Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn.
Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida." - Meaning and context.">
"How Did America's Weirdest, Most Freedom-Obsessed State Fall for an Authoritarian Governor" The Atlantic (27 March 2023/May 2023 issue)
• Spoken phrases rendered as italics in the original.
“

With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn.
Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida.

— Helen Lewis (journalist)

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn.
Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida." in the context of ""How Did America's Weirdest, Most Freedom-Obsessed State Fall for an Authoritarian Governor" The Atlantic (27 March 2023/May 2023 issue)
• Spoken phrases rendered as italics in the original." to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Helen Lewis (journalist)" (Quotes, 2023–present) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 19, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Helen Lewis (journalist)

About Helen Lewis (journalist)

Helen Lewis (born 30 September 1983) is a British journalist and a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is a former deputy editor of the New Statesman, and has also written for The Guardian, The Times and The Sunday Times.