Guns and the Anarchist

A left-leaning anarchist writes about guns.

In Stone Mountain, Georgia, when a group of us marched through the streets to celebrate the cancellation of a Klan rally on February 2, we were accompanied by local activists with rifles and ARs slung over their shoulders; the police kept their distance, which was an extraordinary sight for someone used to New York City’s ultra-aggressive, hyper-militarized NYPD. As the black militant liberation group the Black Panthers showed back in the 1960s, as the Zapatistas showed in the ’90s, and as anarchists in New Orleans showed during the aftermath of Katrina, when cops and other fascists see that they’re not the only ones packing, the balance of power shifts, and they tend to reconsider their tactics.

To be honest, the thought of a world in which the state and their running dogs are the only entities with access to firearms sends a shudder down my spine.

Leftist gun ownership is about protecting marginalized communities

Not everyone should have access to guns — domestic abusers, for example, have proven by their actions that they cannot be trusted with that kind of responsibility — and not everyone needs it. No one without a significant amount of training should be handling a firearm at all, which is why I think designated community patrols made up of well-trained, highly trusted individuals who are chosen by and held accountable to said community (and who do not hold any or less power than anyone else due to their position) is a far better and more equitable defense model than messy “everyone gets a gun!” rhetoric.

I’m also not interested in creating a parallel cultural universe wherein balaclava-clad “gun bunnies” pose for the ’gram (I’d much rather shore up support for Rojava’s all-women YPG Women’s Defense Unit). I’m interested in reclaiming the notion of armed self-defense from those who have long used it as a cudgel to repress dissent and terrorize marginalized communities, and emphasizing its potential as a transformative tool toward collective liberation.

There is a long history of leftist gun ownership, and a concurrent theme of state repression against it.

"Designated community patrols made up of well-trained, highly trusted individuals" is more or less exactly the original vision for local militias as the primary defense of a free state; and concerns about a militarized police are quite similar to the Founders' concerns about a standing army.

There are two criticisms I would make, all the same.

1) It's hard to square 'designated... highly trusted' with 'protecting marginalized communities.' When you move from a universal individual right that can only be lost by demonstrated criminality (I agree with the domestic violence disqualification, for example), you allow space for marginalization to occur. In fact, that is exactly how the racist roots of gun control worked: through processes of restriction to 'trusted' members of the community, which just so happened to disqualify people of a particular race. This subject, of which she makes much in her essay, is extremely well-known to those of us on the right; it's been one of our chief arguments for at least a couple of decades.

If you want to protect marginalized communities, you have to prevent marginalization of individuals. Otherwise, you'll find that your marginalized community gets marginalized one individual at a time. There are some clear and acceptable reasons to marginalize an individual, but the defense of an individual right is necessary to ensure that distrusted communities aren't shut out of the right to the tools they need to defend themselves.

2) It would be wiser to make common cause with the gun-rights right than to try to set up against us. The temptation to do that is clear in the current culture wars; we're just used to thinking of each other as opponents at least, enemies at worst. That said, there's an opportunity not to be missed here. She's saying very little I haven't said myself in these pages, from praise for the original pre-criminal Black Panther project to a defense of the general idea (inherent in the NRA's original mission, which provided firearms and training to Freedmen in the South) that the individual right to keep and bear arms is a necessary part of the defense of human dignity. The argument that we can't rely on the police to protect us? Regular feature of the Hall. The argument that having only the servants of the state armed all but ensures tyranny? All the time here.

If we can't find a way to be allies, we'll end up killing each other. That won't protect anyone's community. The idea should be -- as it was framed by the Founders, even if they did not actually live it out this way -- to set up these local militia as guarantors of a state of liberty for all. That's harder to square with anarchism than it is with citizenship, because it is something like citizenship that creates and binds individuals together with common duties toward one another that wouldn't exist naturally. Minarchism makes more sense than anarchism, in other words.