Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 231 February-March 2013
The basic facts about the appalling slaughter of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut are now well known and have shocked people around the world. The massacre comes in the wake of other mass shootings in the US and has re-awakened calls for stronger gun control. The gun control advocates appeal to common sense: fewer guns should, they say, mean fewer deaths. The threat of more gun controls has provoked a vigorous response from gun rights advocates. They point to the Second Amendment to the US Constitution as protecting the right of individuals to possess firearms. They also argue that preventing law-abiding citizens from owning guns leaves the guns in the hands of ‘the bad guys’ and that universal gun ownership would deter violent crime and enable private citizens to defend themselves. The cat, they say, is already out of the bag: millions of guns circulate on the black market, unhindered by gun laws. US correspondent STEVE PALMER reports.
Both sides pose the issue in terms of the rights and responsibilities of individuals. But this is a social problem, not an individual one. Capitalist violence, not guns, is the problem. Capitalism depends on violence and breeds violence and so long as it exists, the slaughter of innocents will continue. US imperialism is armed to the teeth with every imaginable weapon. It uses state violence to coerce the oppressed and enslave the exploited. It also, through its state, uses violence to threaten other nations, to expand at their expense and to defend itself against its competitors. Further, capitalism creates myriad problems which drive toward social violence: poverty; unemployment; racial and gender oppression; gangs; mental illness; drug dependency and the illegal drug economy; every imaginable kind of chauvinism; colossal individualism, egotism and competitiveness. Finally, it succeeds in making individuals feel isolated and personally responsible for, but powerless over, the results of these problems.
Who really does the dying?
In 2010 there were 30,814 deaths from firearms in the US. Of these, 19,392 were suicides (horrific in itself) and 11,078 were homicides. The remaining 344 were due to ‘legal intervention’, ie, killed by cops. Of the homicide victims, 6,151 were black – more than 55%, although black people are just 13% of the US population. Of the black male homicide victims, 43% were 24 or younger. Black males age 15-19 are more than 11 times more likely to be gun homicide victims than white males of the same age. By any standard, this is a massacre. Yet about this daily carnage of young people of colour, the media and the capitalist ‘experts’ have nothing to say, otherwise they would have to start talking about the whole issue of racism and racial oppression and the broad sweep of social problems created and fostered by capitalism and imperialism.
Gun control – a diversion
The ruling class promotes gun control as the primary solution to this slaughter. However, guns are being used as tools to try to find individual solutions to social problems. The bumper sticker ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people’ has a certain obvious truth: guns don’t just shoot people on their own. But it is no response to the critical question: what makes people kill people? Tinkering with the availability of guns – whether increasing or reducing it – is not going to do away with the social violence created by capitalism, and is hypocritical and diversionary.
The real reasons for gun control
The real reasons for gun control are nothing to do with ‘protecting the public’: they are all about maintaining capitalist domination and disarming the oppressed. This crucial aspect of gun control is concealed from view.
Historically in Britain, subjects had the right to possess arms for their defence, and this was accepted, with only slight encroachments, until the beginning of the last century. In 1918, when the secret Blackwell Report was written, discussing what to do about the vast numbers of weapons which would be available after the imperialist slaughter of 1914-1918, it quoted the findings of a sub-committee:
‘There are two distinct categories of person from whom danger is to be apprehended, viz (1) the savage or semi-civilised tribesmen in outlying parts of the British Empire whose main demand is for rifles and ammunition, and (2) the anarchist or “intellectual” malcontent of the great cities, whose weapons are the bomb and the automatic pistol…Our conclusion is that the regulation of the arms traffic after the war is a matter of vital importance to the future of the British Empire.’
Non-political criminal misuse of firearms did not appear to interest the Blackwell Committee. The ensuing Firearms Act of 1920, besides controlling the arms trade, deprived British citizens of the right to own firearms and turned it into a privilege, which has been steadily whittled away ever since, to the point, even, where the country’s Olympic pistol shooting team has to practise abroad.
In North America, despite constitutional guarantees of an individual’s right to bear arms, forms of gun control existed from before the Union was founded. However these were directed against black people, slave and free, even decades after the Civil War was over.
Ironically, modern gun control in the US was initiated, not by liberals, but by California conservatives around Ronald Reagan. The Black Panther Party, openly carrying guns, had begun to challenge police harassment of black people – ‘policing the police’. In 1967, a conservative Republican assemblyman introduced a bill which would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any Californian city. Reagan endorsed the Bill and it passed into law, supported by Republican lawmakers. Similarly, the black insurrection throughout the country in the summer of 1967 was followed in 1968 by the first Federal gun control law in 30 years, which was implicitly directed against black ownership of guns. The point was not so much to control guns as to control black people.
Obama has used Executive Orders to extend gun control. We sadly, but confidently predict that these will do nothing to halt the slaughter of young people by firearms. Gun controls are intended to confine the possession of deadly weapons to the ruling class and to disarm the oppressed and to prevent them from defending themselves and fighting for their liberation. To US imperialism, civilian gun deaths are just ‘collateral damage’. The real answer is the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with a socialist system which can begin to overcome all the problems which lie behind social violence.
