Monday 18 January 2021

Guns & Laws.

        The Americans right to bear arms is a very one sided right according to the state. U$A does pass gun control laws, but they are usually in response to "non-whites" following that 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms.

The following from It's Going Down:

           On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with two members of the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), about the organization and more broadly, about what it means to create an anti-racist current both within (and against) the current mainstream gun culture which largely has been occupied by the far-Right. The SRA currently has about 10,000 members and is a pan-Left organization, made up of anarchists, Marxists, and socialists. For a history of the group and a look at where they are coming from, we encourage people to read this interview several members conducted with the Anti-Fascist Network in the so-called UK.

From the interview:

         It is important to understand that gun rights were enshrined in the US 2nd Amendment partly because of a need for armed violence at the frontier to continue the genocide of Native peoples, as well as Southern fears of slave uprisings. Gun rights were largely reserved for white people for most of US history, and during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Black people who armed themselves for community defense were often massacred and disarmed by white mobs and police. Attempts by Black people and other marginalized groups to arm themselves have often led to increased gun control; the National Firearms Act of 1934 was partly justified by crime committed by Italian and Irish immigrants; the Gun Control Act of 1968 was partly put in place due to Civil Rights riots; the Mulford Act was passed in California and signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1967 in response to the Black Panthers; ‘Saturday Night Special’ laws banning inexpensive small caliber handguns were passed in the ‘70s in response to Black people in cities preferring those firearms. The history of gun control in America is the history of white people owning guns to oppress marginalized people; Black people and other marginalized folks acquiring guns to defend themselves; and white people then passing laws to disarm the marginalized.

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