Surviving Your Next Family Gathering

If it’s Easter, chances are you spent yesterday sitting on a Megabus stranded in a sea of other people on their way to the house of the nearest relative who knows how to hardboil an egg. You’ve been preparing the speech you’ll casually rattle off to assure your relatives that everything is going just fine. Last night you probably slept on a four poster twin bed next to a cousin you don’t really talk to, on an identical four poster twin bed, in your grandparents' guest room.

When you heard that Uncle Jerry was coming this year you probably rolled your eyes because you knew that that meant you were all in for a mid-lunch lecture, lasting no less than 28 minutes, about his political platform. It will be an ideology cobbled together from that one Ayn Rand novel he read when he was 21 and a Gary Johnson rally he attended in early 2016.

When you arrive at lunch, you clock Jerry and begin talking to other relatives, you pretend you care about football and want an update on how the home team is doing.

By the time everyone is finishing appetizers Jerry has already had two scotch on the rocks, you watched him stir in stevia packets to make it sweeter.

No one really wanted to try the bean dip you brought. But that’s ok, you get it, bean dip isn’t really a Thanksgiving food. You’re pouring yourself a second drink now and eyeing the room, deciding who you’re going to sit next to at lunch. Everything is going smoothly.

Damnit.

You went to the bathroom while everyone was picking seats and so now you are sitting directly across from Jerry. He’s flicking a packet of stevia like it’s a tiny baggie of heroin he’s preparing to stir into his third scotch.

To Jerry’s credit, he isn’t the first one to bring up politics. It’s cousin Linda, who asks if anyone else heard about that whole weird pizza shop scandal during the election. Grandma hadn’t heard about it. You get to explain a debunked conspiracy theory about a human trafficking chain involving pizza shops to your grandmother. Happy Easter.

Jerry finishes his scotch as you finish your explanation and, even though the table has switched over to wine, he pours himself more liquor while he talks. He launches right in with what appears to be his key issue for the year: Guns. You shouldn’t be too surprised when he says he’s just glad we elected an upstanding guy who isn’t going to come after his guns, his Facebook has become increasingly full of reposts from the NRA during the last couple of years.

Now that Jerry’s found a way to introduce guns into the conversation, things are going to pick up quickly. His breathing is becoming laborious as he masticates. Be cool, affect a nonchalant air as you listen to him.

He’s already very excited, slamming his fists on the table and insisting that the right to bear arms is an inalienable right given to all US citizens by the constitution and cannot be changed.

Speak calmly and slowly, don’t make direct eye-contact with Jerry. Remember, Jerry’s an Originalist. He cried when Antonin Scalia died and he sighed a deep exhale of relief when Neil Gorsuch took his place. He’s becoming a bit agitated now. That vein in the top of his forehead is probably starting to twitch—be careful and don’t make direct eye contact with the vein either.

Now, in the most passive tone you can affect, remind Jerry that the US constitution actually can be changed. The bit that gives us the right to bear arms was actually an amendment itself, and the constitution has been changed 17 times since then.

Take a casual sip of your wine. Go ahead and remind him that the right to bear arms was added to the constitution when the “arms” in question were muskets. Tell him you could get behind people who want to have concealed-carry permits for their muskets. After all, you’re not unreasonable.

He tells you a gun is a gun, no matter the ammo capacity, and the constitution protects his right to have one.

Sure, it might be infuriating to listen to Jerry, a man who went off on a tangent last Fourth of July about how he doesn’t believe that all races of humans are created equal, insist that all guns are created equal. But don’t lose your cool. You don’t even have to respond to Jerry at all. If you just help yourself to some more turkey someone else will probably say something to shift the conversation.

But, Jerry isn’t ready to let up. He says the founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves if they could hear you now.

Alright, say they roll over—say they even sit up and decide to assess the current political needs of the country. Maybe the afterlife is boring and they have time for stuff like that. As soon as they plop down in front of the news and start to become aware of the nuclear capabilities of the U.S. government they couldn’t help but be amused picturing Jerry pontificating about how he needs access to guns to defend himself against the government.

“Surely these bomb things could defeat any citizen or group of citizens with a gun or group of guns,” Jefferson will croon.

“The man doesn’t need guns, he needs nukes.” Franklin will say.

"Yes, but he can’t afford nukes, he can afford guns,” Hamilton explains.

“I’m beginning to think they’re just collecting these to make their dicks feel bigger,” Madison will muse.

Jerry is still carrying on, he tells you that mass shootings kill fewer people a year than falling coconuts.

Say that if there were a way to regulate falling coconuts you would probably vote for it, offer to sign an online petition about the coconuts if one exists.

Tell him that you’re not just worried about mass shootings. Mass shootings are fucking terrifying, that’s why they tend to spark a national debate about gun-regulations. But, you understand that they represent a small fraction of deaths by gun violence in the US every year. Most of those deaths are suicides—63%.

That’s right—there are almost no gun deaths that look like exciting scenes from action movies. If you have a gun you are statistically more likely to use it to kill yourself than anyone else, and that's just a fact.

There are also just people doing stupid shit. Like a police chief in Georgia, who slept with a loaded gun in his bed. Which was pretty badass, until he shifted in his sleep an accidentally shot his wife. We have a system that deemed that guy super-qualified to own and operate a gun, and he chose to load it and then cuddle with it.

Jerry rolls his eyes and mumbles under his breath about how it’s really unfortunate that people are politicizing a national tragedy.

Don’t waste your time telling Jerry that he was the one who brought up mass shootings in the first place, in fact, he was the first one to say anything about guns. Just, politely, ask him when it would be a better time to pass legislation on gun control.

He doesn't have an answer. He takes another sip of scotch.

Your grandmother asks everyone what they thought of the traffic on the drive in, and lunch continues.