Should the Left Arm Itself?
Though the proliferation of guns in the US carries a heavy cost, there are many on the left who argue that if fascists are to be armed to the teeth, then so should we.
Understandably, the rising tide of fascism in the US has many on the correct side of history pondering the purchase of a firearm for self-defense or potential revolutionary purpose, many already having done so and vociferously defending their choice:
“After Charlottesville, there was this recognition that there has to be somebody who’s not on the right who is willing to be in places that law enforcement either isn’t willing to be, or where law enforcement is supporting fascists,” Shannon explains. “When you see law enforcement escorting Nazi groups to parades [in places like DC or Detroit] you realize there’s a space to be filled by people who are confident in their skill as gun owners but whose bigger mission is community defense and protection.”
For Vixen, the decision to join came from the threats rightwing extremism poses to her identity. A trans woman who grew up shooting guns off her front porch in Indiana, she spoke about the toxic culture she had encountered at many gun ranges, and of the obligation she felt to protect her queer community.
“Today, I’m a trans woman at Trans Pride, so I feel like I’m personally able to step in front and put myself in front of people who are being attacked or harassed and just try to de-escalate the situation – which is always the goal,” she said. “Obviously, you don’t ever want to celebrate having to use force on someone, but completely throwing it away as an option is really self-defeating.”
So far, none of the members have had to use their weapons in this context, and the hope expressed is that they never will.
This last sentence is key: the gun has become a symbol on the left, a safety blanket which we well know would be disastrous if actually brought to bear against the much more well-armed and quick-to-violence opposition. Writ large, this is the leftist argument for gun rights: a gun may be a comfort to possess, but it is one whose use would inevitably result in, to put it bluntly, getting rapidly blown away by police or white supremacist thugs or home invaders. The Huey P. Newton quote above summarizes the disconnect: in 2023, police barely need an excuse to kill an unarmed Black man, let alone one brandishing a weapon.
In a previous entry, I discussed gun rights at length, finding that actual legitimate self-defense usage of firearms to be vanishingly rare and the real case for gun rights essentially meritless:
This was mostly a refutation of classic 2nd Amendment gun rights arguments, but these responses apply to leftist gun ownership reasoning equally:
According to Pew Research, self-defense is the most common reason Americans own guns:
Personal protection tops the list of reasons why gun owners say they own a firearm. In a Gallup survey conducted in August 2019, gun owners were most likely to cite personal safety or protection as the reason they own a firearm. Roughly six-in-ten (63%) said this in an open-ended question. Considerably smaller shares gave other reasons, including hunting (40%), nonspecific recreation or sport (11%), that their gun was an antique or a family heirloom (6%) or that the gun was related to their line of work (5%).
The number of guns used in a valid self-defense setting is vanishingly small, however, to the point that gun ownership is more of a danger than it is a potential life-saver:
The latest data show that people use guns for self-defense only rarely. According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.
David Hemenway, who led the Harvard research, argues that the risks of owning a gun outweigh the benefits of having one in the rare case where you might need to defend yourself.
"The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense," he tells Here & Now's Robin Young. "But ... every day, they have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared."
Gun ownership, as Hemenway plainly states above, is a losing gamble.
Any leftist who wishes to bear arms is more than welcome to do so, but they should be under no illusions that their violence, justified self-defense though it may be, would result in anything other than disproportionate force being brought against them in turn by a militarized police followed by the swift propagandistic demonization of them as dangerous Antifa lunatics in the already-fascist American public eye, to be used as examples justifying why all vaguely-militant leftist groups should be disarmed and monitored even more closely (or preemptively arrested as terrorists). In the meantime, their gun ownership inevitably contributes to the sad (and significantly unique among comparable nations) proliferation of firearms in the US which results in near-weekly mass shootings by disaffected individuals, the victims are which are almost never fascists, nor often adults.
Conversely, what would armed resistance to a legitimately unjust law look like on an individual scale? See for example the number of anti-abortion laws which are cropping up with alarming frequency and forcing women to carry to term essentially dead fetuses:
A Florida woman, unable to get an abortion in her state, carried to term a baby who had no kidneys.
Deborah Dorbert’s son Milo died in her arms on March 3, shortly after he was born, just as her doctors had predicted he would.
“He gasped for air a couple of times when I held him,” said Dorbert, 33. “I watched my child take his first breath, and I held him as he took his last one.”
She said her pregnancy was proceeding normally until November, when, at 24 weeks, an ultrasound showed that the fetus did not have kidneys and that she had hardly any amniotic fluid. Not only was the baby sure to die, her doctors told her, but the pregnancy put her at especially high risk of preeclampsia, a potentially deadly complication.
Her doctors told her it was too late to terminate the pregnancy in Florida, which bans nearly all abortions after 15 weeks. The only options were to go out of state to get an abortion or to carry the baby to full term, and Dorbert and her husband didn’t have the money to travel.
Given that all pregnancies are potentially dangerous, especially when the fetus is abnormal, was her right to self-defense not abrogated by this law? No one could argue that she would not have been justified to force an abortion at gunpoint, but what practicality would this serve? What would the ultimate outcome be, to the mother in question and to other abortion-seekers? It would not be the guarantee of abortion rights.
There is another problem, raised in my above article:
There is then the issue of proportionality: ignoring the statistics, shouldn’t victims have access to the same kind of weaponry their potential attackers do? The argument that law-abiding citizens should be able to own to guns because criminals can still find them occasionally leads very quickly to a slippery slope in which the justifiable deadliness of the response escalates indefinitely. Say for example a criminal invades a home armed with a knife, so because the homeowner must be allowed to have access to equivalent weaponry in order to defend themselves against the attacker, knives are legalized. No problem so far. If the intruder has a gun, then guns must be legalized. If the intruder has an automatic weapon, then automatic weapons must be legalized. If the intruder has a missile launcher, must we legalize those too for civilian purchase? After all, in a few rare conceptual situations, it might be the only thing that allows a homeowner to survive the invasion of their home by a well-armored gang wielding missile launchers of their own. The conclusion here should be obvious: the potential for an object to be necessary for the preservation of one’s life in any potential situation is not a sufficient reason to maintain its legality in all instances.
This applies to vulnerable groups in the US: if police have tanks and tear gas and missile-equipped drones, then so should the concerned leftist, surely. None of this is to argue of course that leftists and other marginalized communities do not have every right to defend themselves with lethal force against armed street gangs (the police are included in this group) who wish to eradicate them and their way of life. Indeed, they and all of the rest of us potentially armed bystanders have a right to go much further and bring the fight to them, actively thwarting community policing efforts which predominantly harass and arrest innocent individuals in the service of providing bodies for a prison-industrial complex which is tantamount to modern slavery. We are arguing specifically about the feasibility of doing so post-2020, when even peaceful protesters are brutalized, arrested on trumped up charges, spied upon, infiltrated, and worse, demonized in the public, and the prudence of choosing to do so by contributing to the ubiquity of guns themselves. We are arguing strategically, not normatively.
On a grand scale, organizing armed cadres with the goal of some sort of revolution is only infinitesimally likely to accomplish anything worthy of the necessary sacrifice, and would be met with swift and certainly bloody butchery by increasingly desperate fascists who aware that unrest on a massive scale is imminent—brought about by the next pandemic or resource scarcity which is the result of climate change and environmental destruction, both of which are highly politicized, excused as excesses of government meddling in the marketplace or presented as an ivory tower hoax, and more importantly, at least for now, externalizable to even more vulnerable populations abroad. Denial is the order of the day, but it will give way to pacification in short order, enforced by thugs with guns but not fought off by revolutionaries with them.
Two images illustrating the costs of our revolutionary play-acting.
Meanwhile, Pentagon and police budgets only continue to skyrocket while cities go without drinking water. Under what conceivable banner could this militarization of scarcity be fought by anything other than a mass movement the likes of which history has yet to witness? At this point, the numbers are what power-hungry dictators fear, not the incidental gun ownership of the disaffected masses, which could be brushed aside by employing armored vehicles and enforcers and the aforementioned drone violence. Recall that these operators have been trained to use drones to destroy the lives of civilians abroad, whether or not those civilians ever intended to harm US interests. To bring these skills home would be both less complicated and less difficult on a moral level, if the US-based insurgents were presented as armed and dangerous, a threat to the very republic in a more immediate way than a nebulously defined “enemy combatant”—history has shown this to the case many times, and this should not be a controversial statement. The level of retribution any sufficiently organized and armed cadre would immediately suffer would be Biblical in scale, unless it represented many millions of rioters. But then, guns are irrelevant to the equation—soup cans and Molotov cocktails would be just as relevant.
Is this to say communists roll over and let the fascists win with no opposition? In a very real sense they already have won: the planet is well into its environmental death spiral, leftists have been beaten down, infiltrated, and assassinated for many decades, and the public has been pacified and propagandized to accept this as the natural course of maintaining order. If gun ownership affords vulnerable groups a peace of mind, and the wish to some day “go down in a blaze of glory” attempting to defend themselves from e.g. homophobic or transphobic thugs, then that is their business and certainly would be a morally justifiable action. But it should be presented as no more than a dangerous and ill-advised fantasy, and one which helps to contribute to the gun violence epidemic in the US. They are, after all, purchasing weapons and increasing demand just the same as any far-right gun hoarder who dreams of inciting a racial holy war—greedy manufacturers such as Smith and Wesson do not much care about who is purchasing their weapons and will be happy to up production accordingly (illegal home-manufactured weapons excepted of course). They are already being sued by those left behind by mass shootings, though as this article notes, these suits are on shaky grounds given lax gun laws in the US:
The survivors and families of victims of recent mass shootings in Texas and Illinois are taking on gun companies and stores in dozens of lawsuits, alleging the businesses bear responsibility for the massacres.
Last week, survivors of the July 4 mass shooting at a parade in Highland Park, Illinois, sued gun maker Smith & Wesson Brands, two gun retailers and others for their alleged role in the attack that left seven dead and more than 40 injured. The families of three children who survived the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting earlier this year are pursuing legal action in separate cases, as well.
The gun industry, under federal law, has broad immunity from the fallout of mass shootings. Experts say plaintiffs face an uphill battle. But survivors, victims, family members and gun law advocates see an opportunity to hold manufacturers and dealers liable by calling into question their sales and marketing practices. If successful, these suits may reshape how guns are sold to Americans.
“The shooter in Highland Park didn’t act on his own,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, one of the firms representing plaintiffs.
Imagine instead if these manufacturers were being sued by an increasing number of aggrieved families of slain police officers, killed by leftist violence against their abusive behavior? Or an abortion-seeking woman justifiably brandishing a Smith and Wesson product against her healthcare providers? What about the predominantly non-white communities who are the target of white supremacist violence against, say, their voting rights? Would the law, especially once further corrupted by fascist appointment of far-right federal judges, find their arguments sympathetic, or use these examples to justify a crackdown on leftist gun ownership (or leftist organizing…or leftism itself)?
There are examples of successful armed leftist insurrections of course, such as Castro’s in Cuba, but America is not Cuba (this is a wistful statement on a number of levels). It is not a foreign-occupied banana republic with an exploited citizenry looking throw off the imperialist yoke like so many Latin American revolutionaries but would instead manifest as a fully domestic and likely widely popular far-right state comparable to Nazi Germany. There are already plenty of warning signs that such a scenario is ongoing; shooting at those responsible (the Proud Boys, for example) would not deter them, as they do not value their own lives and there are always more disaffected young men to be radicalized and fill their shoes. Worse, this would likely embolden them and even engender wide sympathy in an increasingly desperate, jobless, hungry, and more importantly propagandized US population struggling to find someone, anyone to blame (but by and large not educated enough or savvy enough to point the finger in the right direction).
The obvious and swift response: “what would you have us do?” Most importantly, stop having children. The planet’s environmental woes will impact future generations in ways to grievous to describe, and each new life further strains what will be left of the ecosystem. In the meantime, violent resistance in the form of improvised explosive devices and sabotage is a much more disruptive and, importantly, difficult to collectively punish set of actions whose perpetrators are not necessarily known to the government as registered gun owners. Imagine, for example, a group of armed leftists brandishing firearms attempting to resist a new fascist law openly, or even using guerilla-style tactics—which would resemble what exactly in the heavily urbanized US? For one, their firepower would be easily outmatched. Second, and more importantly, if it is known that leftists are using firearms to undertake civil resistance, their assassination would be far more easy to cover up via one of the US military’s favorite guilt-conferring devices, the drop weapon. This was used to great effect in Iraq, where innocent civilians were murdered and then surreptitiously bestowed post-mortem weaponry by US troops to give them the appearance of justly-slain guerilla fighters. If leftists in the US were known to favor firearms, this kind of assassination coverup would be far more plausible. If, instead, we were well known to employ other means of resistance, this theater becomes more difficult. And as our Middle East occupations showed, the use of e.g. roadside bombs was surprisingly disruptive. Or, less violently, underground networks designed to circumvent the fascist policies and ensure that at least some rights are still available—to use the above abortion example, a network of sympathetic providers willing to risk arrest to provide the necessary procedure.
This is of course assuming the fascist state would wish to attempt to justify its atrocities in the first place, but if it does not, then the question of firearms becomes purely strategic. Here, too, leftists in the US lose out to the inevitably mobilized US military (which a fascist government would employ whether or not such a thing is technically Constitutional, and there are already examples of the military being called into cities in the US to “restore order”), National Guard, or even a heavily militarized police force. The most likely outcome for sufficiently organized paramilitary leftists in 2023 would be another Waco or post-Katrina bloodbath (or a rash of rightwing mass shootings against innocents, which are already occurring at a startling rate), not the successful establishment of a revolutionary state. We are simply too fragmented, the fascists too well established and numerous, and too eager to turn in their leftist gun-owning neighbors as happened in Nazi Germany (and training with illegally held or home-manufactured weaponry would be effectively impossible to do in secret). Our incidental gun ownership does not worry them, only our number and capability of disruption. If anything, the fascists would prefer an armed opposition.
This entry may be accused of being an attempt at establishment propaganda seeking to throw cold water onto and preempt any such armed leftist organizing. It is quite the opposite, as we have previously written in defense of sabotage:
It is in fact a loving and lifesaving message: the weapons of the enemy are not a good fit for the US left, and will only end with us being on the receiving end of bloody and wasteful reprisals (which we have seen are tantamount to collective punishment and draconian sentences against even peaceful protesters). There are of course many examples of vulnerable communities rallying with arms to defend themselves against encroachment by the enforcers of a fascist, racist state or gang (The Black Panthers being a prime example), but these examples are predominantly half a century old, before the advent of drone strikes, the militarization of police, and the favorable politicization of right wing violence and accompanying unfavorable politicization of even reactive, self-evidently justified left wing defense of their communities. The days of Malcom X are long over, if they were ever really defined by his love of guns and not his powerful organizational and rhetorical skills.
Fidel Castro, holding a relic of a bygone era.
We cannot have our cake and eat it too. If leftists wish to be gun-toting, then so will the right wing—and they have both a substantial head start and a willingness to use those guns to enforce their hegemony and oppress and murder others. Gun control is about universality; no one should be allowed to possess the kind of power to control life and death that resulted in Uvalde, and if we are to disarm potential mass shooters, then we must also risk disarming potential socialist revolutionaries. And in the same way that proliferating automatic weapons is not justified by the infinitesimal chance that one would be needed to be used in a justified home invasion scenario, we cannot let this bloodshed continue on the off chance that instead of shooting up a school, a particular set of weaponry would be used to strike a fatal blow against the capitalist machinery.
The socialist revolution is not forthcoming. Many more mass shootings are.
Adopting the language, tactics and tools of the fascists both corrupts us and paints a convenient target on our back. Take the fight to them, but be smart about it. As I conclude in the previous article,
In a similar vein, a well-intentioned leftist may occasionally argue that guns are the last potential bulwark against a full on fascist takeover of the United States, and sufficient weaponry therefore needs to remain in the hands of potential leftist resistance fighters. This is an unrealistic scenario, though: guns are not going to be used to stop a fascist takeover, they will be used to enforce it. If such a thing happens and the military and police are compromised, guns will be essentially useless against the commandeered tanks and Humvees; most gun owners will have sided with the fascists and will be quick to turn in their armed yet questionably-loyal neighbors. Trying to fight back in a dystopian scenario such as that will only end in death or imprisonment and very likely, a further crackdown.
There is no consistent, compelling argument for legal gun ownership of any kind, and laws to heavily restrict their possession are both logical and reasonable.
The exorbitant price of a weapon such as an automatic pistol would be better spent by conscientious leftists on stockpiles of food, housing, community outreach, medical supplies, and as alluded to above…other, less traceable, and no less effective means of fighting back. Sadly, however, the most likely conclusion is that the battle is permanently lost politically, climate change is irreversible and inevitably cataclysmic, and any method of resistance would only provoke worse crackdowns from our increasingly desperate, fascistic, and violent leadership.