by Mike Ely
Everyone probably noticed that the U .S. Supreme Court just made a major ruling on the 2nd amendment — ruling that local governments should not have the right to essentially ban handguns in the home. This was a close ruling, written by Scalia, with the court’s right wing for handguns and the liberal wing opposing it.
The U.S. approach to weapons has historically used local governments to develop local policies: where the population is largely white, conservative or rural — guns are often allowed (even in some areas private ownership of military weapons). Where populations have been black, urban and poor, the ruling class approach has been to sharply restrict and forbid owning and bearing guns — and to portray an armed population as a nightmare.
The roots of this (in U.S. history, and in white supremacy) are pretty obvious.
And all this raises questions:
- Where should revolutionaries stand on the possession of weapons by the population?
- Is an armed population a bulwark against “tyranny” by the government?
- How about under socialism:Should the government have a monopoly on the means of violence?
Here are some initial thoughts:
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One place to start is to ask: why is the U.S. one of the few capitalist class societies where there is a tradition of arming of major chunks of the population? Is it because it has been “free” in some special, precious way? Or because it has been aggressively armed for some special purpose?
I think that a look at the history of this place is revealing of several particularities:
a) This country grew by genocide of Indians (stealing their lands, and then killing those who resisted) — in a way that repeatedly happened far outside the reach of the central state. the standard pattern is that armed european settlers would invade indian lands, clear forests, engage the indians (both in hostile ways and in trade), and then (when the inevitable “border wars” broke out) call on the federal authorities to come rescue them.
That history is repeated over and over — that is the hidden history of the war of 1812 (which is portrayed as a U.S.-british war, but was really mainly a war to conquer the Native peoples between the appalachians and the Mississippi), it is the way the custer expeditions around the Black hills (and the abrogation of the Fort Laremi Treaty) was carried out.
so the arming of the population (always meaning the arming of aggressive white settlers, and the DIS arming of Native peoples) was a key component of the expansion.
b) The U.S. south was an network of forced labor camps of the most horrific kind — a system of slavery enforced by the general arming of the white population. It is often said (correctly) that most white people did not own slaves (true), and that the big slave owners were a small minority (also true) — but over and over again throughout U.S. history, the general white population united to hunt down escaped slaves, respond to slave revolts with white-hot terror and murder, and then rise to defend slavery in the civil war. This continued in the infamous mass lynchings and vigilante hunts for “black rapists and criminals” that forms so much of the background mentality of the U.S. culture.
c) And then there is the border — whose history I won’t capsulize here. but let us just say that the Texas love of firearms (and its “texas rangers” and its whole self-identity among white people) is — in unspoken ways — a history bound up with containing, controlling, dispossessing and exploiting Mexican and slave labor.
d) The history of this country is a history of a weak federal government — certainly compared to Europe. this is true both in the sense that large parts of the country were OUTSIDE the reach and stabilization by a federal government (i.e. the “frontier”) — even taking the form of networks of quasi indpendent settler states (there was the California Bear Republic, theTexas lone star republic, the Mormon Polygamist Zionism republic — along side the Oklahoma Indian territory, and for a moment the quasi-independent and recognized Lakota nation (after the Bozman war). So the weakness of federal authority took a mixed form: state rights in the east, local power (posse comitatus) in the west, personal street justice just about everywhere. The legacy of white vigilante “justice” (which combined the punishment of rustlers with the brutalization of Native, Mexican and Black people) — is the legacy of the objective weakness of the federal authority.
All of these things combined, to create an armed population that demanded (and had) a LEGAL right to be armed (and that exercised its armed power outside the “color of law” — by common law, vigilante tradition, and so on). It is deeply engrained — and it is most deeply engrained where this armed “civil society” was most powerful (i.e. in the South and the West — for different reasons).
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None of this is “ancient history” — it is the history that shaped and marks our present. and its currents and dynamics are right there (not just “under the surface” but “right there.”)
That is why “war on crime” has been (for decades) an obvious codeword for arming yourself and the police against Black people. (”Zero tolerance”? “three strikes yer out”? for who?!)
I have spent time in both of those regions. And you don’t have to go far to hear that the weapons are needed to contain black people — one town cop explained to me once in detail how he worked with the other grown (white) men in town…. “Our job is keeping the jigs in line.” Once working on a ranch in Montana, i listened quietly (but in true shock) as my host explained that white people lived surrounded by “a conquered people” — and that the native people of this area did not understand deeply enough that the conquest meant that they had no rights. the question of land was vivid and current — both for the Indians and for the ranchers who considered “renegades leaving the rez” a permanent danger.
These are the root of the 1990s Militia movement. And these are the basic roots of the demand (from the most conservative and militantly aggressive parts of the white population) for THEIR right to “keep and bear arms.”
