Mihail Pojarsky/Rights are not for everyone

In the United States, an interesting picture can now be observed. Recently there was 100,500 mass shootings, only this time it was done by a trans (F to M). Now, for a week now, the right-wing conservative public in the US has been talking about the need to ban weapons for the “mentally ill.” Trans and sympathizers in response are photographed with trunks and in Protect trans kids T-shirts. Conservative nightingale Andy Ngo collects these photos every other day to his Twitter with captions like “Look what a horror! They threaten us!”

The humor is that there was an inversion. In the past, the opposite has often happened. Some far-right fool was massshooting - like Patrick Crucius, who first spewed the word “Trump” from his guns on Twitter, and then went and shot 20+ people. After such cases, the liberal public in the United States started the usual hurdy-gurdy - they say, the 2nd amendment makes it possible for the bearers of the “ideology of hatred” to arm themselves, everything must be banned and limited. The right-wingers in response began to fervently post photos with guns and slogans like “disarm me only over my corpse.” Liberals collected these photos shouting “That’s it! They threaten us! Take it away and ban it!”

Now the trans are in the role of the right, and the conservatives are in the role of liberals. Here, however, it must be said that there will probably be fewer trans among mass shooters than ultra-rightists. After all, it wasn’t the trans who staged the largest terrorist attack in the United States since 11/9/11. And, if we use such generalizations, then Timati McVeigh alone should be enough to disarm all the “people’s militia” and other “free white citizens” there. But the truth is that mass shooters are not amenable to any, including ideological, profiling. A mass shooter can be right, it can be left, and more often it will simply be none. May suffer from a mental disorder (in 5% of cases), but more often they will not suffer from it. Maybe depressed, maybe not. In general, it is impossible to single out any risk group that could be banned from harm’s way. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that mass shooters are mostly men, but even here 17% of women are a significant percentage.

Mostly, this illustrates that you can advocate for universal rights all you want, but at significant moments people still slide into tribalism and the pursuit of privileges for their own. The American right has been telling for decades that the Second Amendment is a universal constitutional right that cannot be limited. But it is now easy to be willing to impose these restrictions on a highly arbitrary basis of “mental disorder” (which transsexuality is officially not, as it is in another part of the ICD - “disorders of sexuality”). But if it is possible to ban guns to transpeople on the basis of assumptions of mental instability, then why not require certificates from all gun owners that they are free of depression, OCD, and bipolar? And preferably once a quarter, otherwise you never know. And it’s completely incomprehensible how this sticks with the long-term American NRA campaign against universal background checks and common federal bases. Otherwise, after all, how to ban weapons to the “crazy” when the “crazy” goes to a neighboring state and buys everything there?

All of this is reminiscent of the old story of 1967 - when the Black Panthers in California took the vogue to come out to rallies with weapons. Republicans immediately pushed through a law to ban open carry, suddenly remembering that “guns do not solve problems.” Constitutional law is for their own.

Mihail Pojarsky 2023-04-06