I recently attended a town hall held by my newly elected member of Congress, Dean Phillips. It was pretty nice getting to go to a town hall held by my representative in Washington, because the previous representative, displaced last election by Representative Phillips, went for years and years without having any actual town halls. He’d have an occasional fake town hall we’d hear about after the fact, but no actual town halls. Phillips is holding town halls on a regular basis.

Many topics were covered during the event, including guns, and Phillips gave an OK response to an early question on the issue. He runs politically in the middle of the road but definitely in favor of more regulation, which is probably good for the district where a significant number of citizens hunt, and we have not suffered any local mass killings of children. (Though this district does include a school suicide hot spot.)

But then something happened at the end of the town hall. The last questioner said something shocking. He told Representative Phillips and the audience that he had researched which kind of weapon would do best to kill “his deer.” (“His deer” or more us ally “my deer” might be a Minnesota expression referring to the deer you expect to get during hunting season.) He had determined that what he called an “AK-47” rifle, his AK, was the best weapon with which to kill a deer. It was the most effective at killing, and thus, best for the deer. For this reason, we should not really be regulating guns like people want us to.

The audience sat and listened, then waited for Representative Phillips to say something, and he did. He said something assuaging the person who asked the question, and I think Phillips and most of the audience were quietly embarrassed by this hunter’s remarks. Most people just glanced away and were glad to have this not develop into a fight. That, by the way, is a key component of the widely known “Minnesota nice.” No matter how bone-headed a remark or behavior made in public might be, just let it go. Not worth it. Give it a stern look and move on.

Now, before I tell you why the hunter was wrong, the audience was wrong, and Representative Phillips was wrong, in what they all said and did and did not do an did not say, a brief digression. This is advice I’ve since passed on to a few different elected officials, and now I’m giving it to you.

Always have a last question of your own, in case the actual last question is a real bummer like this one was. Don’t have a person ready with an ideal last question that you turn to at the end. That is smarmy and dishonest. But much less smarmy and reasonably less dishonest is to have a question in your head. A question someone once asked you, that you have a kick-ass excellent answer to, the kind of answer you want your public appearance to end on.

Then, if the last question you actually get at the actual event is a great one, and you don’t blow the answer, you are good. Be done. But if that last question is like this guy’s question, so that the public event will end with a squirm and a whimper instead of an inspiring exposition and a tear in the eye, pull out your emergency question. “Thanks for that. By the way, something someone said earlier reminded me of a question I got the other day, but no one touched on here. It is about kittens and how much I love them, and how I saved some baby bunnies from a snake the other day…” or whatever.

Anyway, yes, the deer hunter was wrong because he made the case that a tactical rifle, sometimes called an “assault weapon,” was the best way to kill a deer. This is not true. Tactical rifles trade off effectiveness of accurate killing of a large mammal at a modest distance for lightness, shortness, ability to point around and blast scary things that are near you as you prance through a dangerous situation wearing armor going “hut hut hut” like this:

Meanwhile, to kill a deer, you use the following elements.

1) You hide in a tree overlooking a place deer are expected.

2) The deer pass into the zone of expectation, walking slowly, frequently stopping to browse or listen and smell the surrounding environment.

3) You point a large, long barreled, highly accurate, high caliber rifle with good sights at the deer and when ready pull the trigger.

Like this (fear not, no deer are harmed in this video):

The guy at the Town Hall was wrong.

The audience was wrong. Why? Because — wait for it — no one gasped. Well, I did, and I got a stern look or two, but nobody else did. What should have happened is that everyone should have done that thing they do in the British Parliament. Like this:

Or words to that effect.

What should Representative Phillips have done? I’m not sure. I wanted him to walk up to the guy and slap him, but that is exactly the opposite of what the mild mannered and friendly Phillips would ever do.

Maybe he could have sung a song, like this:

Ok, that was all very fun but I do want to get very serious for a moment. I have a specific suggestion I’d like to give my fellow Town Hall goers and activists interested in gun violence.

Go get hypnotized. Get a post-hypnotic suggestion that has the following effect. Next time you are in a public space and someone takes the floor and belittles any project or suggestion to reduce gun violence by limiting access to tactical assault weapons, high capacity magazines, or similar, or to reduce suicide and accidental discharge of weapons in homes by requiring that guns be firmly secured, or anything along those lines, you will suddenly believe that you are in a room where the entire audience is made up of the loved ones and survivors of Sandy Hook massacre, the Red Lake massacre, the Virginia Tech massacre, the Fort Hood massacre, the Aurora theater massacre, the Columbine massacre, the Parkland massacre, and all the other massacres.

You would imagine, through this post hypnotic suggestion, that there are thousands of people in the room with you, all of whom had lost a child, a parent, a sibling, a student, a teacher, a co-worker, a neighbor, or some other loved one or close acquaintance, to a shooter who would never have been a shooter if this country had an entirely different gun culture and entirely different gun laws.

Imagine the person making the case about his choice of deer hunting weapon in a room full of those people.

And in the balconies, the vast balconies that surround this room that has now come indelibly into your head, are the loved ones of the gun suicide victims, which accumulate at the rate of thousands of years, and the victims of accidental shootings, which happen at about the rate of one a day, and the victims of crimes carried out with guns, which are frequent only in societies where there is a strong and vibrant gun culture like the US. There are millions and millions of people in these balconies that extend far beyond your ability to see.

And that person, who is comparing his deer hunting needs to the sorrow of all those millions, is in front of the room making his case.

Imagine this unthinking hunter explaining how it is important to him to have his choice of hunting rifle, even if that meant decreased lack of safety for others.

No, let me try that again. Imagine this asshole yammering on and on about how he needs a fucking assault rifle to get “his deer” even if that means that we continue to live in a society in which babies and college students and everyone in between are occasionally gunned down in a massacre, and tens of thousands of others die annually through gun violence, including suicide, in order to allow let that piece of shit have is goddamn toy.

Yeah, like that. Imagine it that way. I want all of you, in the actual audience when the actual deer hunter stands up to make his case, to imagine being in that room full of those people.

Then, react.

Because, you know what? They are in that room with you, in spirit. They need you to assume you are with them, watching, listening, waiting, for you do do the right thing. And the right thing is not a stern look, or to look away, or to sit quietly.

The right thing to do is to gasp, then take a breath, then let it out. Shout that person down. End that conversation. Make that conversation highly unlikely to happen again in that room with those people. This is not a matter of respecting someone’s voice. It is a matter of insisting that a misguided believe that a the needs of a hobby are equal to the lives of thousands and thousands of victims of our out of control gun culture.

React.

A rifle has a long rifled barrel. Rifling is a spiral groove that causes the bullet to spin. A spinning bullet flies straighter, so point-blank range is longer. Point-blank is not gun-to-the-head (or rifle-to-the-head) distance, it is simply the distance over which a straight sighted shot will hit its mark without compensating for the bullet falling in the Earth’s gravitational field.

In the old days, to fire a second (or third, etc.) bullet from a gun, you had to shove powder and shot and wadding and stuff down the barrel. Over time this got easier to do, so we ended up with things like revolvers and the rough (but different) equivalent in long guns, a way to get the second bullet into the right place (the chamber) by pulling and/or pushing on a bolt, lever, or other doohickey. Then they invented a way for the bullet to load itself up so that it was ready to go, generally using some of the energy from the previously fired bullet. These were initially called by terms such as “self-loading,” “repeating,” or “auto-loading.” I think the term “semi-automatic” emerged at a later time to clarify the distinction between what eventually became known as “fully automatic” and “semi-automatic.”

An fully automatic weapon fires a series of bullets with only one pull of the trigger.

A rifle is a gun, a gun is a weapon, a rifle is a weapon, and many weapons are rifles or guns.

An assault weapon is often thought of as a rifle or rifle-like gun designed to attack and kill people, maximizing casualties and ease of use during hut-hut-hut situations.* It may have a way to suppress muzzle flash, it usually has a pistol type grip allowing it to be maneuvered and aimed more quickly, it may be light weight, it usually can carry a lot of bullets or can be modified to carry a whole-bunch-of bullets, etc. There is not a formal definition of assault weapon, though in the process of legislating guns, some statues define the term, but that is not official-Webster-linguo-defined. An assault weapon need not be fully automatic

Most gun aficionados will tell you that an “assault rifle” is always a fully automatic. Period. And, to them, this is true. Not an assault weapon, an assault rifle. Totally different thing, they say. You’re using the wrong word, they’ll tell you.

Yet, a gun is a weapon, so a semi-automatic rifle with a pistol grip, flash suppressor, large magazine, etc. is an assault rifle.

Why is this important?

It is not. Not at all. Means nothing. There is nothing whatsoever to the problem that people who talk about guns and rifles and stuff use terms that do not match what a subset of the terms currently active gun aficionados prefer.

But if you use these terms in a way not anointed by the gun slingers, you will be corrected, and that correction will be used as a tool to derail the discussion. You will be trolled. Slinger-trolled.

When it comes down to banning guns, when a bill is passed that bans specific guns in a specific state or country, definitions must be created for use in statute, as referred to above. Even though many gun slinger trolls will tell you that all the terms are defined, understood, and fully deployed across the gun-o-sphere, they are not. There are all kinds of edge cases and vagueness. For example, an automatic rifle fires several shots, but to most gun slingers, an automatic pistol does not. But a machine pistol is a fully automatic pistol, which is a pistol not because of its pistolosity so much as its lack of long rifled barrel and relative smallness. And so on. It will not do to ban firearms without attending to the definitions very clearly. Meanwhile, it will not do to have the conversation constantly derailed by yammering gun slinger trolls insisting that they own the English Language. They do not.

When the famous Clinton assault weapon ban went into effect decades ago, the fist thing the gun slingers did was to eviscerate it by insisting that definitions had to be very very clear, in a certain way, such as naming specific known weapons or lines of weapons. The production of this clarity was demanded in order to allow the creation of loopholes big enough to pass a naval gun through. The purpose, on the part of the pro-gun lobby, of screwing around with definitions, was to avoid actually banning entire categories of guns. Ultimately, the legislation did not work very well.

For much of the time they’ve been manufactured, a typical semi-automatic rifle that is also an assault weapon, depending and varying across time and space, can be turned into a fully automatic weapon with a kit that goes with that rifle. Newer regulatory standards have made it more and more difficult to make this conversion. There was a time when it was trivial, now it is harder. As the old method of making a weapon fully auto (removing the bit that causes the firing pin to only hit the bullet once, then adding a part that controls the hammer’s cycle so it does not try to fire a bullet before it has entered the chamber, etc) has become more difficult, the bump-stock was invented, a device that totally circumvents the measures take to make this conversion very difficult. And so on.

My message is this: When talking about regulating guns, beware the pedant: the person who tells you that you don’t know what you are talking about because you are not using specific terms, and tries to make that the main point of the conversation.

Yes, ultimately, we will need to have proper and correct definiteness, but it is simply not true that adherence to this absurd level of specificity is required to have a productive conversation. It isn’t true because one of the most important differences between weapons is semi- vs. fully-automatic, and that distinction is artificial. Eventually, we will likely see the difference between an “assault weapon” and a “hunting weapon” similarly mucked up, as we decide as a society to ban assault weapons but protect hunting weapons. There will be a weight limit put on weapons, so light weight (a feature of assault weapons) is not allowed. So heavier weapons will be created that can be lightened by changing the stock. Flash suppressors will not be allowed, but there will be instruction to make and add your own. All of it.

Face it: Gun slinging trolls are simply not honest contributors to this conversation. And that does not matter. It does not matter because we are tired of listing to them.

*the hut-hut-hut situation:

But we know that for most issues, Trump has no conviction. He’ll say one thing one day, change his mind the next day, accept a deal that totally tosses out what he promised the week before, etc. Therefore, his comments on these issues over the last several hours are meaningless.

If Trump sticks to his guns, as it were, for several days, this is going to macerate many of those Republicans, and contribute significantly to the process of the GOP digesting itself.

This is working out like the first draft of some good fiction.

In the end, Trump’s actions over the current crisis will cause a number of Congressional Republicans to get kicked out. We will never know which ones, but certainly some of them.

By the way, some of you know that I was asking around about popcorn poppers. I decided on the Presto 04841 Orville Redenbachers Hot Air Popcorn Popper, and I’m very happy with it. I wonder what made me think of that?????