I saw a reddit post of someone who put pulsing RGB light strips inside their gun safe, and while I don’t hate the look (they should have slowed down the speed though) I just had to have a little dread-laugh at the idea of trying to find what you want in there hungover at 3 AM by gamerlight. Rushing through the dark to a gun safe in fear of your life while the sounds of pursuit draw near already sounds like a level of terror bordering on the psychedelic. If I was experiencing that primordial state, and I got my safe open and it suddenly filled the room with a glaring rainbow light that said:

I actually think I might puke. It would feel like some mocking hallucination. I might wonder if I was already dead. I certainly would not feel more prepared for anything.

I feel this way when I look at a lot of gun things online. Obviously there’s a representation bias there, where people without opsec needs, people who like to share their cool stuff, and people with too much money -or all of the above- are more likely to post online. Therefore the most prolific gunposters are also the ones most prone to doing epic internet shit to their guns, I get that. And I also get that there’s serious guns and there’s fun, weird range toys. Not everything must be serious at all times, we can sometimes wash our ushankas. And I will first say that I’m not in regular contact with any part of the gun world that isn’t online. I’d like to be, but ammo is expensive. So this is a largely vibes-based analysis with an internet skew. That said, my opinion is this, so much of the gun culture I see online, in stores and at ranges is deeply frivolous (whatever) and childish (troubling). Yeah I know, , but it feels like theres been a qualitative shift in the vibe. I’m not sure how to encapsulate it other than by saying that American gun culture, being mostly a consumer culture with military and police crossover (which brings extra brainworms from the Micheal Bay movie slop propaganda sphere) was ripe for Marvelization, and it has Marvelized to an intense degree.

Maybe I’m just applying a new label to a timeless dialectic: some people have always done silly shit to their weapons, and some people have always scoffed at it for reasons of solemness or something, like I am now. It just seems like the level and style of dumb shit that we specifically are doing now could only come from a culture so enamored with living vicariously through fictional warfare but so generally insulated from the real thing. All this shit could only exist, be sold in the zero-gravity environment of the boring suburbs whose numb inhabitants nurse more and more fevered dreams, are subjected to massive media campaigns of psychological conditioning to make them dream, to sell more stupid gun shit. The second you subject it to the gravity of a real life and death struggle, it become absurd. When you’re menacing a drag story hour with your rifle and your bros, all your fascist meme patches are doing their job: instilling in all decent people the fear of being murdered by a fucking loser, which is worse than just regular getting murdered. But in an actual shootout, how are those baby yoda pepe patches gonna look covered in your friend’s offal? How are you gonna look then? Like a toddler. Like a big, out of your depth baby, which is what you are, and do you really wanna die looking like that? Be immortalized in crime scene photos as the corpse wearing an IFAK labeled “emergency bacon”?

Don’t get me wrong, while this is mostly a right wing/centrist/apolitical dumb guy who thinks he’s the boondock saints phenomenon, nobody is immune to it. It’s seductive, you find a cool thing and you want to put it on your cool thing, and then smash cut to the slim but real chance of you fumbling with your 12 pound rifle in the middle of the night, half-remembering how to operate 6 different attachments and praying the little Mechanicus incense brazier you hung from the barrel doesn’t clank against anything in the dark.

I don’t really have a conclusion, other than the obvious one in the title. I guess my conclusion is “know your toys from your weapons, and keep them seperate”. With the way everything has been accelerating, I feel a special kind of disgust that such an unprecedented moment of omnipresent crisis be met with the fucking tired, stale, insipid, oafish symbology of the gun-as-toy collecting, chemtrail fearing moviebrains who accuse everyone else of being sheep and not taking the responsibility of self-protection seriously.