Re-post of The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights (Reprise)

In light of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, and because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm re-posting a link to my left argument for gun rights from 2017. (One among many. See links at end of article)

Some points covered in the article:

The class concept of the state. It's not a neutral arbiter to be trusted with a monopoly of armed power. "The concentration of wealth and the concentration of armed power in the hands of a few, are both bad ideas—and the one has everything to do with the other."

The net effect of eliminating the right of citizens to possess firearms will be to increase the power of the armed capitalist state. Whatever strict gun-control regime is instituted, ruling-class families and institutions will still have all the guns they want.

But what about horrible mass shootings? Recognize that *gun homicides have declined even as gun ownership has increased,*. that mass shootings are a small portion of gun deaths in the US & a lousy index of the social problem of gun violence. But they do grab one’s attention.

For the full argument, go to the article:

The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights

(Reprise) 

The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights(Reprise)

(This article, which was published on Counterpunch, is a condensed and updated version of an essay that was published on this site in 2013, and can be found here. See also related links below.)

"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
–George Orwell

As can be expected, in the aftermath of the horrific mass murder committed in Las Vegas by Stephen Paddock, the issue of “gun control” and “gun violence” comes to the fore again. Reprising some of the points I made in an essay on the subject after the Sandy Hook shooting, I want to argue against the impulse to use this event to eliminate what the marxist and socialist left has historically recognized as an important right.

Let’s start with the basic difference in principle: Some people consider the citizen’s right to possess firearms a fundamental political right.

The political principle at stake is simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force, and, obversely, to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the people. The “sub-political” concerns—hunting, collecting, individual self-defense—are valid in themselves, but they are not as important to the gun rights question as the political concern about the distribution of power in a polity. 

This is not a right-wing position. Only in the ridiculous political discourse of the United States, where Barack Obama is a marxist, can citizens' right to gun ownership be considered a purely right-wing demand. The notion that an armed populace should have a measure of power of resistance to the heavily armed power of the state is, if anything, a populist principle, and has always been part of the revolutionary democratic traditions of the left. Per George, above, and Karl, here: “The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition… Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

That’s because left socialists who hold a marxist analysis of capitalist political economy have a particular understanding of the state—including our American capitalist state; for them, it’s an apparatus whose main purpose is to protect class rule and its accompanying injustices, and to project compliance-inducing aggression on behalf of the American elite and its favored allies — locally, nationally, and internationally. They understand that any mitigations of these injustices and aggressions are not the products of the liberal state’s inherent neutrality and altruism. They are the hard-won, always-precarious, fruits of social movements that scare the liberal capitalist state into forgoing particular wars, advancing particular minority and civil rights, establishing remunerative social welfare policies, etc.

Sealed With A Kiss: Mabel and Kathleen Talk Armed Self-Defense

In a previous post (The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights), I remarked that: “Only in the ridiculous political discourse of the United States, where Barack Obama is a “marxist" (or any kind of “leftist” at all) can citizens' right to gun ownership be considered a purely right-wing demand.”  I discussed how it was the Black Panthers who embraced gun rights forty-some years ago, much to the consternation of conservative Republicans, including California governor Ronald Reagan. And I mentioned how the Panthers themselves were inspired by Robert Williams, a North Carolina activist, whose book, Negroes With Guns, made the forceful case for armed resistance to racist oppression in the United States.

Robert Williams died in 1996, and Rosa Parks delivered a passionate eulogy. Mabel Williams, Robert’s amazing wife, outlived him for many years, continuing her own activism.  Mabel died on April 19th.

In the video clip below (about 10 minutes, see full discussion here), from a conference on “Self Respect, Self Defense & Self Determination” held in Oakland in 2004, you’ll see what an amazing woman she was, as she and Kathleen Cleaver discuss the issue of armed self-defense in the black community.  They talk about how Williams argued that an armed black community “reduced the level of violence,” since it forced murderous white racists “to make a calculation: are they willing to risk their superior life to take your inferior life.” They discussed how “all the black people had guns…It was just not even discussed. You had guns. ..If in fact they heard the Klan was going to ride, they would be prepared. There was no discussion. ” They stressed that, for black revolutionaries: “That was fundamental: the notion that people had to accept the responsibility for standing up for themselves.” 

You know, just a couple of gun nuts.

In this clip, Mabel starts out by describing how Robert’s radicalism was energized by the kind of incident that, we must (and don’t) remember, was completely ordinary in these United States. It was an incident that got Robert “accused ..of being a communist, of course,” since only communists would raise a fuss about such things. Mabel Williams tells us how the story of Robert Williams and Negroes With Guns began, as do many great stories, with a kiss:

Related Posts: Lawyers, Guns, and Twitter: Gun Battles and Class Struggle after San Bernardino, The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights

The New Privateers:Civil Forfeiture, Police Piracy, and the Third-Worldization of America

I know you're already mad about various injustices, but when you read Sarah Stillman’s recent New Yorker article, “Taken,” your blood will boil. It’s about the laws and practices – developed over the last 15-20 years as part of the "war on drugs" and the general encroachment of police-state tactics – regarding what is called “civil forfeiture.” And it’s about a lot more than that.

Forfeiture laws are touted as effective tools for destroying the empires of crime lords by seizing all the ill-gotten gains of their criminal activity. Criminal forfeiture laws – which are applied following conviction of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, before a judge, with legal representation and such – can, used reasonably (the problems here are another issue), provide for just that.  Civil forfeiture, on the other hand, is based on the legal theory that property does not have the rights of a person, and that therefore actions against property can be taken on the basis of mere suspicion or “probable cause,” with no need to prove a crime. So the cases will have goofy names like, “United States v. One Pearl Necklace.” Another feature of the pre-crime police-state paradigm, civil forfeiture laws make suspicious (property) presumptively criminal (activity), without having to prove any actual, you know, crime. They authorize the police to steal your cash, car, jewelry, home, whatever, without even asserting that a crime has been committed.

[Do you hear the echoes in how suspicion of terrorism becomes terrorism itself? In how I don’t have to prove American citizens Awlaki, father and son, are “terrorists” (whatever that is) before drone-killing them, because my suspicion that they might be is good enough? (We won’t even get into how suspicion=guilt regarding other little stuff, like, oh, chemical weapons.) Do you see how years of putting up with pre-crime tactics for the “war on drugs” has been training in compliance for the more radical presumptive-guilt tactics of the “war on terror”? Constantly selling “war”-inflected frameworks of legal exceptionalism, the state has used various opportunistic bogeymen – “communists,” “drug dealers,” “pedophiles,” terrorists” (Who cares about them?) – to lure citizens into accepting a creeping radical authoritarianism.  Preemptive forfeiture today, preemptive detention tomorrow too.]

The insidious wrinkle in all this, which makes civil forfeiture not only creepily authoritarian but also painfully, infuriatingly, predatory, is that state and federal civil-forfeiture laws have allowed the police forces and prosecutors who seize “suspicious” property to keep all of it, and, in many cases, to use it any way they see fit, including personal perks and bonuses. As Stillman points out, we’re talking everything from “Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations,…credit-card late fees, [and] poultry-festival supplies,” to “a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation…. important to [the District Attorney’s] reelection,“ to “a twenty-one-thousand-dollar drug-prevention beach party,” to “a city marshal’s ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus” and another officer’s “total of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.”  Stillman reports: “In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorney’s entire salary.” In other words, the real practice of civil forfeiture has become a lucrative system of “policing for profit,” a system that has literally legalized highway robbery and turned police into pirates.

The Social Network, NSA Version:"They took those programs that I built and turned them on you"

Laura Poitras's short take on William Binney, 32-year NSA veteran who quit the Agency in October 2011 when he saw the deep data-mining capabilities he had helped to develop for foreign intelligences turned on Americans, in violation of the NSA charter and the Constitution. This was published by the New York Times last year, well before any act of Edward Snowden.

"That gives you an outline of the life of everybody in the community.  ... That involves anybody in the country.  Even Senators, House of Representatives, all of them."

You'll learn a lot in 8 minutes.

See related posts:  “No matter what the law actually says”: The Snowden Revelations and the Eternal Surveillance State, Edward Snowden, Lawrence O'Donnell, and the Failure of Fuzzy Land Thinking, and "Just One More Detail":American Surveillance And The Unanswered Question of Israel,

“No matter what the law actually says”: The Snowden Revelations and the Eternal Surveillance State

The sudden cascade of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden through Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras in the Guardian, and Barton Gellman in the Washington Post has provided stark confirmation of our worst fears about the American government’s contemptuous disregard for our most fundamental rights.  As Greenwald, speaking on Democracy Now, succinctly summarizes the extra-Constitutional world we now live in:

[T]he objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. … It is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do. [Emphasis mine]

Every single time is what they want, and – digitally, at least – they have it.

It’s hard to overestimate how radical this is. Any serious discussion about this issue has to begin with a clear understanding of what we are talking about.  We have to understand not only this or that discrete program – the Verizon/telco “metadata” order, Prism, Boundless Informant, etc. – but the whole matrix of the supercharged surveillance state that has been constructed over the past twelve years, of which these programs are the building blocks.  We also have to understand the legal-constitutional and ethico-political premises and consequences of this new techno-social construct.  It’s hard to overestimate how thoroughly this parasitic entity has already embedded itself in our polity, and how difficult it will be to extricate ourselves from it.  Referring to the East German secret police who kept voluminous, detailed records on virtually everyone, Daniel Ellsberg is on the mark when he calls what we’re becoming “The United Stasi of America.”

Snowball in Hell: The Momentum of Same-Sex Marriage in Our Sulfurous Polity

Glenn Greenwald’s column in The Guardian the other day, “The gay marriage snowball and political change,” makes an important point about how the growing momentum of the movement for same-sex marriage rights demonstrates that change, even radical and rapid change, is possible.  No matter what the outcome of the present Supreme Court deliberations, we have already witnessed an extraordinary, and extraordinarily rapid, change in social ideology, as well as legal and institutional practices. As Greenwald says: “It's conventional wisdom that national gay marriage is inevitable; the tipping point has clearly been reached. …It really is a bit shocking how quickly gay marriage transformed from being a fringe, politically toxic position just a few years ago to a virtual piety that must be affirmed in decent company.”

Double-O bama: License to Kill

Self-Issued.

The unbelievable has become the norm.

From Glenn Greenwald:

"As always, it's really worth pausing to remind ourselves of how truly radical and just plainly unbelievable this all is. What's more extraordinary: that the US Senate is repeatedly asking the Obama White House whether the president has the power to secretly order US citizens on US soil executed without charges or due process, or whether the president and his administration refuse to answer? That this is the "controversy" surrounding the confirmation of the CIA director - and it's a very muted controversy at that - shows just how extreme the degradation of US political culture is."

Read full article.

Flight Club: The No-Fly List and the Authoritarian Theater of the Absurd

[I]t is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

A recent segment on Chris Hayes’s show Up (embedded below), following on a column by Glenn Greenwald, recounts the outrageous story of Saadiq Long, a 43-year-old African-American Muslim and ten-year US Air Force veteran, and his Kafkaesque journey through the no-fly wringer. Last year, Long, who lives with his wife and children in Qatar, where he teaches English, bought a ticket on KLM to visit his mother in Oklahoma, who was suffering from worsening congestive heart failure. He was surprised when KLM refused to allow him to board his flight back to his own country because the US government had placed him on its “no-fly list.” Never convicted or even charged with any crime, Long spent over six months trying to figure out why his name was on the list and what he could do to have it removed. 

(The answers, of course, are that he will never know why, nor will his name (since it may not be his name) likely ever be taken off the list.  As this AP story by Eileen Sullivan points out: “The government will not disclose who is on its list or why someone might have been placed on it.”)

After a months-long campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and (according to this local news article) “several legislators,” and two weeks after Greenwald published a column on Long’s plight in The Guardian November, 2012, Long was finally allowed to fly home to see his ailing mother.  Problem solved, right?

Hunting 250s: “We’re going to go out there, and we’re going to violate some rights.”

This video, published by The Nation, captures one incident of a kind that occurs about 700,000 times a year to New Yorkers.  Except if you're white.  The young man in this video, the son of a cop, was stopped multiple times in one day, for the “suspicious” behavior of wearing a hoodie and a backpack, and “looking” at the police.  In other words, walking while black.

Know any white people this happened to?  Anyone on the Upper West Side?  According to a New York Civil Liberties Union report (see here and here), 90% of those stopped are black (23% of the population) and Latino (29% of the population).  In fact, more young black men were stopped by the NYPD in 2011 than there are young black men in New York City.  Really, let that sink in.  Who’s running the NYPD, Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly, or George Zimmerman and Geraldo?

Dimples on the Ass of American Justice

I’ve come across two horrifying stories that everyone interested in civil liberties, equality before the law, freedom from persecution, and other trivial little “dimples on the imperial derriere” should consider. (“Dimples” is Rebecca Solnit’s term for the various faults/delicts/crimes of Obama, in her linked article excoriating his critics.)

The first, as told by Glenn Greenwald, concerns Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American professor of nuclear engineering who came to the US in 1985 to study for his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine.  Loathe to return to Saddam’s repression, he stayed here, was hired by the university as a research professor, became a citizen, and raised five American-born children. 

Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, with his four sons Photograph: Hamoodi family (as posted by Greenwald)