There’s one reason I’ll vote against Republicans no matter how loathsome the Democrats are.

Yep, guns.

This doesn’t apply to political polarities outside of the United States, where I’d gladly, under the right circumstances, vote for someone who might be counted a “conservative.” But in the US we’ve arrived at the crackpot coordinates of gun-idolatry, where yahoos can traipse around supermarkets carrying Glock 17s in tactical holsters. Legally. I wonder when open-carry laws will be interpreted to mean I can wear a pistol belt sagging with a half-dozen fragmentation grenades.

Remembering when, in the bad old days of the mid-1980s, I worked in Guatemala and El Salvador. Armed thugs — official, para-official, and private — roamed the streets packing heat. I was one of them. Flash suppressors hung out of SUV windows. Young toughs with revolvers tucked behind their belt buckles extorted shop owners and disrespected women. Dawn broke on corpses in the streets. Different than here? Okay, but wait for it. When the social disorder ensues, the streets, cars, and houses are already awash in guns.

Already in 2023, in the United States of America, there have been (today is September 27) 640 shootings in which at least three people were shot (625 dead, 2,650 wounded). That’s higher than the figures of American casualties during the first year of the Iraq invasion and occupation.

The problem with guns in the US — apart from the fact that they can be so easily and instantly devastating — is more than their ubiquity. They are in the hands of intellectual and emotional toddlers, something that can be said of our entire culture, of course, but a fact that pairs disastrously with the easy availability and increasing legal tolerance of people carrying them around as threat displays in public.

What’s more, and in addition to our generalized intellectual and moral infantilization, we’ve been inundated almost from birth into entertainment — in an entertainment-saturated society — that serves as propaganda for guns, gun-culture, and the notion that the dramatic tension in most of our stories is resolved ultimately by killing someone . . . with a gun. This trope is far too easily transposed by the childish mind — especially but not exclusively in the male child’s mind —onto imaginary dramas in our own lives featuring enemies that, when put down by a bullet, elevate our imaginary selves to the status of redeeming hero. Those cosplaying dipshits in the photo above are not recognizing themselves as cosplaying dipshits, but imagining themselves as potential heroes in some cosmic struggle between good and evil.

The introduction of public gun displays into street demonstrations started in earnest when Barack Obama was sworn in, and it escalated wildly under the approving eye of Adolescent-in-Chief Donald Trump. Republicans has always entertained a certain amount of gun-nuttery — mostly related to performative masculinity, but also in combination with racial paranoia — but Trump’s provocations, coming as they did in response to an economic and social crisis, emboldened the armed threat display as a kind of right-wing street theater.

This is the public equivalent of someone coming strapped to a house party. The threat of lethal force, instantly deliverable at the squeeze of a finger, creates a poisonous force-field that makes any other form of good faith conversation, and even debate, impossible.

This really is enormously dangerous; so dangerous, in fact, that as long as this kind of threat-display is rationalized and even encouraged by Republicans, I cannot in good conscience — even in spite of a few things upon which we might agree, and even in spite of how perfectly abhorrent the Democratic Party apparatus is — ever vote for a Republican, nor can I abstain is some fruitless protest against Democrats.

Put the fucking firearms away, and maybe we can talk.