lefties support gun rights, too

"Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves … and prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give."

Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

I've kept pretty quiet about it until now, because I hate the idea of being lumped in with those fear-mongering racists over at the NRA, but consider this my official coming-out: I firmly believe that the right to bear arms is a fundamental political right, and that to limit or eliminate that right is unconstitutional.

Like Ida B. Wells,  I think that gun ownership is especially important for African-Americans. As individuals and as communities, we tend to be on the receiving end of institutional violence more often than other groups. It is too easy for us to find examples of our vulnerability during every moment in our nation's history. This fantastic, albeit long, blog post also does a better job than I ever have of tracing the modern gun control movement from white fears of black armed self-defense (a la the Black Panthers following police to prevent police brutality).

But even more important than self-defense, the writer makes the point - correctly, I think, or I wouldn't be writing this - that the constitutional right to bear arms is rooted in preventing the government (police and the military) from having a monopoly on the use of force. This is the same problem I have with capital punishment. The government should not have a monopoly on the power to decide if a person should live; based on the other inherent flaws in the way the death penalty is meted out (see above paragraph), I think it's best to eliminate that power entirely.

Back to the right to own a gun. Two passages from the essay stand out; the first is quite long, but quite powerful:

"I heard someone ridiculing a gun-rights supporter on TV the other day, along these lines:  Do you realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about tyranny or resistance to tyranny, in the United States? Really? Let’s roll the videotape back a few years, and try that out again:  Do you realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about American presidents, Republican and Democrat, torturing, kidnapping for torture, nullifying habeas corpus, spying without warrants on everybody, setting up a separate justice system for Muslims, rewarding billions in bonuses to bankers who crashed the economy, offering Social Security and Medicare as sacrifices to those bankers, aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers and journalists while granting complete immunity and government favor to torturers and banksters, personally overseeing the assassination of anyone they want anywhere in the world, including American citizens, starting seven or eight secret wars?  Do you realize how ridiculous you sound when you talk about the great European social-democratic states, Socialist governments included, overseeing forced austerity on behalf of banksters, selling off the land and assets of their countries, reneging on the pensions of their citizens, ushering in 25-30% unemployment, facing riots and pitched battles with police in the streets?

Understanding that things can and will change, radically at times, is an historical attitude. Asserting that the society and moment we live in today is omnipotent and unchangeable –proclaiming, essentially, that history is over – is what I understand as pure ideology. 'Tyranny' – or whatever you prefer to call it – has, not so long ago, already been here and been successfully resisted, with non-violent and not non-violent tactics – unless you think Jim Crow doesn’t qualify. And whatever-you-want-to-call-it is back – unless you think a regime that practices assassination, unilateral war-making, unlimited surveillance, austerity imposition, and issues from a completely corrupt electoral process, etc., doesn’t qualify.  And it may well be resisted again. I don’t know how the street protests and occupations of state capitols and such by workers and pensioners and student debt-slaves and people thrown out of their homes and out of their jobs may unfold in America in the near future, but they very well may take lessons from more than the edited history of such struggles in our country and around the world.  Nothing ridiculous there, as far as I’m concerned.  History is not over."

 Yup.

"The ultimate power does not rest with who starts out with the most guns, or even with who shoots them the most (or at all), but with who ends up determining which way they are pointed.  The most successful insurrectionary moment is one in which no bullet has to be fired; everyone just has to know at whom they will be headed if they are. 

That is still a struggle over the use and control of arms. Pointing a gun is using it."

And more yup. All day, yes.