Gun Control is Bad, Actually

Dr. Weirdlike Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gun

This is probably gonna be one of my more controversial posts, but I want to talk about guns. In traditional American political discourse, guns are a simple left/right issue - the right favors an unrestricted right to bear arms, usually justified either for self protection, for protection against tyranny, or for hunting use, and rests its argument in a rather broadly read interpretation of the Second Amendment, whereas the “left” - meaning the Democrats and their allies - favors gun control or sometimes even gun abolition, citing public safety, crime, and the perceived ridiculousness of resisting tyranny enforced by a modern military with simple firearms. They favor a more strict interpretation of the Second Amendment, that “the right to bear arms” is strictly confined to “within a well regulated militia” rather than that being the justification for a more broad right to bear arms. The constitutional argument is interesting, but not something I care to discuss here - I don’t consider the Constitution a document worth saving, and as such, I don’t think where it comes down on the issue has any bearing on what the proper course of action is.

What I am interested in, though, is the issue itself. As noted, the “left” in America generally favors gun control - I refer to them as such, because as alluded to by me in previous articles, we do not have any sort of serious political left in America at all - the Democrats are a center-right party, solidly pro business and pro capitalism and fairly authoritarian. Biden just added 100,000 more cops, after all. The Republicans are a far right party, equally pro business and pro capitalism, but even more authoritarian and willing to lean into racism and culture wars and hate to further their political agenda. Gun control is in fact a fairly authoritarian position, generally, but the reason the right resists it is because of our long history of racism and racialized crime in America - the racist far right wants to preserve the right to kill those who offend them, essentially.

But that doesn’t mean gun control is good. Typically, the actual left position on gun control, best described by Karl Marx himself, is as follows: “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.” Marx recognized, as have many other leftists like Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and revolutionaries all over the world, that capitalism remains in power through use of violent force, and the workers need a means to defend themselves against such. Power concedes nothing unless forced to. This left position has been largely ignored in mainstream American politics for at least fifty years, after what revolutionaries we had - Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, etc, were all killed by the FBI and their groups disbanded.

Before I dive too deep into revolutionary politics, though, which is perhaps a harder sell, I’d like to talk about public safety. Usually gun control debates in America come up after a mass shooting. Mass shootings are an almost uniquely American phenomenon - they happen here daily, yet are nearly unheard of in any other nation in the world, regardless of gun control laws, from Switzerland's mandatory gun ownership to the UK and Japan’s near gun ban, no one has this issue but us. Comparatively, it is also a relatively minor issue - while it's no consolation to the victims, the percentage of gun violence tied to mass shootings in America is quite small - definitions vary, but of the 45,222 deaths due to guns in America in 2020, between 38 and 513 are attributable to mass shootings, or roughly between .1 and 1%. That this is the driving force behind so much gun control legislation is somewhat bizarre, but understandable, as mass shootings are shocking events widely broadcast by the media, whereas day to day domestic violence and murders are less well covered, but more more common.

Of course, America still has a gun problem even if mass shootings aren’t as big of a portion of deaths as the media might lead you to believe. Our death rate from gun violence is 10.6 per 100,000 people, about five times higher than Canada and France and about ten times higher than Germany, Australia, or Spain. For what it’s worth, though, we are not a complete outlier - our gun violence rate is about a quarter of that in Venezuela or El Salvador, a third of Guatemala, and half of Colombia or Honduras. Regardless, however, especially for a “developed” nation, we have an unusually high gun violence rate.

If I had to speculate as to why, it would be a unique combination of gun culture in America, and its ties to racialized violence and oppression. Americans love their guns, and white Americans hate non white Americans. I am not proposing, of course, that it's all white Americans with guns shooting non white Americans, but rather that the forces of racial oppression and casual acceptance of violence, especially through the use of firearms, conspire to cause our gun violence rates to be unusually high. However, it's these same reasons I would say gun control is NOT the answer to gun violence in America - at least, not gun control as typically proposed by Democrats.

I worked in two separate district attorney’s offices while in law school, and did a lot of case readings of gun law in Massachusetts and other states while writing some of the briefs I wrote while working their and while taking criminal law classes. What became increasingly clear - and statistics back this up - is gun control laws in America are enforced unevenly and almost exclusively pretextually. That is to say, gun control laws are used, not as a method of controlling gun violence, but as a tool for the police to justify stopping, searching, harassing, arresting, and killing black people. They are both ubiquitous in case law and exclusively used in this manner. Again and again you see officers cite concerns about firearms as justifications for warrantless searches or stops. Again and again you see officers cite concerns that suspects are reaching for firearms, whether or not one is actually there, as justification for why they killed suspects. And again and again you see suspects who were stopped by officers for no real reason, who cooperated with officers the entire time, and who committed no other crimes go to jail, often for years, because they possessed an unregistered firearm, or one with a lapsed registration, or even just because they didn’t have the firearm registration card (FID) on them.

A suspicious person might wonder how many of those guns were even the suspects, versus being planted on them by officers to secure arrests. But even if they are all actual violators, these arrests are an enormous part of our criminal justice system, enough that Massachusetts has a specialized gun court just to deal with them. Thousands if not millions of young African Americans are having their lives ruined because of these laws - just because they may have been carrying the personal protection which our constitution supposedly grants us the right to carry. But these same laws are NOT wielded this way in white communities - we do not see thousands or hundreds or even dozens of white kids getting slapped with firearms charges. Moreover, these laws are not only not used against white kids - they would largely be completely ineffective against the sort of person who performs a mass shooting. Usually these are young, affluent white teenagers or young men, and the firearms are most often borrowed from a relative, although some also purchase them at gun shows or smuggle them in illegally from out of state - regardless, however, it is extremely rare for any sort of countenanced gun control to actually have any chance of affecting mass shootings. They are exclusively designed to and used as a way to harass and control urban young people of color, in the exact same way marijuana laws used to and still are in many parts of the country.

This is the primary reason I oppose gun control. As long as it is enforced by a racist police force and a racist criminal justice system, it will just be used to further oppression of the most oppressed, and do little or nothing to enhance public safety. I had initially intended to discuss the revolutionary politics angle as well, and why leftists should not only oppose gun control but should support gun ownership, but honestly I think that's a discussion for another time. I don’t want to water down the point I’ve just made with a distraction.

Instead, I will propose my alternative solution, for those who are perhaps not sold on the utter unsalvageable nature of our current system and thus want something to advocate for in the current system. Instead of focusing gun control laws on the demand side - that is, on the gun owner, making it harder for them to get guns and allowing police carte blanche to harass someone they suspect might have a gun - we should be focusing our efforts on gun manufacturers. For instance, smart gun technology, that is, weapons which only fire for their registered owner, has existed for decades but the industry resists it, because it would cut into their profits. We can ban the manufacture and importation of automatic weapons and large magazines without actually making it illegal to possess them, thus allowing collectors to keep their collections and allow people on the street to avoid harassment by overzealous officers, but still reducing or eliminating the supply. These sort of measures may in fact be particularly effective, because unlike many other industries, a lot of guns are still made domestically - the fact that the United States has such lax gun control laws means we in fact are often the ones illegally flooding our neighbors with guns, rather than the stereotype of them being smuggled into our borders from Mexico. We are in fact arming the cartels, not the other way around. We can hold gun manufacturers liable for violence with their weapons, which will strongly disincentivize the entire industry and may drive some out of business. Focusing gun control measures on industry level would be far more effective at increasing safety and reducing supply, without adding more fuel for the fire of American police oppression. But, like most things, it probably won’t happen, because it would cut into profits, and money rules in America.