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.

5 comments:

  1. Ymar Sakar1:45 PM

    If you wish for allies, look at marianne w from the dem candidates for prez. Trojan horse. Looks like a leftist but is not.

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  2. "Designated community patrols made up of well-trained, highly trusted individuals" also sounds a lot like a decent police force. Or a posse, which sets itself against cattle rustlers and enjoys the support of a healthy community in an otherwise lawless culture where people take responsibility for defending themselves within a shared code of behavior.

    Marianne Williamson, though not my idea of a president, is in fact more interesting than the run-of-the-mill crystal-gazing looney. I've never met her, but I know her family. Her sister, who died rather young of cancer, was married to a former law partner of mine, a man whose character I admired above that of almost anyone else I can think of. His late wife, Marianne's sister, was cut very much from the same cloth:
    a tough and enormously appealing woman. Their father, my partner's father-in-law, was initially suspicious of this Canadian suitor of unproven prospects and tried to bribe him to go away, a proposal my partner rejected with dignity and good humor, as he rejected every other unsuitable proposal I ever saw anyone put to him. The father-in-law came around. Marianne's brother is an immigration lawyer I respect. The whole family are extremely bright, self-directed, and tested by fire. Jewish, with everything that entails in terms of resilience and a coherent culture. You'd want them in the trenches next to you. Still, as I say, I never met Marianne, who may be completely nuts for all I know. I've never tried to read her books.

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  3. ymarsakar10:15 AM

    If we can't find a way to be allies, we'll end up killing each other.

    Haven't seen much killing in this so called CW2 yet.

    Bodies aren't even stacked up to the moon. Not a problem.

    Also killing each other is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is that Red v Blue becomes each other, then the Deep State hammers both flat when both are weakened via the stalking horse distraction.

    Immediately killing the enemy ends the threat, if only temporarily in this plane and life. However, it is immediate, an ending at least. But "fighting" is what Americans like to do and fighting is what leads them to lose wars all over again. Fighting is a waste of time in Sun Tzu's Art of War. For obvious reasons.

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  4. "...also sounds a lot like a decent police force."

    I have often argued here that good policing is just full-time good citizenship: being the designated person to come help if (a) a cow should break out of the fence and get in the road, or (b) an accident should require witnesses for court later, or (c) people from outside the community should cause trouble as by robbing houses and need to be arrested and brought before a magistrate. I mean two things by that: first, that any citizen should have the right and duty to help with those things as they can, so that police are entitled to no special powers over the citizen; but also that good policing really is good citizenship, an inherently honorable and desirable practice.

    One could substitute a militia for a police force in the same way that one can substitute volunteer firefighters for a professional force. In a larger city, it's more likely you'd want the professional full-time force. But in a smaller community, the volunteers might make more sense. They'd perform the same functions, and even in the city the volunteers might make very desirable additions in times of heightened stress. And this would all preserve the unity of the citizen and the police force, so that there was no sense of a difference in kind that could be exploited or that could be divisive.

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  5. ymarsakar5:23 PM

    Martial artists have perhaps a lot more experience in organizing things from a non credential, non license based, grass roots perspective than other meet up groups.

    And I don't mean MMA gym martial artists or those looking to teach it for money.

    The hidden Miyagi existences (that are still around).

    MA hobbyists aren't exactly sanctioned by the law or communities, but they aren't blocked either.

    A proper militia should hold approximately the same distance to the Ruling Authorities.

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