Episode Summary

Margaret and Ellie talk about building a better culture around guns, the importance of gun ownership for community and self defense, some basic tenets of firearm safety, ideas around conflict deterrence, some problems with our current gun culture, consent and guns, mental health and guns, and unsurprisingly how community might be a big piece of the answer to maintaining better gun culture.

Guest Info

The Guest is Ellie Picard and she is a hand gun instructor with Arm Trans Women. The group can be found at https://linktr.ee/atw.firearms.inst or on Instgram @ATW.firearms.inst or @Codename_Ellie.

Host Info

Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Next Episode

Hopefully will come out Friday, December, 16th.

Transcript

Margaret 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. And this week we are going to be talking about what it takes to build a better gun culture, a gun culture that keeps people safe instead of not safe. And, with me to talk about that I'm going to have on an instructor named Ellie Picard. And, I think that you all get a lot out of hearing what she has to say. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show in the network.

Margaret 01:36 Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then kind of your background with the stuff that we're going to be talking about today?

Ellie 01:46 Yeah, for sure. My name is Ellie Picard, and I use she/her pronouns. Currently living in Charlottesville, Virginia, I'm originally from the District of Columbia. And, I've been interested in firearms for most of my life, I've only been actively shooting and training with guns for the last three or four years. I became a certified handgun instructor a few months ago, and I work with another trans instructor. Here in Virginia, we have a company called Arm Trans Women. And we offer classes, not just for trans folks, but for literally anyone who signs up. But, we particularly enjoy and emphasize the importance of teaching queer folks, people of color, other marginalized people, because we're the ones who really need to know how to defend ourselves in our communities and our families, because no one else is going to. And I'm also a doctoral candidate, a researcher in political science, and my research focuses on radical queer militancy. And so studying and paying attention to radical gun culture, or queer gun culture has been a big part of my research life as well as my personal life. So, I'm not just actively, personally involved in these things. It's something that I dedicate a lot of intellectual, you know, resources to thinking through and dealing with as well.

Margaret 02:07 Yeah, I get really