Anti-racism

The right to bear arms is rooted in genocide and slavery in America and imperialism abroad

Rallying against gun control in 2018 (Pic: Wikimedia commons)

Charlie Kirk said gun deaths were an unfortunate but justifiable side effect of the right to bear arms. The “right” he defended has led to the deaths of hundreds of children.

Gun crime is the biggest cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States.

There have been 47 school shootings in the US so far this year. They left 19 dead and 77 injured. The number of school shootings are at record levels.

The American thirst for guns is fuelled by fear, frustration and despair. One gun salesman bragged, “The gun business is just like the booze business—it’s pretty good when times are good and it’s fucking great when times are bad.”

When George W Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, the US gun industry sold about 1.5 million rifles every year. By the time he left office—following the War on Terror—Americans were buying nearly 7,000 AR-15 assault rifles every day.

The gun lobby responded to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 with racist scaremongering.

During the first four years of Obama’s presidency, gun sales exceeded 43 million—a staggering 52 percent increase. Membership of the National Rifle Association grew from three to five million.

During this “Obama boom”, gun sales expanded so fast that supermarkets opened gun counters in hundreds of stores.

When Donald Trump first stood for president in 2016, the NRA rushed to endorse him, donating $30 million to his campaign.

The peak of the Covid lockdown in March 2020 saw five of the ten highest days for gun sales ever recorded. Some 201,308 guns were sold on 20 March, more than on any other day in US history.   

Military-grade guns became symbols of patriotism and an assertion of male authority and white supremacy.

In her book, Loaded—A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz showed how the Second Amendment which guarantees the right to bear arms, is rooted in genocide and slavery.

The Second Amendment was passed in 1791 to enable white settlers to steal land from Indigenous communities. From the 1600s, armed settler militias were repurposed to terrorise enslaved people. 

The US, Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “was founded on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves. This was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional. The capitalist firearms industry was among the first successful modern corporations. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies.”

For centuries all black people were banned from owning guns. But during the American Civil War of 1861-65, around 200,000 black soldiers learnt how to use guns, and many took their rifles home.

When the war ended in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan emerged with the aim of disarming black people through a campaign of terror.

The NRA was set up in 1871 to campaign for gun licences which could exclude black people from defending themselves.

In 1956, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King’s home was firebombed, but his application for a gun licence was rejected by the authorities in Montgomery, Alabama. 

Right wing politicians support gun controls when it suits them. When armed Black Panthers staged a protest at the California Capitol building in 1967, the governor of California, future Republican president Ronald Reagan, quickly banned the carrying of firearms. 

The following year King was shot dead and riots swept the cities of the North, the NRA campaigned for the guns used in the inner cities to be licensed. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was not about controlling guns—it was about controlling black people.

The gun violence on US soil is intimately connected to the US role as an imperialist power. The US is the world’s leading exporter of weapons, with nearly 40 percent of global weapons made by US corporations.

The number of people killed by the US military is staggering. Estimates of deaths resulting from the Vietnam War range from 1.5 million to 3.5 million. The death toll in Iraq was over one million. In Afghanistan, some 75,000 died in two decades of Western occupation. 

As one left wing paper observed, “There are plenty of states that repress their own people in horrendous ways. But there is, in planetary terms, no more dangerous, anti-democratic and murderous a state than the US”. 

US military spending now tops $900 billion a year. That means that every American pays $2,000 a year to the military. In comparison, China spends less than $300 billion on its military. 

In his book, The Complex—How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, Nick Turse shows how the Pentagon collaborates with Hollywood and the publishers of Marvel Comics and shapes university science and research. 

Gun violence flows from a legacy of colonial conquest and slavery, and the racism and imperialism that seep into every pore of US society. But it’s intensified by the trauma of life for ordinary people in the US, one of the most unequal societies on earth.

Some 20 percent of wealth flows to the top 1 percent, and the top 0.1 percent holds roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent. 

The suffering behind these figures is demonstrated by the suicide rates which have risen by 30 percent in the past 17 years. In 2023, 49,000 Americans killed themselves and suicide accounted for half of all gun-related deaths.

The US establishment responds to this crisis with repression. The US has 5 percent of the world population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, nearly two million people. 

The police are responsible for gun violence. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group estimates that police officers account for a third of stranger homicides. 

Addressing gun violence depends on broader social justice demands, such as free healthcare for all, slashing the Pentagon budget and defunding the police. 

The “American Dream” is just one name for capitalism’s endlessly renewed and endlessly broken promises of affluence, security and fulfilment.

There can be no more urgent reason to overthrow this sick system than the violent and needless deaths of children—whether they occur in Texas or in Gaza.