On loaded guns

There is a difference between being morally and literally bulletproof

I.

“The firing stopped. I lay there maybe 10 or 15 seconds. I got up, I saw four or five students lying around the lot. By this time, it was like mass hysteria. Students were crying, they were screaming for ambulances.

I heard some girl screaming, ‘They didn’t have blank, they didn’t have blank!’

No, they didn’t‌.”

The above is a transcript from an eyewitness account of the 1970 shooting at Kent State, when members of the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of unarmed anti-war protesters. There are any number of parallels between that moment and this one. The days of escalating conflict between local activists and federal law enforcement culminating in accidental but entirely predictable violence; the ratatat of gunshots, the screaming that follows. The words vary, but the song remains the same: a single voice raised in horror and anguish and disbelief, the last thing most of all.

They didn’t have blank?!

Why did you have real bullets?!

Or, most recently, after an ICE agent shot a 37 year-old nurse dead on a Minneapolis sidewalk:

What did you just do?!

II.

If this were a different kind of story, the bullets would not be real. Or they would be, but the gun would jam, or the shooter would miss, or or or. The important thing is, the person at the center of the action would emerge unharmed.

Screenwriters call this “plot armor.” It’s a silly conceit, but a necessary one; every story needs a protagonist, a main character whose journey forms both the connective tissue between the bare bones of the three-act story structure and the beating heart inside of it. If your hero gets shot or trampled or hit by a bus before the end of the first act, you no longer have a story— or at least, not the kind people want to watch, because even the most thrilling plot is meaningless if you don’t care about the characters in it.

Plot armor is the reason why the stormtroopers in the original Star Wars trilogy have such abysmal aim, or why the zombies on The Walking Dead inexplicably lacked an appetite for one Rick Grimes.

Most importantly, plot armor is not about the hero being skilled; it is about the hero being lucky. He bends down to tie his shoe just as a bullet whizzes through the place where his head would have been. He drops a knife into a room outfitted with a state-of-the-art alarm system, which shuts off one tenth of one second before it lands. He’s about to have his head caved in by a giant henchman, only to realize at the last moment that this is not just any giant henchman, but a giant henchman whose phone calls the hero has been listening in on for months — and that while he cannot best this man in combat, he can disarm him by touching his heart.

We laugh at these scenes because they’re absurd, impossible, insane— but the important thing is, we laugh. We are delighted, not surprised, because we put our faith in plot armor the same way that devoted Christians put their trust in a benevolent god. The universe will protect the hero from harm until his story is finished, and if he does come to harm, it will be for a good reason — and this, too, is a sort of luck. Not the kind that lets the hero escape unscathed, unbitten, from under a pile of zombies, but luck all the same. If he dies, it will not be randomly, senselessly, at the split second nexus where misfortune meets misjudgment meets an impulsive and hideous mistake.

If he dies, it will be by choice, not by accident — and certainly not in vain.

III.

I do not want Alex Pretti to have died in vain. What fills me with despair is the unavoidable truth that he almost certainly did, because like Renee Good, his death was something he neither anticipated nor intended. The thing that distinguishes a martyr from a casualty of war is desire: the martyr wishes for death, while the casualty is killed while trying to escape it, and Pretti’s last moments on this earth make it painfully clear that he very much wanted to live.

It’s agonizing to watch. What happened is so messy, so chaotic, so evidently the product of a series of panicked and entirely avoidable errors on the part of all involved, any of whom could have made different choices resulting in different outcomes. If only that agent hadn’t pulled the trigger; if only the weapon they took off Pretti hadn’t discharged by accident amid panicked shouts of “Gun! Gun!”¹ If only ICE hadn’t charged across the street to confront Pretti, and if only Pretti hadn’t resisted arrest, hadn’t been carrying, hadn’t been there at all.

There are so many other ways this event could have unfolded, all of them pointless to think about now — except that thinking about them now could stop us from reliving this moment tomorrow, or next week. Another man holding another gun over another body, shattered and bleeding, another innocent man or woman’s final breath turning to crystal in the freezing air.

Another death, followed by another scream.

They didn’t have blank?!

Why did you have real bullets?!

What did you just do?!

IV.

I’ve written about the strange pseudoreality of political protest, and political violence, in an era where the average person is likely to watch the death of Alex Pretti on the same device he uses to screen episodes of Bridgerton. I’ve written about what is likely to happen, and keep happening, in a world in which ordinary people are encouraged at every turn to misunderstand the stakes of these interactions — in which one party has a loaded weapon, a short temper, and near-limitless permission to discharge both with impunity, while the other is armed with a pure heart, good intentions, and an Instagram infographic about her constitutional rights that contains several small but crucial inaccuracies vis-a-vis the line between observation and interference.

All of this is still relevant, I think, but I also think I may have underestimated how desperately people would continue to cling to a narrative-driven interpretation of events. To rage against the intrusion of reality — cold, cruel, unfair, ungovernable reality—into an idealized, plot-armored vision of the world where the heroes win, and the bad guys lose, and everything happens for a reason.

To weep over how things ought to be instead of reckoning with how things are, even when the latter might be the one thing that saves us from seeing another five or ten or fifty people lost to senseless and preventable violence — deaths that alters the trajectory of the discourse and the future not even the littlest bit.

You can say it should be otherwise; you would be in good company. On social media, the posts come fast and furious, as if we could catapult ourselves into a quantum universe where things worked out the way they were supposed to, instead of the way they did, through the sheer force of our fingertips and the sheer depths of our moral clarity. It is as loud and insistent as a ringing bell. You should be able to heckle and antagonize ICE without risking your life in the bargain. You should be able to disobey their commands without getting shot in the face. You should be able to bring a weapon to a protest without being arrested; you should be able to struggle against five armed officers with a gun on your hip; you should, you should, you should.

V.

Would it help if I said that this is all true? That I wish we lived in a world where there wasn’t such a devastating gap between what is and what should be?

Of course you should be able to do all this, and more; of course bad, senseless, hideous things should not happen to good people. Of course someone — if not the men with the guns, then the cosmic forces that govern the universe — should recognize someone like Pretti as the hero of the story and armor him accordingly.

It should, it should, it should.

And yet.

VI.

On Saturday afternoon, Alex Honnold completed a 1,667-foot free solo climb of a skyscraper in Taipei. The stunt was both sponsored by and livestreamed on Netflix, which felt like the culmination of something. Here we could watch a real, actual person risking his life in real time — not just on the same screen we use to stream episodes of Bridgerton, but on the same platform. The line between fictionalized narrative and narrativized reality has never been harder to discern; the difference between a real, vulnerable person and a plot-armored main character has never been easier to ignore. Because what Honnold is doing is absurd, impossible, insane— but when he summits the building in one piece, what do we feel? Delighted, of course, but not surprised. And the more he succeeds, the less surprised we are.

Eventually, Alex Honnold might even come to occupy the same place in the cultural imagination as an Indiana Jones, a Rick Grimes, a John Wick: a man who we’re perfectly content to watch risking his life, because we know he’ll never actually lose it. He can’t lose it.

For Alex Honnold’s sake, I pray this is true. I hope the day never comes when we stop being delighted, and start being surprised.

But for Alex Pretti’s sake, I wonder if we should consider the wisdom of allowing ourselves to confuse our folk heroes with the kind in the movies — and encouraging ordinary people to tempt fate for a good cause, as if this alone will protect them from harm.

VII.

Because there is what should happen, and then there is what will happen, when you try to run from them and they pull the trigger.

They will not miss.

The gun will not jam.

You will not survive to see how the story ends; you will not be canonized in death.

“Students were crying, they were screaming for ambulances. I heard some girl screaming, ‘They didn’t have blank, they didn’t have blank.’

No, they didn’t‌.”

No, they didn’t.

1. Update: I misread a story raising the possibility that Pretti’s weapon accidentally discharged; as of 2pm ET on January 26 this is being investigated but not yet confirmed.