Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] Sticking to their Glocks
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http://socialistworker.org/2013/01/17/sticking-to-their-glocks
Column: Danny Katch
======== STICKING TO THEIR GLOCKS ============================================
Our whole society--not just the wing nuts--celebrates the "Good Guys with
Guns."
January 17, 2013
ANYBODY STILL hoping for a sensitive and serious national debate in the wake
of the Newtown elementary school shootings probably hasn't heard that January
19 is Gun Appreciation Day.
Is it just me, or does it seem early this year? I've barely recovered from
New Year's, and it's already time for making homemade, hollow-tipped ammo and
gathering around the family firearm for carols (my personal favorite is
"There's Nothing Semi-Automatic About Our Love").
Actually, Gun Appreciation Day [1] is a right-wing media stunt to protest the
new momentum for gun control laws that has followed Adam Lanza's massacre in
Newtown with a semiautomatic Bushmaster XM-15 rifle.
And Wade Michael Page's rampage in a Sikh temple with a Springfield Armory
XD(M) 9mm semiautomatic pistol.
And James Holmes' movie theater shooting spree with a Remington 870
pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, Smith & Wesson M&P15 semiautomatic rifle and
Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol.
Sorry to bore you with technical details, but it /is/ almost Gun Appreciation
Day.
Reporters have noted the day's provocative timing: two days before Barack
Obama's inauguration. It's also two days before Martin Luther King Day, which
makes you wonder if gun worshippers want to create an annual alternative
holiday for those who don't believe in peace and racial harmony.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WE'VE KNOWN that the National Rifle Association (NRA) wasn't going to back
down an inch since December when the group's spokesperson Wayne LaPierre
called for armed guards to be placed in every school. LaPierre's memorable
slogan--"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a
gun"--perfectly summarized the NRA's breathtakingly simple common sense:
>-- Bad Guys don't obey laws because they are Bad Guys.
>-- Therefore, Good Guys shouldn't obey laws either.
>
Who knew that the very principle of civilization could be philosophically
demolished in two easy steps?
"Good Guys with Guns" is a one-size-fits-all argument against any conceivable
limitation on personal ownership of weaponry, from assault rifles and
high-capacity ammo clips to--presumably in the coming years--dirty bombs and
personal drones. /The Second Amendment protects my right to bear unmanned
aerial vehicles!/
It's also a key element of the ultra-individualist world view promoted by
those billionaire libertarians and major NRA donors Charles and David Koch,
who seem to think that Adam Smith's phrase "the invisible hand of the market"
was not a metaphor but a cleverly obscure call for concealed weapons.
For most of us, neatly dividing humanity into two groups seems a little
sketchy, especially when the dividers seem to have color-coded the
categories. In other words, trigger-happy racists should be the last people
allowed to pick the teams in the Morality Bowl.
Gun enthusiasts typically describe Bad Guys as coming in two flavors:
criminal and crazy, which happens to be a decent summary of some prominent
NRA leaders. Take the modern organization's founder, Harlon Carter, who was
convicted in his youth for murdering a 15-year old Chicano boy who loitered
too close to Carter's home in rural Texas.
Carter only got off when the conviction was overturned on the dubious grounds
of self-defense--foreshadowing today's "Stand Your Ground" laws, like the one
in Florida that George Zimmerman claims gave him the right to kill Trayvon
Martin. The NRA is a major backer of "Stand Your Ground" and similar laws
that seek to protect Good Guy murderers like Carter and Zimmerman.
Then there's Wayne LaPierre himself, whose speech after the Newtown massacre
was a call to arms against crazed gunmen that sounded a lot like [2] the
paranoid manifesto of a crazed gunman:
>The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine
>monsters--people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by
>demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk
>among us every day...So now, due to a declining willingness to prosecute
>dangerous criminals, violent crime is increasing again for the first time in
>19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or
>man-made disaster, and you've got a recipe for a national nightmare of
>violence and victimization.
>
Note to Wayne's friends: Don't take him to a teen zombie movie. He probably
won't catch the irony.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
CRAZY AS he is, we all know that LaPierre has tremendous influence in the
Republican Party. Just last month, in fact, some wing nut senator introduced
the "Save Our Schools Act" [3] to deploy the National Guard to schools.
Oh wait, that was no fringe Tea Partier. It was Barbara Boxer, liberal
Democrat of California, proposing to send troops trained for night raids in
Kandahar to kick in lockers in Kansas. So why hasn't Boxer been receiving a
fraction of the scorn progressives have been dumping on the NRA?
One reason is the usual partisan hypocrisy of those whose own definitions of
Good Guys and Bad Guys are based solely on the capital D or R next to their
names.
More important, however, is the fact that many progressives who support
limits on guns change their tune completely if those guns are carried by
soldiers, police officers or any government agency allegedly serving the
public good. At a time when American society has never been more militarized
and patrolled, this leaves a gaping hole in the national discussion of
weapons and violence.
Consider that 2012, the year that saw mass shootings in Colorado, Wisconsin
and Connecticut, also saw a celebration of "the greatest manhunt in history,"
as the posters for Katherine Bigelow's movie /Zero Dark Thirty/ described the
assassination of Osama bin Laden. Liberal commentators gushed over the
realism of Bigelow's war-nography, just as they cheered every speaker who
shouted "Bin Laden is dead" at the Democratic National Convention last
summer.
Perhaps these 18 months of worship for Seal Team Six has made it hard for
progressives to consider a simple question in the wake of the Newtown
shooting: Who exactly was Adam Lanza dressing up like on that December
morning when he put on an all-black uniform? We know one thing: it wasn't
Wayne LaPierre. That guy may talk like Johnny Rambo, but he looks [4] more
like John Denver [5].
I don't blame the NRA for the low level of debate for the same reason I don't
blame my toddler for not changing our lightbulbs. The fault lies with those
who are capable of more serious thinking, but who choose to ignore our
society's round-the-clock celebration of Good Guys with Guns, and instead
focus solely on gun prohibition.
It's easy for liberal bloggers to swap stories of paranoid fanatics in the
heartland who stock arsenals to protect themselves from the hordes of
criminals and crazies. It would be more productive to think about how this
phenomenon is related to the hysteria in recent decades against "homegrown
terrorists," "wilding gangbangers," "criminal aliens," "looters," "violent
anarchists," "grown-up crack babies" and on and on. In each of these panics
created by our Wars on Drugs and on Terror, respectable and powerful people
in both parties argue something very similar to the NRA.
>-- Bad Guys don't obey laws because they are Bad Guys.
>-- Therefore, the state shouldn't have to obey its own laws either.
>
After Newtown, /New York Times/ columnist Joe Nocera mocked [6] the gun
lobby's "absurd" argument that "instead of tightening gun laws, we should go
in the other direction, and start packing heat. That way, you see, we can mow
down the bad guy before he gets us."
Nocera could have used (but didn't) almost the same words to describe the
national response to the September 11 attacks: Instead of using international
law to prosecute Osama bin Laden, we went in the other direction and started
launching wars. That way you see, we could "fight them over there so we don't
have to fight them over here."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
LEFTISTS LIKE myself traditionally oppose gun control because, even though we
have much more in common with people who oppose gun violence than those who
seem to celebrate it, it nevertheless doesn't seem like a great idea to leave
all the guns in the hands of the state--and besides, we really do believe in
all that right to self-defense stuff the NRA makes such a mockery of.
But the United States of 2013 is a country with a vast arsenal and
surveillance apparatus. Let's face it: the revolution won't be purchased in
the sporting goods department of Wal-Mart. So it doesn't make sense to oppose
gun control chiefly on the basis of any future armed rebellion.
On the other hand, if you want to understand why it's equally foolish to
expect gun control laws to have a real impact on gun violence in society,
look no further than the domain of the NRA's arch-nemesis, New York City
Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
In the country's most appallingly unequal city, gun control is daily enforced
by unconstitutional search and seizures by heavily armed Good Guy police
using little evidence beyond the skin color of the suspected Bad Guys. Every
case of racial profiling has the potential to end violently--as one did last
February, for example, when Officer Richard Haste followed unarmed
18-year-old Ramarley Graham into his apartment and fatally shot him in his
own bathroom.
Michael Bloomberg hasn't spoken out once against /this/ type of gun violence,
and nobody expects him to. Every police department in the country operates
under its own personal "Stand Your Ground" law, and always has.
I realize a neither-for-it-nor-against-it stance on gun control doesn't
satisfy that urgent feeling we all had after Newtown that something must be
done. But let's drop the pretense that any of the proposed legislation has a
good chance of stopping the next shooting. Obama's proposed restrictions on
assault rifles and ammo are very limited, which is just as well, because
prohibition has a pretty awful track record.
Furthermore, because the government shares much of the NRA's assumptions
about Good Guys and Bad Guys, all signs are that the gun controllers under
any new laws will be focusing, as the /New York Times/ put it [7], "on ways
to keep more commonly used firearms out of the hands of dangerous criminals
and people with mental illness."
An accompanying article in the /Times/ that same day [8] quoted a doctor who
has researched mass shootings about why this is the wrong approach: "Most
mass murders are done by working-class men who've been jilted, fired or
otherwise humiliated--and who then undergo a crisis of rage and get out one
of the 300 million guns in our country and do their thing."
Thus, the main effect of gun control legislation will be a symbolic statement
against violence, and a shallow one at that.
If you want to do something that can prevent future gun violence, how about
joining the family of Ramarley Graham in pushing for Officer Richard Haste to
be convicted of murder? That would put one particular group of repeat violent
offenders on notice that they'll be held accountable. And it might help in
creating a culture where it's impossible for anyone to think that they're
part of the Good Guys with Guns.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Columnist: Danny Katch
Danny Katch is a New York City based writer, activist and wiseass. He is the
author of /America's Got Democracy! The Making of the World's Longest Running
Reality Show/ [9] and has contributed to other long-titled books such as
/Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America/
[10] and /101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History/
[11].
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[1] http://gunappreciationday.com
[2] http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/21/nras-wayne-lapierres-press-conference-speech-in-full
[3] http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-sen-boxer-national-guard-schools-20121219,0,7530900.story
[4] http://www.mom4freedom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Wayne-LaPierre.jpg
[5] http://blog.mysanantonio.com/jackfishman/files/2010/11/John_Denver.jpg
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/nocera-lets-get-madd-about-guns.html
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/us/politics/obama-gun-proposal-to-look-beyond-mass-shootings.html
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/health/breaking-link-of-violence-and-mental-illness.html
[9] http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pr/Americas-Got-Democracy-Ebook
[10] http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Occupying-Wall-Street
[11] http://www.haymarketbooks.org/hc/101-Changemakers
