What White Liberals Are Ignoring About Gun Violence
March for Our Lives has good energy behind it, but its politics must take into account marginalized people.
I wasn’t expecting any sort of radical viewpoint at the March for Our Lives in my local area populated by mostly white suburbanites. I went with my sign in hopes of putting a less widely shared thought in people’s head as I marched around. There has been a severe lack of discussion in the way other people experience gun violence. When so much resources get devoted to those behind this march, and the lack put towards the black lives matter movement (or even derided by those same people), the racial disparity is abundantly clear. The acknowledgement by Parkland students that young black and brown people’s voices have been ignored when it’s came to gun violence is a good start towards breaking through the traditional discourse in America. But the deeply held racist roots of American gun culture, as well as violence by the United States against black and brown people has been ignored for far too long. This movement feels so powerful because it comes from the passionate and blunt sincerity of these students. If this is really going to break the mold, then it must address these neglected injustices and adjust their platform to solve them.
The 2nd amendment itself is rooted in white supremacy. One of the key reasons for its implementation was to arm the slave patrols of the South, deputized men meant to stop slave rebellions and catch runaway slaves. Today the NRA tries to sell guns by using fear and racism to make mostly white men believe they need guns to defend themselves from dangerous black people, Muslims, and immigrants. When the NRA refers to those marching as “violent radicals” they seek to deputize their audience against this threat to the gun manufacturers they lobby for. A study from Scientific American shows that the average gun owner is a white man anxious about protecting his family and has high levels of racial resentment. The average gun owner also owns an astonishing 8 guns and 3% of gun owners own half of the guns in America. Taking these facts together it is clear what the strategy of the NRA is. They put out media and propaganda designed to scare their audience of white male gun owners into purchasing even more guns by inventing the threat of the non-white “other”. When we talk about gun violence, especially mass shootings that are primarily done by older white men (several outright white supremacists), we must ask are gun control laws being enforced that makes sense, or are they targeting marginalized communities as some recently proposals do?
Gun control has historically been one element in which mass incarceration, especially of black people, has been enforced. One of the few pieces of gun control the NRA supported was a law banning open carry signed by Ronald Reagan in California after the Black Panther Party did a peaceful open carry demonstration in the capital. Several gun control laws often involve increasing the mandatory minimums for violating them, minimums that have become an anathema to those looking to change the criminal justice system. We know these sentences are disproportionately used against black and brown people as well. When it comes to white people, in 2009 we saw a paper by a Department of Homeland Security analyst warn of the rise of white supremacist and militia groups, only for political pressure from Republicans and conservatives to cause the Department to repudiate that report. When it comes to violent white groups and people, law enforcement has taken a step back, as they did nothing about the Parkland shooter who was an out and out white supremacist. Instead there’s a focus on targeting the mentally ill who are much more often the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it.
Rampant police violence has been completely disconnected from talk of gun violence in the mainstream. But similar to mass shootings, police violence has been a fixture on our screens for years and for marginalized communities with next to no accountability or structural change. The regularity of police shootings has taken a significant role in normalizing the regular loss of life, especially that of black and brown people. This type of violence can’t be separated from any other type of gun violence. When someone is killed, and that killing is put out for everyone to see and nothing of consequence happens repeatedly, it sends a message to everyone and violence becomes accepted in our society. We have come to the realization that our gun violence is such a problem because we have so many guns in our country. We must take the next logical step and realize that more police, who are often armed, leads to more deaths by police. There is a need to hold police accountable but expecting the same justice system that incarcerates black and brown people at exorbitant rates to punish the very agents of that system is difficult to say the least. The solution is not simply police reform, or better policing, but an alternative to policing altogether. As we try and reduce the number of guns in our society, we have to look towards police who killed 1,129 people along with the mass shootings which killed 394 in 2017. Any one-sided approach is going to come at the expensive of black lives.
That’s not the only form of state violence that hasn’t been a part of the conversation. One of the most popular hashtags after Parkland, even shared by some of the students, has been #VetsForGunControl. The tweets are generally the same, that these soldiers used weapons like the AR-15 and have experienced the type of damage it can do, therefore these “weapons of war” don’t belong on our streets. The logical conclusion of this is that these weapons did belong in Iraq, Afghanistan and the multitude of countries we have been at war in. These can’t be separated from each other, when the mass killings we commit abroad become normalized, it takes hold in our own culture at home. The literal example of this is the shooting in Yountville, California where a veteran took the lives of 3 veteran caretakers. This is the case of the violence we commit through wars coming back to haunt us here. We cannot train people to kill and have them commit heinous acts, only for them to come back and that violence not impact our own communities. The response to horrific tragedies is not just to funnel violent people on some murderous excursion abroad to kill brown people. By making any type of mass violence acceptable, it normalizes all types of it. Politicians can’t talk about gun control while doing fundraisers with arms manufacturers and approving massive arms sales to countries like Saudi Arabia, using our weapons to wage a brutal one-sided war in Yemen. In addition, the guns we sell here are often displayed and marketed to show similarity to military equipment. If we want to truly acknowledge the issue of gun violence, we must realize that weapons of war don’t belong anywhere.
It takes time for people to develop their own personal politics, and I certainly didn’t have the views I have now at the age of these kids. In that circumstance, it is understandable how some may not have fully encompassed these other avenues of gun violence. But there are those in power along the center left to center right that will happily take this powerful grassroots energy and make sure it produces nothing more than some moderate, and potentially harmful, reforms. The responsibility for those of us who want to see justice, is to help encourage and develop this movement by providing programs and a platform in which the youth can learn these politics in time. Addressing rising white supremacy, ending police violence, calling for an end to our multiple wars abroad, and ensuring policies that won’t hurt the marginalized are all essential demands that need to be incorporated. White liberals can be an instrumental part in this, by exploring these untouched avenues themselves and making it so these issues are impossible to ignore. Then, this movement can turn into something revolutionary.
