Gun Nuts

I think there are two kinds of gun nuts in the US:

• gun owners, blessed by the sacrament of the Second Amendment, who cannot figure out a single useful political purpose for all their firepower; and
• gun haters, who scoff at the Second Amendment, but who want the government to use violence (especially gun violence) against everyone they don't like.

My position on firearms is best expressed by the following observation made by Audre Lorde many years ago:

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

The legend of the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord implies that guns were tools of their liberation, and as a nation we had previously promoted the private ownership of firearms partly because, in the words of the Second Amendment, they were “necessary to the security of a free State”.

But in reality guns are tools of subjugation, oppression, regime change, and counterinsurgency. They can never “dismantle the master’s house” because as one of the master’s chief tools, they are essential to the very building and maintenance of that house.

The proof of this is writ large in America’s history. How did our ancestors clear North America of its original inhabitants? By giving them guns, liquor, and blankets contaminated with smallpox or the measles. And how do we continue to subjugate the peoples around the world whose natural resources and/or land we covet? By giving them guns, drugs, and HIV/AIDS. Would we have given them guns if firearms were tools of liberation? Of course not.

Every instance in which we gave guns to so-called “freedom fighters” was motivated by a desire for regime change and subjugation. And the result nearly every time was a new regime which oppressed its own people so that our extractive businesses could siphon off the wealth of that nation while its American-armed new rulers kept the local population under control. It was a well-honed strategy which worked everywhere, including right here in the good ol’ U S of A.

The master knows us well. He was there when we were created.