The firearms industry wants people to call weapons like the Sig Sauer MCX that Omar Mateen used to kill 49 people in Orlando this past weekend “modern sporting rifles,” rather than “assault weapons,” Justin Peters finds. “The phrase is an artful attempt to recast weapons such as the MCX and the AR-15 (and its variants) as all-American toys,” Peters writes. “The term is a genius act of marketing, meant to bring these deadly weapons into the mainstream and keep them there. It’s also disingenuous hokum that exists to cloud debate, like calling a used car ‘pre-owned.’”
Conservative activists have been spreading anti-gay sentiment in Orlando for years, by boycotting Disney World because it hosts Gay Days, Mark Joseph Stern wants us to remember. “Conservative Christian activists may not be directly to blame for the massacre at Pulse,” Stern writes. “But they are responsible for relentlessly vilifying the LGBTQ community in terms that often spilled over into outright hatred.”
Donald Trump frustration #780987: Trump cares a lot about the words other people use, but he’s allowed to say whatever he wants, Dahlia Lithwick points out. “No small part of the elaborate Trump two step—in which he says something utterly unconscionable and then walks it back fractionally—rests on the assumption that his own words are loose, gauzy nothings that have no real meaning and thus no serious or enduring consequences,” Lithwick writes.
How did Ayesha Curry, wife of star Golden State Warriors player Steph Curry, come to symbolize virtuous womanhood? Damon Young explains how certain corners of Twitter fashioned the mom and housewife into a weapon used to censor other women: “Ayesha Curry’s name began to get dropped whenever a famous young woman deemed sexually unscrupulous happened to be in the news. To them, she was the hummus-making rose emerging from the concrete thots.”
Lara Bazelon doesn’t know what to call her ex-husband, father of her children and continued staunch co-parent. “I do not like the word ex when applied to people, not to those who are still integral to my life,” Bazelon writes. “Ex is a Latin word; it means ‘out from,’ ‘out of,’ ‘removal.’ Applied to a person, it means ‘no longer.’ Ex does not capture my relationship with the person I see several times a week, sometimes daily.”
Some joy: Casey Fiesler looks at the new Game Developer Barbie, and finds a lot to celebrate.
Laptop-colored laptops,
Rebecca
