Harabec [they/them]

You don’t.

What can be done within capitalism is dispersion, displacement, disenfranchisement, intimidation, sabotage, etc. You know all the tricks the GOP and the torries use to hollow out things like USPS, UK rail, the NHS, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, public schooling, basic infrastructure? That. These tools exist. Ultimately we won’t even start to move in that direction until we, as a society, grow comfortable with the idea that it’s better for a cop to die than to kill.

The only way we win this thing is by going outside, talking to our neighbors, building solidarity and community.

How many of you know your neighbors’ names? How many of you can spell the names of Game of Thrones characters?

it probably will. Those who control capital will recreate the police if we don’t. FBI/ATF/DEA/USPSIS/USSS will become more involved absent cops and while we won’t have local cops entering every brown person who wears a colorful backpack on the way home from school into a gang database, we’ll have to deal with “community partnership” and “outreach” programs between law enforcement and “communities”. By “community” they always mean a handful of Karens, local priests, small business assholes, and one or two people who run a co-opted outreach program that has a multimillion dollar endowment and helps twenty kids at a time.

I admit, I had thought for a while that we were never going to win actual police abolition and that we should push for stripping their responsibilities and keep them from responding to crises. Things like taking their guns away, making them grab something from the trunk or run away if someone starts shooting, residency requirements, some theoretical system that would actually force accountability. Not since all this started. It’s been galling to see how people protesting police brutality has been met with this fucking much petulance and cruelty. That NYPD union chief asshole just screaming while dozens of cops stood in solidarity, how George Floyd’s killer had a line of cops standing guard at his house, how conservatives and liberals just fell in line the second somebody whistled at them.

No, we need to push for police abolition because anything short of that is permitting institutional evil to prey on our most vulnerable.

I recommend watching Tacticool Girlfriend’s videos on firearm safety in order to get a basic understanding of safety concepts. Safety is simple and intuitive, but it needs to be a constant concern. The number one thing I like to stress is awareness. Be always aware of where the muzzle is, be always aware of the condition (loaded? unloaded? safetied? chamber clear?) of your firearm, things like that. Even when you think you know your weapon is clear, check it before doing anything with it.

Here’s a solid checklist of things to learn, I would say before going out to shoot with it. You may already know some or all of these things, so I apologize if this sounds condescending, but I’m also posting to record something for future people looking for resources:

• Learn how to field strip your weapon, as you would for cleaning
• Learn how your weapon functions. Not the terminology, short recoil vs. blowback vs. tilt-barrel vs. gas piston don’t mean much, learn what each part does, if it should move, and how it all goes together. The good news is firearms are usually pretty single purpose in their design, I’ve found them to be fairly intuitive when you start going through them.
• Learn how to clean your weapon. Clean the bore from the rear, both for safety (as cleaning it from the rear requires disassembling it to the point it won’t fire) and to avoid crown damage to the muzzle. Learn what cleaning compounds to use, bore brushes, etc.
• Learn what malfunctions to expect and how to clear them. Stovepipe jams, failure to extract, failure to feed (I hear 10/22s can have this with some of the aftermarket magazines), etc. Learn what to expect and how to handle it safely.
• Learn the legality. You have a rimfire, as opposed to a centerfire rifle, so some things that are legal for you to have for it might not be legal for your typical AR or AK. Learn where you can and can’t take it, how you have to transport it, if you have to have it locked, etc.
• Get safety equipment. Eyes & ears and gloves if you need them. Again, a .22 isn’t as big manly man big as an action hero desert eagle pistol or something, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous, and that accidents with it (out of battery discharge, spall from your target, hot brass hitting you in the face, the rim from a cartridge splitting off) can’t ruin your day. Get hearing protection for yourself, and a few spares for people who may join you, and eye protection as well.
• Learn what ammo your weapon takes. Not just the caliber, the cartridge. What grain of projectile, what kind of chamber pressure can it take. If you’re learning to shoot on your grandpa’s old Marlin 1895, can it take modern .45-70 or is it specced to the black powder charge .45-70? If you have an M1 Garand, don’t feed it commercial .30-06 hunting loads, those will damage the op rod unless you tweak the gas plug. If you have a shotgun, well I don’t know anything about shotguns, prolly ask someone who does. Point is, not all ammo is the same even if the caliber is the same. Do your research, it shouldn’t take too long to find out if there’s anything you should know.
• Get some range ammo and some defensive ammo, keep a reserve. This doesn’t apply to everything, per se. A crowbar is probably better than your 10/22 or my 336XLR when it comes to home defense, but you should be practicing with your weapon regularly. Some people use the word train, I prefer practice.

You’re right that ranges aren’t always safe. Gun people are given to some chud proclivities, to word it more politely than most deserve, and one of those chud proclivities is to not give a fuck about the “china virus” and to have a nasty chip on their shoulder about it. Call ahead to an outdoor range, ask if they’re open, ask what restrictions they have for quarantine, ask if you can stay safely distanced while shooting there. Not all ranges will be able to provide that, don’t go to those. Don’t go to an indoor range, pick an outdoor range. I say this as a hwhite person, but I was open with what I didn’t know and what I was new to, the range staff were very welcoming to a novice. In my experience, gun folk are given to chud proclivities but there’s a certain amount of respect for being straight-up with them. I mean, I didn’t say I was a socialist, and I would recommend biting your tongue over talking about politics, but if someone is trying to pressure you into talking about politics, what worked for me has been to say that you disagree but you’d rather focus on the guns that you both agree over rather than the politics you don’t. You run the risk of finding assholes, and of assholes finding you, try and disengage.

Also worth noting that you can usually shoot on BLM land. Bureau of Land Management, not to the cool BLM in this case. Check your local ordinances and if it’s allowed, check to see if there are any safe spots, consider getting into contact with your local chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association if you’ve got one, they usually have a good read on the safe places to shoot.

Or let you sic Wrex on them! Would that be too much to ask?

but she got latex tiddies. Latex tiddies we must be strong to resist. Tali is best girl.

heh, ass-science hammer.

I didn’t use melee during my first playthrough. I wish it had a New Game+ mode, because I want to do a nightmare difficulty stealth melee run. Nothing like a knife to the kidney to inform the bosses that the people are feeling unrest.

I haven’t played the Outer Worlds as thoroughly as I have Mass Effect, but I remember the game letting me play a political terrorist. When I wanted to kill the capitalists the biggest obstacle was that the capitalists typically had expensive guns and a large security force.

Fortunately, that security force was used to thrashing unarmed workers. I did my civic duty and gave the private security force a free lesson in how to block sniper bullets with your teeth.

This reminds me of something I’ve always hated about the first Mass Effect.

Your character is some shady special forces type who is literally above all laws in the galaxy and you come across a racist rally. The’re protesting the end of the war between humans and one of the species of aliens. Not the war, the end of the war. And going on about how humanity needs to ‘stand on its own’. Mind you, the whole game is about racism, so they put thought into this interaction. Your character can either be a Renegade where you hit people, act racist, and kill people for nothing, or a Paragon where you act like the biggest lib in the galaxy and do a bunch of needlessly self sacrificial stuff.

So you, a squad of heavily armed soldiers who are above the law, come across a rally of extreme racists who are known to be violent. The spokesperson for them comes and asks you to endorse his run for office, and as Renegade you can agree but as Paragon you just say something like “I disagree, but I respect your right to your opinions”. No! The opposite of racism isn’t not-racist, it’s antiracism. Fuck 'em up! To borrow some analysis from Ibram X Kendi, a neutral option on racism doesn’t exist. If your actions/policies create or sustain racial inequities, your actions/policies are racist. So fuck 'em up! Your character has the power to amplify or shut down their shit, walking away is choosing to allow it to continue, and that’s choosing racism over antiracism.

Space Nazis get the airlock, collaborators get put against the bulkhead.