Each mass shooting in the US is a sign of societal sickness, and their increased pace and deadliness shows the disease is becoming more severe. There was another tragic example even as this article was being written: a shooting rampage in Northern California that that took the lives of five apparently random victims.
But just as disturbing is the political reaction in the aftermath of these tragedies.
Republican politicians, beholden to the gun lobby, bend over backwards to deny the obvious fact that the country is awash in guns and gun violence, while the National Rifle Association brags about its ability to stave off even the smallest regulations, like banning the “bump stocks” that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire bullets continuously.
Radicals have a long history of being skeptical about gun control as a solution to violence, both because we oppose most government attempts at prohibition and because we don’t think that a government with a long history of violence against people of color, workers and the left should get more power over society, because it will use it in ways that increase repression and violence, not decrease it.
But it’s also important to understand that the context of gun debates is very different today then it was 50 years ago.
Then, gun control was an overtly reactionary strategy of criminalization pushed by Republicans like Richard Nixon and then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan, as they confronted urban riots involving armed Black veterans of the Vietnam War and mass support for the Black Panther Party strategy of armed patrols to monitor and confront police brutality.
In part as a product of the success of that government-led backlash against the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the political provocateurs when it comes to guns today come not from the left but the right. And the vision they promote isn’t collective resistance against oppression, but paranoid individualism, toxic masculinity and racism — all of which happens to…