Y’all, I try to understand conservatives. I truly do. But how — if, according to conservatives, men are naturally the protectors and women are naturally the caregivers — does it make any goddamn sense to arm teachers and expect them to exchange fire with school shooters? Teaching is a female-dominated profession. The people packing heat in schools, if teachers are armed, are therefore going to be women.
Last week, a bill passed the state Senate that would allow some staff to carry guns in schools. It's set to be heard in the House on Wednesday. If this were coming from radicals on the left, I’d get it. I’d think it was dumb, but I’d get it. You can see the line of reasoning that would get you there: Cops can’t be depended on; communities need to be proactive in their own defense; society is just going to sit back and let school shootings continue to happen; therefore, we need to arm the people on the frontlines of these incidents. Here’s your gun, sister. Learn to use it.
But why in the hell would conservative men support this? I swear, it’s like they sit around demanding that society acknowledge that men are the best at being strong and willing to do what must be done, and then the second you’re not paying attention, they’re yet again pushing the hard work off to women.
No wonder we’re witnessing the implosion of the trad-wife movement. In the words of Hermes Trismegistus (if you take nothing else from my column this week, say “Trismegistus” out loud a few times — it’s really fun), “As above, so below.” The bullshit these conservatives pull in public, they pull in private.
A bill that would allow school staff to carry concealed firearms passed in the state Senate Tuesday
Conservative men are huge on traditional gender roles — for women. But doing the hard work of keeping up their end of the bargain? Nope, push that off onto the ladies too.
Think about how — repeatedly — women are given the message that our voices aren’t appropriate in the Capitol, how we don’t have any inherent right to be there, but are there only as long as the men in charge allow it, and if they get tired of us being there, they will use the power of the state to have us removed. We are not fit to be a part of the decision-making process. We can observe, but not have opinions on it.
Obviously, it would be best for us to not tax our little girly-brains with politics in general.
But the very same women who can’t be trusted with politics can be trusted with guns? Can be trusted to discern who should be shot and killed at a school full of children?
Women get all the responsibility but none of the power.
Listen, I’m pissed about this. Gun violence in this state is out of control, but by and large, gun violence is a problem of male violence. Which we all know. Women, in general, get shot, and are not shooters. And when we are shot, by and large we’re shot by men.
It’s not just that “guns don’t kill people — people kill people.” It’s that men kill people. And rather than looking that bit of ugliness straight in the face and trying to figure out how to deal with it, we’re going to continue to tell ourselves this fairy tale that this violence is just something inherent to men and that it’s up to women to turn men’s inherent violence into something that protects instead of harms. And when the fairy tale predictably fails us, I guess option two is to just insist that women also get guns and do the work of protecting ourselves and children — usually from men — because that’s easier than fixing men.
