Anarchist take on gun control

I suggest a duel at dawn, sir! I slap you both with a large trout!

Jack stop being a cock.

People should follow my advice! With the tea and the pie.

Is it really practical to argue for gun control in the US anyway? I don't know what the statistics are but i'd imagine a large number of people in the US would highly disagree with it.

And i'd imagine its a lot harder to smuggle guns into the Uk than the US considering the size of the two countries and their cultures, so even if guns were somehow made illegal in the US I think you'd still have huge numbers of weapons on the streets anyway.

Surely its far more important to be talking about confronting gang culture than worrying about an issue like gun control which for better or worse you're unlikely to have much of an effect on anyway.

Hi

The U.S. picks and chooses it’s defeats based on political expediency. Those who we rather romantically refer to as insurgents play further into the U.S.’s hands with every strike. What makes you so sure the U.S. policy is as publicly presented? Isn’t a prolonged guerrilla war in Iraq in its best interests?

As with the British State in Ireland, the occupying forces in Iraq and their terrorist shadows are mutually dependant on each other for their survival and so, unwittingly or not, act in each other’s best interests.

Love

Chris

I think it's too early to say that's true in the case of Iraq, and it's absurd to claim that wars are to any large degree about two sides supporting each other through mutual destruction. Were the Vietcong mutually dependent on the US army as well? Bit of a weird take on war. While it could be saud that the US and USSR were mutally dependent on each other, they weren't actually fighting.

Hi

In a way. They certainly used the U.S. military threat to bolster their own authority. I’d go as far to say that Churchill was dependent on Hitler to rally workers behind the local bourgeoisie’s agenda, despite my position on WWII.

That’s a good choice of words. The U.S. state depends on the fear of armed criminals to justify its relaxed attitude to gun ownership. Authoritarian social control through sensationalised fear masquerading as “the right to bear arms”.

What did you expect from the mighty LR?

Love

Chris

I love guns. Shooting is loads of fun. At parent's place in Herefordshire for a couple of days so am going to try and kill defenceless pigeons tomorrow.

Come the revolution I'll be a sniper.

With a shotgun?

Jack - I saw that. Doesn't mean you have to be a cock though.

Nah. Got a rifle.

How is it a lie? There might be (well there are) other factors they don't mention but calling something true a lie just makes you look hysterical.

http://www.abcf.net/tdc/

This is a question near and dear to me. I grew up hunting and shooting guns. I used to read all kinds of gun magazines as a kid and as a teenager in the sticks, I was briefly intrigued with the survivalist stuff in the early 1980's that really became the militia type stuff. i also live in a predominantly black neighborhood in a predominantly black city in a very murderous country. I don't oppose guns per se because a gun is a tool, just as any tool is a weapon if you know how to use it that way. But that tells us nothing about gun control. Let me try and complicate matters a bit.

One thing I have noticed that no one has mentioned is that in Canada, people mostly own shotguns and rifles aka hunting firearms. Most murders in the U.S. are committed with pistols and assault rifles, which have almost no other purpose than killing people. In the black community in the U.S., deaths are by handguns and modified assault weapons more than anything else (and mostly handguns.) I can't have a serious discussion with people about violence in our community without addressing handgun violence. Many of the people who own a handgun 'for protection' and are hardcore NRA-types are white working class racists (NOT all, of course) who are scared of young black kids, even if they never see any. That's one side.

Where do those handguns come from? Saying they are stolen is only partially true. At some point they were legally owned. Where do young black men and kids in the U.S., living in cities, legally obtain handguns? They don't. And you can't just steal that many. Fact is, the guns shows and some people at them make a nice buck from re-selling legally bought handguns illegally into the black community. and that's no conspiracy, that's business. That's another side.

During the civil rights and black power movements in the U.S., access to guns was vital to self-defense. If you can find it, read "Negroes with Guns" by Robert F. Williams, a fantastic book detailing the armed resistance to segregation in North Carolina in the late 1950's, with support from the NRA. Or the Deacons for Defense in New Orleans, about whom there is a decent movie now. Or the guy in Baltimore who in the early 1970's started killing off the big drug dealers and virtually shut down the heroin trade in black communities for about six months, leaving only a black star as his calling card. That's another side.

Consider that, as someone correctly said, owning guns won't do squat against the state. Either we take over the police stations and win over the majority of soldiers or we lose. We won't win fighting some guerilla war from the mountains in industrialized, mostly urban countries. For the somewhat romantic view, check out the movie "The Spook Who Sat by the Door". Its an interesting take on what if something like the Black Panthers really were a guerilla army (the BPP did much more and much less tha that and the romanticized notion of the BPP is harmful nonsense, in part generated by the BPP.) That another side.

As for whether or not people have a right to own guns, I have no idea what that abstract crap means. Its not a theoretical statement or analysis, its an abstraction that isn't worth agreeing or disagreeing with. We are for people taking control of their lives, of defending themselves, of running their own world, of living with respect and dignity. In any concrete situation, we can only start from there. To talk about 'the armed people' in abstraction from the political situation, from who "the people" are, is to refuse to make a distinction in theory from the KKK, the BPP, the Deacons for Defnse, miners on strike in the hills of West Virginia in 1920, etc. Another side.

I'm for disarming cops, but I am also from disarming the drug dealers and right now the drug dealers and gang bangers kill more people than the cops. But how do you get rid of the gang bangers and drug dealers? More cops? Obviously not. The spike in murders in the U.S. in the late 1980's was an effect of a market being established for crack. when the market was being established, lines of distribution created, etc. it acted just like any other form of primitive accumulation: drenched in blood from head to toe. However, consider this: no guns, how much less death? Thousands of young black men were killed in Los Angeles and other cities in a few years, but if they had to use knives and fists, how many more would have lived? Another side.

We know that the state will not disarm willingly. We also know that in every country, the professional gangsters and drug dealers can get and have plenty of guns. there is no gun control for those people. Yakuza have them. British mobsters have them. Should 8 year olds be able to get them, though? But what about 8 year olds in Gaza fighting the Israeli forces? another side.

What about the guerilla movements? They have, almost across the board, been nationalists. The IRA, PLO, Sendero Luminoso, FMLN, NLF, ANC, all have turned their guns on working class activists who disagreed with their nationalist politics. Every one of those groups has used guns to act as a new mini-state, to police the population, to assassinate political rivals. Another side.

Ask the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq right now what their position on this is, as they face being murdered by fascist insurgents. ask them how the militias act in relation to women's groups and striking workers. Then ask them if the women's groups and workers should be armed and organized into self-defense squads. I suspect the problem, the answers, and the discussion have little bearing on some abstract notion of whether we should be for or against 'gun control', and will have little to do with my concerns in the U.S. in Baltimore.

The best answer to this is to refuse to pose the question abstractly. Good theory, like good practice, refuses such abstractions and immerses itself in the conrete and tries to grasp the whole process of the concrete and show the complex links between all of the particulars, to illuminate what appears disconnected and chaotic, not to apply some abstract, exterior principle to it.

Chris

People have all kinds of dangerous things in their house - electricity, gas, bleach, kitchen knives, hammers. Peoples stupidity kills people, and with the advent of socialism, much of the reason people get killed - capitalism greed - will go.
Only dictators hate gun ownership.

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people." That's my attitude pretty much. as somebody mentioned, in Canada they got more guns than in the US and there isn't near as much violence. the people arguing for gun control in the US are the same interfering liberal tossers that are also trying to take away Yanks ciggs, booze and porno. Its that same Puritan bollocks all over again.

Somebody made the argument that the state is always gonna have bigger guns and thats true. But the thing is, that misses the point. Its a psychological thing. I've heard that pickets on the west coast (of America) have in the past kept guns in their cars. The cops knew this and gave them some space! Its kind of a matter of seriousness.

Also, if people have to rely upon the state for protection that binds them to it. We're seeing all this fucking scary shit on the telly, and people may criticize the government but its kinda hard to make a break with the state when it looks like its all that stands between you and serial killers or gang crime or whatever. If you can protect yourself and your family without relying on the coppers, you're that much more self-assured. The working class in America has a quite deeply rooted sense of this, as far as I can figure - owning a gun is tied in with freedom and responsibility.

I also think redtwister's post was dead on. It isn't an abstract thing, this.

just got my first gun this weekend (.22 LR). it's a fukn blast to go out and shoot cans and such. i surely don't harbor any illusions of facing down the s.w.a.t., army, or even the local right wing racist thugs redtwister spoke of with it. but if remedying the working class genocide here in the states, or any other place for that matter, is a concern of libcommers i suspect there has to be a better avenue of action than supporting liberal calls for gun control.

"in Canada they got more guns than in the US and there isn't near as much violence. the people arguing for gun control in the US are the same interfering liberal tossers that are also trying to take away Yanks ciggs, booze and porno. Its that same Puritan bollocks all over again."

Well, yes and no. Canada surely does not have more guns than America; per capita this may be the case, but not in real terms.

In all seriousness, Canada has incredibly strict gun control, I know this because I come from a gun-oriented family, grew up hunting etc. The weapons that really kill people, the infamous Tec-9 (known as the street-sweeper) is an absolute case here. It is semi-automatic, very small, incredibly cheap, easily procured, and a great tool if one wishes to wipe out a crowd of people in a drive-by. It is impossible to legally acquire anything even remotely similar in Canada. This is true for all automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Indeed, no weapon in Canada may allowed to have a cartage capacity of more than 3. This makes for a slow slaughter.

Furthermore, Handguns are essentially illegal. One can own a handgun, but the restrictions on them are beyond the pale. Under almost all situations they must be kept at the gun club. If you are allowed to have one in your home (which is very rare) one has to have the gun locked up in a certified gun-locker with a locked-trigger guard installed as a back-up. In another locker, separate from the weapon one can have their locked and secured ammunition. The only place you're allowed to use your hand-gun in the gun club. To get to the gun club one has to drive the pre-determined route dictated to the owner by the police.

As semi-automatic rifles and pistols (et al) do the vast majority of the killing in the US, this binary between Canada and the State some folks have been positing is actually quite flawed. One simply cannot acquire them here, and the penalties for doing so are actually quite strict.

Before all of the "the underground economy" argumentation manifests, I'll preempt. The state deals with illegal guns very seriously, and is generally involved in constant sting operations., and generally does a fairly good job of keeping weapons 'off the streets' as it were. Pistols are socially useless, their only pretense for existence is "defense," and can only be used to kill other people. So I don't have a huge problem with anyone banning handguns, be it the state or the commune.

Another problem with this argument is that say, on our farm, we need lots of guns, because they are tools. We need a good 30.06 (high-bore rifle) with a scope to take out Coyotes who are going after cattle, a .410 (shotgun) to take out gophers (because they dig holes and break the legs of livestock, not pretty, but if you like your beef...) a .22 (small rifle) to take out small pasts/sport gun, and a 12 gauge to put down horses, sick cattle and dogs.

An oft forgotten problem with large numbers of nasty weapons kicking about is the police response. It allows police forces the pretense to acquire things which only the army 'should' have. Large armored vehicles, high-caliber automatic weapons, military grade explosives and on. This is one problem for the wider social; as the 'populace' gets more weaponry, the police 'must' respond in kind. This leads to the horrific level of hyper-militarization which is ever increasingly manifest in our police forces today. Even in Canada, the police are following their counterparts in America, which is absolutely farcical and incredibly dangerous.

Back to work,

The only place in my state that has any real form of gun control is clark county. Automatic weapons are legal, silencers are legal, you can even by those little grenade launchers. The only place with any sort of gun violence problem is clark county. Perhaps its not the guns causing the violence but poverty and desperation?

Gun Control? Don't pull, squeeze.

Don't underestimate the old 22lr. I've shot deer with an old ruger 10/22

.22 is the caliber of choice for mob executions.

You can have it when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

Bah, you can keep your sk knockoff

that looks really awkward to hold and fire! but, i know practically nothing about guns.

I think it's a pretty rum deal if there are anarchists here asserting that it is quite understandable for the state to exercise any sort of control over people. What next? Drugs control to stop the Heroic Working Class from poisoning their minds? Would you be that exercised about gun control if the gun lobby wasn't run by Jesus-lovin' hillbillies?

The best thing to campaign for would be to close down the gun factories and the gun shops. Failing that, demand the right for state subsidies to buy guns so that even the poor can have a mini-armoury in the house. Slogan? GUNS FOR EVERYONE OR GUNS FOR NOBODY!

Whats this? Reform today? Is the revolution tomorrow?

This is like arguing wigth a little teeny me.

Actually I don't think it'll have laws as such. What it won't have as well is money, which will end the tyranny of buying and selling of anything. It will have customs and practice.