikTok caps minors at 40 minutes a day and mandates educational content after that. Even a communist regime will not let their own kids near it unregulated. Take wisdom from where you find it, and do not use smart tools to make your kids dumb. There’s a time for introduction, but let them be kids for as long as possible.
The Childhood Protection Act we keep refusing to write. In this case we had three dead at the Islamic Center of San Diego. A security guard. A landscaper, blocks away, saved only because a bullet hit his helmet. The shooters were teenagers, 17 and 19. One took three weapons from his mother's house before he left. A suicide note with writings about racial pride. Hate speech scrawled on one of the guns. We have become so accustomed to this we read it like weather. It could have been so much worse, and that sentence is the indictment. We are not a culture mature enough for the weapons we keep at hand, and we have proven it beyond any honest argument. Protect hunting. Protect the public good of walking to school without dread. Until we stop making it this easy for citizens to prey on each other, the exceptional-nation talk is just noise over the sirens.
The language hasn't caught up to the news. We're fixing that.
kinshipment (noun) — when the same administration that loosens gun-shipping rules happens to include a shareholder in the online gun store best positioned to cash in on the loosened rules.
"The ATF just proposed mailing firearms straight to your door, and by pure kinshipment, the president's son sits on the board of the retailer best set up to profit from it. Turns out the invisible hand of the free market has the family crest tattooed on the wrist."
Etymology: kinship + shipment. (Source: Reuters via KFGO)
Be safe out there, but don’t let things stop you from living. Living by fear is not America. Whatever occurs this week…
Always strive to be a good human.