Leadership Quote by Nancy Johnson

The line lands like a dry aside, but it’s really a miniature argument about normalization: when everything is framed as a “match,” violence stops feeling like a decision and starts feeling like routine. Johnson’s phrasing is almost comically matter-of-fact - “very natural to shoot them” - and that’s the point. She’s describing how language and structure (training vs. competition) can lower the moral and psychological threshold for pulling a trigger. Call it training and you preserve the idea of preparation, restraint, and rules; call it a match and you cue adrenaline, winning, and the permission to act.

The subtext is a negotiation over identity and limits. There’s “Dan,” the pushier voice advocating escalation (“shoot more”), and Johnson positioning herself as the reasonable actor: “I think I shoot plenty.” That last sentence is doing political work. It’s a claim of competence (“plenty” implies experience), moderation (not excessive), and autonomy (she decides, not Dan). It’s also quietly revealing: in a culture where shooting is normalized, “plenty” can be both reassurance and alarm, depending on who’s listening.

As a politician, Johnson is also modeling a certain kind of public pragmatism: speaking about lethal tools in bureaucratic terms - frequency, categories, best practices. The intent isn’t confession; it’s justification. The context that matters is a political environment where the act itself is less contested than the optics of how often, and under what label, it happens.