Humanitarian

Recently there has been an upsurge of gun violence in the US, particularly at the school at Red Lake Indian Reservation, that has reopened the debate on gun control and violence in America.  This issue has often been divisive among those on the radical left; hardly surprising because the only two choices offered in the mainstream are the gun-control-for-civilians-but-every-weapon-imaginable-for-cops-and-the-military camp, led by Tipper Gore, and the guns-don’t-kill-people-everyone-has-right-to-build-their-own-nuclear-weapons camp, led by Charlton Heston and an army of right wing racist militias.

The dichotomy of this debate is interesting because, on the surface, it might appear that the right-wing was actually opposing absolute state power.  However, the right’s championing of guns has little to do with giving people power against governments or the rich; after massive propaganda campaigns, the right doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.

So what is the true aim of the pro-gun lobby?  Jon Steward puts it in his America: The Book: ‘providing black people with enough weapons to wipe each other out.’  I would argue that this explanation has quite a bit more to do with reality than the stated goal of these groups, although perhaps black can be expanded to include all of the lower class.

The gun-toting right realizes that it has largely been successful, through massive propaganda administered by the entertainment industry and others, in convincing the lower classes of America that there enemies are not the rich who have de facto rule over the country, but other members of the working class, for whatever arbitrary reason.  Who should you pick as your enemy?  Why not someone from another race, or an immigrant, asks the news media?  Corporately controlled hip hop asks you, as if there weren’t enough ways to divide the working class, why don’t you form arbitrary gangs, and then slaughter members of other gangs? 

This is what mainstream hip hop is so good at, providing America’s impoverished youth with ways of dealing with their problems that are not threatening to the establishment and in many cases actually promote pro-establishment behavior.  You want to feel empowered?  Why not slap a bitch around!  Want to feel good about yourself?  Buy a Lexus or a Cadillac!  Want to ease your troubles?  Get stoned out of your mind on crack!  Do you feel violent because of your desolate situation in life?  Kill someone of another gang or someone in your own family (Eminem); whoever you want, just don’t take it out on the rich white capitalists who are the real root of your problems.  Corporate hip hop does the rulers of the country a great service by peddling these messages, teaching people to find sanctuary in drugs, sex, senseless murder, religion, and other things Marx would call ‘opiates of the people.’

Of course, I have great respects for those in hip hop whose message is different from the disempowering one delivered by white-owned corporate hip hop labels; my favorites include Tupac, Public Enemy, Saul Williams, dead prez, the Last Emperor, Outkast, the Roots, and many others whose voices are drowned out by songs full of brand names and bitches and hoes and senseless black-on-black violence.  Their art has been hijacked; just as all other genres of music were hijacked by Clear Channel and the corporate entertainment industry.

So, to summarize, the right wing is gun-happy because they know they won’t ever be the targets of the violence and that, thanks to their insidious propaganda, the working class will fight the bourgeois’ class war for them.  And once people in the working class start to kill each other, the bourgeois can amplify these events through its propaganda machine, thus inspiring more fear and hatred in the working class and ensuring that the cycle of violence will continue.  Aside from this, forcing guns down everyone’s throat helps create the erotic fascination with violence, mass-slaughter, and weaponry that needs to be present in the general population so that no one will object to the annihilation of 100,000 Iraqis or a $412 billion dollar Pentagon budget.  And of course, the weapons manufactures, some of the most profitable businesses in America, are also keen on freeing up gun control laws.

What about the liberals and Tipper Gore?  The aims of the ‘liberals’ who advocate gun control on civilians is simply to give the state a greater capacity to control its civilians by giving it a monopoly on violence.  This has always been the goal of law and order liberals, to ensure that no one questions authority or the right of government to oppress its citizens or to murder millions overseas. 

As Ward Churchill points out, talk of gun control only arose once the Black Panthers started policing a racist police force in Oakland that had been abusing African Americans with impunity, during a time when civilians were allowed to have the same types of guns police were carrying.  What if Tipper Gore had been around then?  She surely would have been among those who advocated civilian gun control to keep guns in their rightful hands, namely, in the hands of the state, and out of the hands of oppressed minorities who were standing up for their rights and fighting back.  That, I would argue, has been the principle motive of some of the gun control liberals.  In principle, equal access to weapons is extremely democratizing; something which of course the elite fear.

So, what is the best way to ensure that political liberties are protected and the same time fight to end the plague of senseless violence?  The working class could, instead of fighting the bourgeois’ class war for them, actually attempt unite and rebel against authority.  I doubt the thugs in the NRA would be so pro-gun if they actually saw their beloved weapons pointed at the establishment instead of just at regular people.

This is a steep order though, and in the meantime, it seems logical, if we want to protect liberty and at the same time protect lives, to put some limits on weapons, especially the state’s.  No, don’t repeal the second amendment, but maybe ban Assault rifles, for the military and the police, not just the civilians.  As Michael Moore points out in his uncharacteristically nuanced film Bowling for Columbine, the violence at America’s core has less to do with guns than it does with a murderous culture, and so it seems obvious that to really make the world more safe, we need to address some issues at the heart of American culture and ideology.  In the meantime, some restrictions can perhaps prevent some innocent blood from being shed in senseless violence.