Disarmament

A lot of people on the left are calling for the US to enact strict gun control laws in the aftermath of the terrible shooting at a Florida school. They should ponder some of these photographs.

The history of the US suggests that gun control would be a bad idea for the country's most marginalised groups.

Historically, African Americans have armed themselves for protection against lynchings, racist cops, and pogroms. America's first gun control laws were enacted in the nineteenth century to try to stop freed slaves from acquiring arms. For decades blacks in the south struggled for the right to bear guns, knowing that a rifle was the best defence against the ropes of lynch mobs and the burning crosses of the KKK. The Black Panthers are famous for patrolling American cities with guns, but even the pacifist Martin Luther King kept a huge arsenal of weapons for self-defence.

Not only the civil rights but the trade union movement was built with guns. Early America labor leaders carried guns wherever they went, and coal miners and railway workers fought pitched battles with police and soldiers, as well as armed strikebreakers hired by bosses.

Today African Americans have begun to form armed self-defence squads to defend their neighbourhoods from both out of control cops and criminals. In Dallas, for example, the Huey P Newton Gun Club, named after a famous Black Panther leader, patrols inner city streets. If a ban on assault rifles were enacted, groups like this could be criminalised, just as armed black civil rights groups were once criminalised in the southern states.

American cops will always be heavily armed; so will rednecks and criminals. Gun laws will disarm only vulnerable groups like African Americans. Is it really safe, in Trump's America, for the left to give the state, criminals, and white racists a monopoly on arms? The American left needs to arm, not disarm itself. The Huey P Newton Gun Club should be made into a model, not a target for the state.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]