F*ck Guns
March 15, 2023
A few weeks ago, my wife and I received a message that there had been an active shooter threat at our daughter’s high school, and that they were on lockdown. It was around 8:30am, so school hadn’t started yet. But Kinley had gone there early for soccer practice. Once the threat happened, she was locked in the school locker room with her team and told to remain silent so as not to reveal their location to the shooter.
I drove over to the school to see what was happening. The building was surrounded by cops and traffic was being diverted away from the scene. I parked across the street and watched, while texting with Kinley to let her know that I was outside, and that everything was ok.
After a few stressful hours, the police were able to secure and search the building, then arranged for all of the students to be safely transported to nearby Macky Auditorium, where they would be held until their parents could pick them up.
The whole thing was — and still is — a pretty awful experience: being stuck outside while my daughter was inside, not knowing how long it would last, whether or not there was a real shooter, and then knowing that this will happen again. If not here, then somewhere.
In that moment, sitting outside, I was so fucking angry. Angry that our kids have to live in constant fear of mass shootings, angry that humans (mostly Americans) keep killing each other with guns, and that guns and the right to own them are woven into the fabric of our country and our Constitution. So I posted this on Instagram.
And I know posting on social media is mostly pointless, and with respect to gun control, it’s going to be a very long time before anything changes. But I didn’t know where else to put my anger.
Ultimately, the high school incident turned out to be a false threat. But these days, it’s pretty clear that every threat needs to be taken very seriously. There are more guns (400 million) than there are people in the US (330 million). Then there are the people that decide to take one of those 400 million guns and go on a killing spree. As long as there are guns, and there are people, then the killing (of all living beings) will continue.
Until all either the people are all gone, or all the guns are gone, the problem will persist. But the guns aren’t going anywhere. It’s actually looking more likely that all the people will be gone first.
As an example of how far gone we are, watch this clip of Jon Stewart eviscerating a pro-gun Republican senator from Oklahoma, for whom logic and common sense and statistics and facts just don’t exist. It’s really entertaining. But it’s also just sad knowing that Stewart’s undeniably crushing victory is not going to change any minds, and is more likely to make things even worse.
I saw a Jasper Johns piece at the Powers Art Center recently that I really loved. It was a print of an American flag, but printed in a way that creates an optical illusion. Here is how it works:
Stare intensely at the white dot in the middle of the upper flag for about 30 seconds. Then shift your gaze to stare at the black dot in the lower flag, and notice the colors you see there:
Once the color receptors in your eyes fatigue, they compensate by generating complementary colors to what you’re seeing. Green becomes red, and orange becomes blue.
I find this idea really interesting. We can’t fully trust what we see with our own eyes. We think we can know things for certain. But we can’t. Our brains are always messing with us. We think we know, but we don’t really know.
I wanted to make a piece of art about guns that illustrates this idea. Borrowing Jasper’s illusion technique, I created a print that takes a solid red gun, and an orange United States, turns them into a ghostly green and blue using the same effect:
And poof….the guns are gone.