Gun Control

Civil laws develop simultaneously with private property out of the disintegration of the natural community.  -- Karl Marx, from The German Ideology

  I do not oppose gun control laws in America, but neither do I support them.  I do not support them because I do not see that they will do any good. I understand the impetus behind the drive for gun control, and I appreciate that it seems like a no brainer that fewer guns = fewer bodies, but it seems to me more and more grasping at straws in the face of the horror of our violent US culture. Like so many mainstream solutions to intractable problems, we seem content to understand the aspirins we take to assuage the pain of our cancers as the chemotherapy that will kill the cancers. Sometimes, we can't even understand what the cancer is: violence is the cancer, not guns, and any solution that does not directly address violence is bound to fail. Besides, even if gun control laws could significantly lower the numbers of guns, how long before knives, arson, acid, and car bombs become all the rage in our violent country?

  The last thing that this country needs is a "War on Guns": as has been coughed up ad infinitum by the second amendment crowd, the War on Drugs only barely affects the availability of said illegal drugs, and we can assume that guns would be the same. Unlike drugs, which are consumables, guns would remain around for a long time before they start deteriorating* . . . and as the flow of drugs into the US continues barely abated, so would the flow of guns continue. Banning assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and conversion kits may hold down death tolls somewhat; but even as every life is significant, pardon me for being troubled by any accounting which finds solace in 15 deaths instead of 20, or 30 deaths instead of 50.

  And let's not forget, per John Ehrlichman, how the War on Drugs was conceived as a racist/anti-left gambit. The history of gun control too has a whiff of racism wafting around it: the NRA, who supported many gun control initiatives in its history, was all in with Governor Ronald Reagan when California passed the Mulford Act in 1967. This legislation, which essentially prevented citizens from carrying weapons in public, was authored directly in response to the Black Panthers. The pivot toward free and open access to guns for all citizens, for both Reagan and the NRA, came later, after the threat of armed African American revolutionaries was somewhat diminished**. There is absolutely no reason to believe that, if we add another major prohibition for our existing law enforcement regime to enforce, that its outcome with regards to race (and class!) would be any different than our disastrous, racist drug war. Our police have shown an overt tendency to use laws and initiatives as tools of control (as opposed to mediation), and those tools are always wielded disproportionally against certain populations.  Does it seem wise to further empower institutions which have demonstrated, over and over again, the inability to execute governance in a consistently just way?

  Again, it is violence that we seek to eliminate, not guns. We can outlaw acts of violence, we can do our best to regulate the tools of violence, but violence itself exists beyond definition of the law. Law exists to institutionalize and legitimize the state, which in turn institutionalizes the violence of the class for whom the state functions. Capitalism, the religion enshrined in our country (and by the west in general), is based on competition and inequity, and violence is a natural condition of this inequity. Of course, any mainstream discussion of violence in our country almost exclusively assumes that violence is anti-social (be it resistance or simply the white-hot explosion of our culture's id) while explaining away state violence as something other than violence. The intransigence of the problem lies in the fact that to erase violence, you must destroy the very foundation of our culture, a culture that is built on violence. Considering the magnitude of that task - not to mention the fact that such an act would be considered revolution - it's clear why so many want to substitute gun control for real substantive change.

  We are educated to believe the laws protect the underclass and powerless in our culture . . . and ultimately they do, somewhat, but only to the degree that protecting the underclass serves the state, not the underclass itself***. It is (obviously!) not a bad idea to enact good laws; but laws serve the state (which, per the Marx quote above, is interchangeable with private property in our culture), and what we really want to do is to change our culture. To this end, we need to rebuild what Marx calls "natural community" . . . you could, for instance, begin with the idea that access to healthcare is the right of every person (not "every citizen" - break away from the chauvinism of arbitrary borders, build a community of humanity worldwide). You could follow up with the idea that everyone is owed a living, and that everyone has equal access to the riches of the world. You could see to it that no one stands on another's shoulders. You could turn these concepts into laws, if you are able, but most importantly, you want to build these values: our laws, good and bad, ultimately serve a corrupt master. It is the culture we are trying to change, so that is where we must start. Building a natural community in this manner will do more to end mass killings than any law we could pass.

  Again, I don't necessarily oppose gun control. If it were up to me, every woman would have free and open access to any gun she wanted, while every man would be completely banned from owning any guns****. And Lord knows that I am not aligning myself with second amendment types; as I've said for years, guns don't kill people, idiots who think think their rights to guns supersede the safety of our citizens do. Besides, the whole idea of trying to control guns is quickly becoming technologically moot: it will take years for liberals to regain anything resembling control of the Congress and the White House, which is an absolute minimum requirement for passing gun legislation. By that time, it is likely that home production of guns will be easily accessible with the latest 3D printers and computer machining equipment, and the patriots of the US will be flooding the countryside with guns for no other reason that to support their reactionary ideology. Gun control will very soon be an impossibility; only changing the culture will save us.
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*  This is not, in and of itself, a reason to oppose gun control, and I do not suggest that it is. If I believed that gun laws now would drastically reduce illegal weapons even 50 years from now, that would be a reasonable result. I do not, however, believe that to be the case.
** Note that Reagan supported the Brady Bill, as well as an assault weapons ban, which would put him right in line with current Democrat gun control efforts. It is also worth noting that he supported these initiatives well after he had to worry about gathering votes for public office (1991 and 1994, respectively).
*** See Adam Smith's defense of welfare: he understood that a free market economy required a buy-in, both literally and figuratively . . . and if nothing else, he understood that it was in the free market's interests to keep its workers from revolting (or, you know, dying of starvation).
**** Yeah, I know, gender's bullshit: let's go with any less physically capable being can own a gun, any physically capable being can't.

Labor Day

Labor Day’s a sop
tossed out by the bosses
like a dry husk
Joe Hill didn’t die for Labor Day
Joe Hill just died

When Joe Hill rises again
we'll see who takes his place
in the cold ground

                             -- Wm. Zink

Look Out Your Window

  Watch what's going on. The cries for UNITY! are peaking, the vilification of VIOLENCE! as the ultimate evil is surfing along just behind. The new marching chant: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? But, I have to ask: under what flag shall we march?

  Who is making this appeal to unity? Is the (overwhelmingly white) mainstream of the country going to be comfortable holding hands with 45 on this? Are they comfortable with the fact that his cries for unity include the torch bearers who marched Friday night in Charlottesville? Are they comfortable with the fact that this amounts to the erasure of white supremacist evil? Are we really going to ask our oppressed comrades to unite with those who would oppress them? Again I ask: under what flag shall we march?

  I'm totally fine with the old "love the sinner, hate the sin" bible shtick, but it is not clear to me at all that that is what is going down . . . looks much more to me like "love the sinner, tolerate the sin" all for the sake of UNITY . . . because when UNITY becomes the primary force in all our efforts, then TOLERANCE raises its fair weather head to erase anything that may stray outside the lines, to build the tent big enough to include any ideology, no matter how repugnant.

  Again, I would remind you, infinite tolerance is an impossibility. At this point surely someone on your social media feed who orbits in the galaxy of militants (or even some progressives!) has hipped you to Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance"*. This Unity the masses are calling for comes at a price, and the price is too high. We can not tolerate the bullshit of these racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, elitist-worshiping assholes and still have a country that honors justice. As they say: NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

  "So fine, no unity without justice, blah blah blah. But you're all as bad as they are, reducing everything to violence. That is the reaction they want. Just ignore them, don't dignify them with a response." Yeah, how's that been working for you? Again, I'm not going to call anyone out for non-violent resistance, as long as it really is resistance, and not just avoiding the problem. The thing is that, without active resistance (AND NOT JUST IGNORING IT!) the problem will not go away. So, if you are going to follow the pack and denounce violence, you fucking well better have another solution . . . because, I tell you what, militant resistance is having an effect: the white supremacist assholes are cancelling rallies left and right. For that, you can thank your local antifascists.

  Until the oppression which defines our country is vanquished, free speech is a luxury. Until everyone is treated equally, unity is a dream. It is time to cure the disease, not treat the symptoms.
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*   "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." -- Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Get On the Bus

  Don't misunderstand: I love every last one of you crazy leftists. I love the arguments. They always sound like that scene from Life of Bryan to me:

  You must know your destination before you start your journey, right? Well . . . sorta.

  All the arguments are really important. They are vital. They are the crucible of revolutionary theory. When we all get on the bus, we are sitting on the East Coast, and we know we wanna head west to California, maybe Arizona. But exactly where? That is, of course, the question. Some say Sonoma, some say Frisco, some say LA. There's a San Diego guy, and a small anti-social cadre in the back who say California is a mistake, and that we only should go as far as Tucson. The arguments are furious, passionate, recriminations fly. So the bus driver just sits there, waits 'til we figure it all out, right?

  Wrong. You get on the bus, and you drive west. Work it out on the way. And if anybody calls you a gradualist, tell 'em to fuck off and get on the bus.

  But as far as those pantsuit clowns who only want to go as far as DC or Harrisburg, they get on and stay on until well after the continental divide, or they can just stay off the damn bus.

AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL

RIP Heather Heyer

Remember what she was willing to fight for, remember what she died for.

Tolerance v. Tolerance

If you tell me that you reject violence because it is not constructive, I will, up to a point, listen to you. You better be ready to provide context, though, because tolerance as a basic principle is meaningless.

One cannot be infinitely and unilaterally tolerant. A given situation requires action, and even inaction is a choice. Along the same line, tolerating the intolerance of others does not add to the general level of tolerance in the culture.

Everybody has their deal. Everybody has things they can and can't do, everyone has their limit. But, if you are willing to characterize your limit as something beyond limit, you need to come correct. Principles need to be operable & defensible. I will listen to you if you tell me you are a pacifist. Passive resistance is, after all, still resistance. All I'm saying is that if you call yourself a pacifist, you better be ready to lay down in front of the tanks . . . or, admit your pacifism is a limit, not a principle.