A (Brief) People’s History of Gun Control

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January 21, 2013

Why It Will Come Down Harder on the Cottagers Than the Gentry

A (Brief) People’s History of Gun Control

by KEVIN CARSON

From its very beginning, gun control — the attempt to regulate the possession of means of self-defense by the ordinary populace — has been closely associated with class rule and the class state.

In early modern England, regulation of firearm ownership was closely intertwined with the struggle by the landed classes and capitalist agriculture to restrict the laboring classes’ access to independent subsistence from the land. This included enclosure of common woodland, fen and waste — in which landless and land-poor peasants had previously hunted small game — for sheep pasturage or arable land. It also included exclusion of the common people from forests via the Game Laws and restriction of hunting to the gentry.

Under the slaveocracy of the American south, firearm ownership was prohibited by Black Codes that regulated free blacks. And after Emancipation, whenever the old landed gentry managed to successfully assert its power against the Reconstruction regime, former slaves were disarmed by house-to-house patrols, either under the Black Codes or by such irregular bodies as the Klan.

The same was true of the Civil Rights struggle a century later, after World War II. In areas where armed self-defense efforts by civil rights activists were widespread, they significantly improved the balance of power against the Klan and other racist vigilante movements. Numerous armed self-defense groups — e.g. the Deacons for Defense and Justice, whose members used rifles and shotguns to repel attacks by white vigilantes in Louisiana in the 1960s — helped equalize the correlation of forces between civil rights activists and racists in many small towns throughout the south.

Especially notable was Robert Williams, who in 1957 organized an armed defense of the Monroe, NC NAACP chapter president’s home against a Klan raid and sent the vigilantes fleeing for their lives. Williams’s book Negroes With Guns later inspired Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers Party.

Speaking of the Black Panthers, no discussion of the origins of modern American gun control would be complete without recognizing their role in inspiring the modern right-wing gun control agenda.

Foreshadowing current groups like Copwatch and Cop Block, the Panthers in 1966 organized armed patrols of Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns, stopping to witness police interactions with local residents and provide information and offers of legal assistance when necessary.

In 1967 Republican state assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland, a vocal enemy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers, responded with a bill to prohibit publicly carrying firearms in California. The BPP’s Bobby Seale protested the bill by leading a Panther detachment, armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, up the steps of the statehouse (“All right, brothers, we’re going inside”), through its doors, and into the public viewing area. There Seale read a statement denouncing Mulford’s bill as an attempt “at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror and repression of black people,” and warning that “the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”

Mulford’s gun control bill was signed into law three months later by Governor Ronald Reagan.

Irregular workers’ militias and armed defense formations played a significant role in labor history, both in the US and abroad. During the Copper Wars at the turn of the 20th century, the governors of several Rocky Mountain states instituted martial law — including door-to-door confiscation of firearms from workers’ homes and striker encampments. In some cases, as with the West Virginia Coal Wars and the Homestead strike, workers fought pitched battles against Pinkertons, state militia and sheriffs’ deputies.

In Spain it was largely owing to workers’ militias, organized under the auspices of the CNT trade union federation and the parties of the Left, that Franco’s July 1936 coup attempt failed. In the areas of southern and eastern Spain where Franco’s forces failed to carry the day, workers’ militias often played a decisive role. In some areas armed workers drove Franco’s troops back into their barracks after pitched battles and burned them alive inside.

From its beginnings the state has been an executive committee of the economic ruling class and an instrument of armed force by the owners of the means of production, enabling them to extract surplus labor from the rest of us. I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy.

Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/21/a-brief-peoples-history-of-gun-control/

True motives behind Obama's gun 'control' stance

22.01.2013

 

By George Green

From abroad I must note that when I was last in America I could see the increasingly authoritarian executive branch paying careless disregard to their oath to uphold the Constitution. Thus I am hardly surprised that President Obama, who seems to have to problem arming American soldiers to interfere with the sovereignty of other nations, has decided to again extend executive power, this time to ban and register firearms. The question is whether he's doing this out of care for protecting schools or something else.

Recently there was a tragedy involving a young man killing many school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in New Town, Connecticut. This has been used as the so-called 'final straw' requiring unprecedented intervention from the federal government, and explicitly the administrative branch. The strange thing is though, Connecticut itself already had similar laws to the ones prposed including and assault weapons ban. If it didn't work in Connecticut why is the administration proposing it for the whole nation? The chief of police in Newtown was indeed shocked by the firepower the 20 year assailant was packing, but if he didn't obtain it under the laws of Connecticut, how is making it illegal elsewhere going to help?

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Criminals and Crazy people will always find a way to create violence; in lieu of assault rifles certainly they'll take up fertilizer and coffee grinders to create bombs as terrorists groups in nations with strict gun laws already have. Yet there's no public outcry to ban gardening. Something else must be compelling Obama, following in the steps of Hitler prior to his seize of power, to go after firearms specifically, and the US amendment that was specifically intended to allow the people to resist the government in an armed struggle by founders who felt that another revolution could one day be necessary. Perhaps Obama isn't worried at all about schools, perhaps he smells revolution in the air.

For those who haven't been following American news; the people are not happy. Two movements have emerged, the so-call Tea Party, and the Occupy movement. The Tea Party movement has held major rallies in cities across America gaining massive support but with relatively no interference by the government. The Occupy movements, seeking to directly protest the financial centers where grievances against the American people have not been addressed and continue unabated, have seen what can only be described as regular abuse of authority by the police; while America accuses other nations, like Russia, of taking a tough line on protests, when it comes to blocking traffic on Wall Street America puts it's boot down hard.

The two groups largely disagree on what should be done but they do agree on one point: The people in power neither care about their issues, nor is the current government capable of addressing their concerns; that may not yet be revolutionary talk but it's getting close to revolutionary thinking. As Obama soon goes to his inauguration, a multi-million dollar event with everything one would expect to need for a rap album release party, he doesn't go with a majority of the people. American voter turn out has been abysmal for years and Americans go to polls far less than other first world countries. Knowing he lacks the support of a majority of the country, enjoying only the support of those not so disappointed with the system that they bother, and that two growing movements identify Federal Government as the problem; maybe we can see why Obama might be concerned with guns. With revolution in the air the most logical thing for an increasingly dictatorial leader to do is to dispense with laws designed to allow for revolution when the government fails to do its job.

As further evidence I'll again point out; the Obama administration has no real problem with assault weapons. Obama himself is surrounded by them every day at public appearances, and every soldier sent abroad is armed with them. Further his administration arms rebels in attacks on governments it doesn't like. Finally a recent program from the administration involved selling assault weapons to drug dealers on the border of Mexico and the United States (resulting already in numerous casualties in America, and in Mexico) in was can only be described as an inept attempt to track drug dealers. (Maybe they should try giving away Improved Explosives to terrorists next?). Certainly the administration doesn't worry about whether assault weapons proliferate they are worried about who has access to them, and knows where they live.

Americans should be taking heed that the administration has a very different plan for America than it says it has abroad. Continually America has been funding revolutions, armed and political, abroad, and arming rebels in many instances. Meanwhile at home the humorously undemocratic two party system is making sure such a revolution cannot take place in America regardless of the will of the people. With the American military already conducting training to put down an uprising within America, and the administration targeting the Second Amendment, the reason is clear; America's elite career politicians are worried. They're not doing the will of the people, the people are catching on, and they're doing all they can to hang onto power rather than do the will of the people. The new gun control laws have nothing to do with schools, and everything to do with propping up a failing state.

George Green

George Edward Green III has been a journalist since 1997, and written for several Technology, Financial, and Libertarian Publications, and lives near L'viv Ukraine

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/22-01-2013/123540-obama_gun_control-0/