The typical Bearing Arms reader is, I suspect, pretty close to the typical gun owner. While we may range across the demographic spectrum, the average reader is either conservative or libertarian in their ideology.
But I’m genuinely fascinated by those who don’t share that ideology and are still gun owners. I genuinely believe that gun owners will, in time become gun voters so I support people from across the ideological divide to own guns and learn to defend themselves with one.
Sometimes, though, I’m genuinely baffled by the thought processes, such as they are, that some people use to justify whatever it is they want to justify. That’s what ran through my head when I read this long and rambling piece written by someone who doesn’t believe in gun rights, but who has a gun anyway.
I won’t even try to get into the background the author exposes us to, in part because it’s unnecessary and in part because it’s about eight million words to say “I’m a really, really lefty leftist.”
Then we get to the part about guns which starts:
Still, I couldn’t shake how much I hated guns. The mainstream American fascination with guns wasn’t and isn’t leftist or revolutionary in principle; it’s rooted in imperial genocide, chattel slavery, white supremacy, and patriarchy. And it repulsed and still repulses me in a way I find hard to fully express. In the U.S., the majority of people who owned guns then and own them now weren’t and aren’t believers in the teachings I was getting from the radical thinkers I was consulting. They were and are mostly gun worshippers who believe their rights as Americans begin and end with the second amendment. Back then, I found it hard to reconcile what I was learning with the realities of the world I was living in. The people who toted guns, for the most part, weren’t like me or my friends. In fact, they would probably feel inclined to aim those guns at us if and when we were doing something they felt threatened their right to have the gun (or their private property or whatever). Beyond that, I couldn’t imagine holding a gun in my hand and dispensing the magazine. I especially couldn’t imagine holding something so powerful and ruinous and aiming it at another person. Even in the wildest conceptions and thought exercises where I built a storyline in which I had to fight for my life, I hoped I had another option: a chance to flee, a place to hide, or, at worst, the opportunity to hit my attacker over the head without ending their life.
***
I continued to study, read, write papers on radical political theory, and organize in material ways throughout the many communities I became part of after other people took over the operation of our Food Not Bombs chapter. I was no longer steadfastly dedicated to nonviolence as I was in the years before. In the “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, they write about the proletarian right to arm ourselves against our oppressors and say, “The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.[…] Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”
In theory, I agreed with this, but in the back of my head, guns remained a quandary I couldn’t solve for myself.
You know you’re in for something special when someone starts quoting Karl Marx and Frederick Engles.
I applaud her for at least acknowledging conflict in her views. How is it that guns are about slavery, genocide, white supremacy and patriarchy when they’re also tools for the proletarian to defend themselves against oppressors? That makes absolutely no sense at all. It seems as if these are mutually exclusive positions.
What’s more, she went on to write, “Even though it didn’t square with my distrust and disbelief in our current system of government, I believed strongly in the need for increased control of their sale and ownership.” Again, how can you distrust the government and still want them to have as much control over the means to resist it as possible?
In time, she managed to work through this and is now a gun owner, but the glimpse into her mind at this particular time is fascinating, in a trainwreck kind of way.
The idea that guns are any of the things she believed, especially at a time when the gun control laws were created to keep guns out of the hands of non-white people, suggests that guns were tools that could be used for liberation. While you could make the argument that owning guns was white privilege or whatever, the truth is that gun control was a symbol of racism and authority, reserving firearms only for those at the top of the pyramid.
It’s actually the only single point I find any agreement with Marx.
So much of this piece seems to be the author’s justification for going from a non-violent left to embracing gun ownership as a part of the extreme left–the way a left-leaning friend of mine put it was “If you go far enough left, you get your guns back”–while missing some important points she should have seen far earlier.
It’s an interesting look into a leftist gun owner’s mind–this is one who goes beyond the term “liberal,” it seems, since she’s quoting Marx and Engles and seems to take their opinions seriously even as she couldn’t wrap her head around gun ownership–and where she came from to get to the point of owning a gun.
But it’s also interesting that she still doesn’t seem to think you have a right to one.
Let’s hope that changes down the road.
Read the full article here
