If people were good, and justice impartial, then gun control would work. But that’s not the case.

I have been on a campus during one fatal school shooting, been mugged at knife point by people of various ethnicities, been punched in the face by skinheads across the political spectrum, been bodily threatened by drunks citywide, had a large office chair thrown at me, and once, when I was 19, I had a profoundly unpleasant experience with a couple of truckers outside Chicago that wasn’t exactly rape but wasn’t a lot of laughs, either.

Basically, if it walks on two legs and approximates human speech, I fear and potentially loathe it. While not a misanthrope — and maintaining some vague belief in a larger divine mystery — I do not believe people are inherently good. I believe that anyone, under any circumstance, for reasons they themselves may never remotely understand, is capable of any and all acts of evil.

(Evil is a concept I also believe in, even if I think most people, even the most monstrous, are also capable of a Hitler-ian capacity to love a stray dog.)

By the way, I like guns. I’m not a gun obsessive — some kind of firearms “Stan” — having only gone skeet shooting and not being particularly drawn to owning a gun myself. Fan-wise, I’ll buy the shirt, though I’m more about the hits than the B sides. But I dig the heft and the power of guns, and find it wildly satisfying to pull a trigger and watch something burst.

Having grown up in small towns where many neighbors owned guns — people who helped my mom shovel snow when I moved away — I don’t harbor any contempt for the casual owner, either. Of course, having been around gun owners, I’m aware of their zeal when it comes to the topic of firearms. Many aficionados talk about guns like I talk about eighties hardcore or old comic books — they collect their rarified knowledge like Trekkies.

As much as the national conversation is framed as though there’s some sort of genetic chasm between people who live on the coasts and people who live in “real America,” I see a commonality between those who pedantically insist on the correct meaning of “AR” in AR-15 and Brooklyn hipsters who know no god but artisanal mayonnaise. Spend ten minutes arguing data points online with your average Second Amendment fanboy and then tell me he’s not a deep-cut hipster, but for guns. And I don’t mean “hipster” as an insult (my tattoos, after all, are pretty aggressively dumb and obscure) so much as an accurate descriptor of dudes passionate about mastering their niche topic of choice.

I understand devoted gun owners would reject the comparison. They believe their guns are a necessity and that their right to own these weapons is both fundamental and under threat. For a while now, gun sales have been given a boost nationally by gun owners’ fear of waking up one day to Nancy Pelosi absquatulating up the chimney with a sackful of pistols and the family hollow-points.

These true believers — as opposed to the effete and unserious skeet shooters such as myself — see their firearms as God-sanctioned bulwarks between their families and the entropic societal (let’s be honest, often black) forces that claw nightly at their windows. Plus, even while usually loving cops and soldiers, they sure as shit don’t trust the government to do more than keep the lights on and bomb Iran.

Fear is stoked on both sides of whatever cultural breach may exist by the notion that we, as a nation, are “more divided than ever.” I’ll spare you the Civil War corrective, because I get that when people say our country’s fractures have never been deeper, they also mean “except for that one civil war.” Like Trump, I value the legroom to mean what I mean if not what I say, so I think a little give is acceptable. Of course, I can think of a few Kennedys who might argue that the fissures of the 1960s were pretty bad, too. Or at least comparably more dramatic than Fox News versus All Late-Night Talk Show Hosts, including The Ones in the Triple-Digit Channels. (And yes, for sure, I’ll give you that Oswald was a commie of sorts; I’m not putting everything on the right-wing Birchers…)

Look, I trust the government not a whit, not in its bombings of theoretical boogiemen, nor in its lobby-driven, quid-pro-quo domestic allocations. And when it comes to government operations, I distrust the feds’ ability to curtail constitutional freedoms in a remotely just manner. New gun laws won’t be applied to white militia nerds, but they will sure as shit be used against black folk. The modern gun-control movement was started in the late sixties under California governor Ronald Reagan’s beady watch to subdue Black Panthers, while 40 years later Florida’s stand-your-ground self-defense law was all well and good until African-American Marissa Alexander attempted to use it in a threatening domestic situation.

Historically, new policies of control — be they on drugs or guns or both — serve to further criminalize the already marginalized. The state is a hammer that sees everyone as a nail only in theory. A cursory examination of militia versus terrorist versus gangs shows that the hands that wield said hammer can be real choosy on whose dicks get knocked in the dirt and whose get to swing fancy free all over public land.

I am most assuredly not looking for a Waco redux in every town. I want fewer people to be considered terrorists and gangsters, not more. I’m fine with intermarriage cowboys cosplaying Shays’ Rebellion, and while obviously abhorring the carnage, I don’t need every white serial killer to be granted serious political mojo based on maladjusted Reddit posts. I just want the same courtesy extended to your random mentally ill weirdo playacting at ISIS and for the punitive branch of the government to stick to what it does best — TBD.

Don’t get me started on Massachusetts-style laws that just make it financially prohibitive to get a gun license. Why should the rich get to live longer and die more dramatically than the rest of us? It’s bad enough that I can’t check overweight baggage on airplanes using cash anymore.

And I understand fear. I revel in it as fully as your most paranoid end-timer. But what I fear is a population that wants to marry their flags, misuse lawn lighting, and give cops tanks while fretting about globalists with tanks forcing their daughters to breed with Mexicans.

I may be overstating their positions slightly, but if we’re gonna be a nation divided, why cede hyperbole to the new confederacy? I know it bums Dana Loesch out when the NRA gets called a white supremacist organization, but it bums me out when she says she used to be a goth. Both are true and she and I will just have to live with our respective disappointments.

Point is, I deeply relate to gun owners’ frights and shivers, so much so that I want every mother and mother’s son who has to share space with these freaks to be well armed. I don’t think a forced national disarmament is in the cards ever, and, holding freedom to a premium over safety, I don’t want one. I want the left to be on equal footing with the right, bullet for bullet, garish hat for garish hat. I don’t necessarily want Sean Connery’s “Chicago Way” Untouchables speech put into action, but I’d feel a lot better if the option wasn’t solely in the hands of cops and the military who, truth be told, don’t like us much. We leftists don’t like each other much either, but we can say it, they can’t (and we probably won’t shoot each other till at least a few months after the revolution and the urge for purge kicks in).