The woman who actually lives in the house had just moved to Oklahoma City from Maryland with her family about two weeks earlier.
“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.
“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
She said the agents didn’t care.
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
Marisa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she said. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
Before they left, Marisa said one of the agents made a comment.
“One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning,’” she said. “It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was a little rough? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”
Now, Marisa said they have, quite literally, nothing.
“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.
Marisa said she is left with nothing but questions.
And yet, those who want easy access to guns argue its to protect themselves from tyrannical power. They are also not doing that. Perhaps, in part, because the power disparity between military, police, and a civilian gun owner makes personal guns little more than display pieces.
Gun ownership is a hobby. Most of the dialogue around them is theater. Those who enjoy guns own far more than is needed for 'defense', because it's enjoying ownership that they're actually defending.
So it's better to let it grow more, right?
That's obvious, hard to do a lot of what you don't enjoy if you can avoid it. Of course it's theater. Most of the dialogue around karate is theater. It still somewhat prepares one physically for various events.
I wrote a Gemini (small web) client in the last 2 days, of course it's theater, I don't have a modus of using Gemini yet, but it was useful. At least I have a client convenient for me personally, I've gained some experience (ok, it's a simple task, but), some self-confidence.
With guns - of course it's mostly a very cool toy, people also do historical fencing with swords. But they also learn things about military history and something about using small arms. Better than nothing, sniper rifles still have a place in warfare, even if typical "assault rifles" are almost like a bayonet in WWII, still has uses, but very secondary.
Learning is the root of any achievement. Learning is helped by joy. Why should this be different for defense?