The Gun Control Question
By: Kent Allen Halliburton
Tags: Politics, History, Social Media, SEO, Guns

Credit: Christopher Williams

“An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.” — Dr. Huey P. Newton

On Sunday October 1st, 2017, a white male terrorist opened fire on a crowd in Las Vegas killing at least 58 people, and wounding at least 500 more (as of this writing) adding to the ongoing American problem of mass killings by lone individuals. Of course, the right wingers will use the tragedy to make the gun industry richer. Without fail, though, the liberals have already begun their crowing for new gun control laws more in line with other imperialist states in the usual ignorant, privileged way. After all, it is very easy for someone who lives such a privileged lifestyle within the imperialist state to think that restricting gun rights more and more to that state would ever be a good idea and not recognize it for the unabashed imperialist boot licking it is.

Real leftists, in contrast to liberals, believe in empowering the oppressed, and stand for their absolute right to self defense. We understand that because political power grows out of the barrel of a gun just as Mao said, that the imperialist state wants to keep the oppressed disarmed. We recognize that under capitalism:

1. Gun control is racist. The entire history of gun control in the US is steeped in racism. From the days when gun control laws in slave states kept blacks defenseless to the modern era when Reagan deliberately targeted blacks and the Black Panthers in particular. And now where the racist drug war combines with gun control laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of felons, it is clear that gun control laws favor the white settler population.

2. Gun control is ableist. Liberals continue to push the utterly ableist view that guns must be kept out of the hands of the mentally ill in defiance of all evidence that overwhelmingly demonstrates that the vast majority of mentally ill people are victims of violence not perpetrators. They are in need of the ability to defend themselves, liberals deny them this need.

3. Gun control is classist. Gun control laws, the various licensing and background checks costs money making legal firearm ownership inaccessible to the most impoverished again restricting gun ownership to well off, predominantly white settlers.

All of this is lost on the liberal, eager as they are to preserve the unjust settler status quo that is comfortable for them. Idealists that they are, they focus on the abstract boogeyman of evil “lone wolves” with “assault rifles” leaving them incapable of addressing the actual underlying issues at the root of these mass killings and making it easy for them to avoid doing any of the real hard work needed to actually fix anything.

These killings are a direct consequence of American settler colonialism, of its sexism, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. It is the product of a culture that glorifies competitive individualism and white male violence. All of these things are rooted directly in and reinforced by the system of global capitalism.

So, pass all the laws you want liberals, keep putting more band aids on a cancer for all the good it will do you. These terrorists will keep right on shooting and the bodies will just keep piling up. Nothing will change until the masses are willing to get serious, drop the liberalism, get radical, and begin to organize and tackle the real problems. Are you with us?