U.S. Politics

[leviramsey]

Try living in a ghetto, as I have for several years. The biggest thing preventing police brutality is the prospect of the cops getting KIA.

[leviramsey]

The secret history of guns

Opposition to gun control was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.

Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest really bad person in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.

The Panthers’ methods provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.

A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”

Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s assassination—and the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riots—gave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.

Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

[mjmooney]

Try living in a ghetto, as I have for several years. The biggest thing preventing police brutality is the prospect of the cops getting KIA.

 

"That’s to say, like, if you got a cold... you take a shot of malaria" (Bob Dylan) 

[maqroll]

This is why I understand both sides of the gun debate. The right to bear arms was made law of the land specifically to defend ourselves against a tyrannical government, a notion that gets met with widespread ridicule. Surely the benevolent US government would never turn on it's own people? 

Sorry, I just don't buy this.

 

What scenario do you envisage whereby the government would attempt to impose something that was SO unpopular, that the electorate would resist it with small arms?

 

In such a case, NOBODY could win. In a shooting war between the US government and the people, where the people have a bunch of handguns and hunting rifles, and the government has Strategic Air Command, who do you think would triumph? And what kind of triumph would that be? You only have to think of it for a few moments to realise the absurdity of the very concept.

 

It's certainly true that the government is running scared of the gun lobby. But that's for electoral reasons, not firepower ones. Let go of the **** wild west, FFS.

Mike, I didn't say I agree with the pro gun side.... I said I understand their position. Big difference. Of course, if the shit hit the fan and the government started rounding up "domestic terrorists", there is no chance of civilian militias winning any kind of "war"...

 

But people have a deep mistrust of government, and much of that distrust is warranted, based on what they've done abroad and here at home. The erosion of our civil liberties, beginning with The Patriot Act and continuing with the NDAA and surveillance drones, makes people uneasy. 

[maqroll]

Scary

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

'Tis a rogue state.

[chrisp65]

What's the arguement against all law abiding americans being allowed their own small nuclear weapons. You know, nothing crazy, just big enough to ensure mutually assured destruction on a school or mall scale.

[LockStockVilla]

Scary

Even more than $662 billion is spent on those programs by the DoD. I've done some work on government budgets in the past and the only US agency to never pass an audit of their budgets is the DoD. So much is spent on these secret programs in addition to what is out in the open. 

[maqroll]

License to Kill Americans

[peterms]

The Bush family's e-mail account has been hacked.

 

One of the consequences of this dastardly act is that we now learn that Dubya is a most talented artist, and two examples of his stunning control of the brush can be found here.

 

Some people may think it's a little odd that he paints himself in the bath or shower, and e-mails the resulting work to his sister, but I put it down to him misunderstanding the idea of "watercolours".

 

Either that, or a subconscious attempt to come to terms with the concept of waterboarding.

[coda]

Washing the blood off.

[mjmooney]

License to Kill Americans

And yet somehow, all those .38 specials failed to prevent it... 

[maqroll]

License to Kill Americans

And yet somehow, all those .38 specials failed to prevent it... 

Mike, scroll up to post #64

[mjmooney]

 

License to Kill Americans

And yet somehow, all those .38 specials failed to prevent it... 

Mike, scroll up to post #64

Sure: 

 

 

Mike, I didn't say I agree with the pro gun side.... I said I understand their position. Big difference. Of course, if the shit hit the fan and the government started rounding up "domestic terrorists", there is no chance of civilian militias winning any kind of "war"...

 

So you agree that they are deluded (or disingenuous) in linking mistrust of government with the right to bear arms? 

 

They are two entirely different arguments. I know you are a libertarian, but the whole point of democracy is that we all do sacrifice certain perceived "freedoms" in order to have any chance of practical management of a vast and complex world. The alternative is not self-organising local communities (the anarchist ideal) - it's unelected dictatorships. There is an argument that that is what we effectively already have, but that's another debate. 

 

My point is that private gun ownership cannot be defended on 'political' grounds. At least be honest about it - it's about machismo (and yes, fear). I've already said in this thread that I don't believe that gun control is implementable in the US. Sadly, you can't put the genie back in the bottle - which means that you (and to an increasing degree, we) will continue to pay the price in senseless loss of life. 

[CrackpotForeigner]

The alternative is not self-organising local communities (the anarchist ideal) - it's unelected dictatorships.

For the anarchist ideal to work, the institution of the State needs to be dismantled. What follows thereafter is anyone's guess, but it did work pretty well for about six weeks in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. I say give it a try

[maqroll]

 

So you agree that they are deluded (or disingenuous) in linking mistrust of government with the right to bear arms? 

I think some of them believe that when the National Guard starts closing in, the AR-15 they carry might just give themselves and their families a head start while they flee...and protection while fleeing (assuming a breakdown of social order).

 

But mostly this debate comes down to symbolism. The gun owners believe that any governmental attempt to infringe on their constitutional rights is simply intolerable, and symbolic of government's increasingly hostile approach to civil liberties in general.

 

Of course, many of these people are flaming hypocrites who want laws passed that deny gay marriage, access to abortion, etc. They don't mind if other people's civil rights are infringed upon...

Edited February 11, 2013 by maqroll

[leviramsey]

"The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do, they cannot give the factory worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see it stays there." -- George Orwell, "Don't let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home Guard", Evening Standard, 8 January 1941

The Rifle on The Wall

Let’s start with this: The citizen’s right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right. The political principle at stake is quite simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force. This should perhaps be stated in the obverse: to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the citizenry as a whole. The history of arguments and struggles over this principle, throughout the world, is long and clear. Instituted in the context of a revolutionary struggle based on the most democratic concepts of its day, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is perhaps the clearest legal/constitutional expression of this principle, and as such, I think, is one of the most radical statutes in the world.

The question of gun rights is a political question, in the broad sense that it touches on the distribution of power in a polity. Thus, although it incorporates all these perfectly legitimate “sub-political” activities, it is not fundamentally about hunting, or collecting, or target practice; it is about empowering the citizen relative to the state. Denying the importance of, or even refusing to understand, this fundamental point of the Second Amendment right, and sneering at people who do, symptomizes a politics of paternalist statism – not (actually the opposite of) a politics of revolutionary liberation.

What the modern American capitalist state has done is invert the relative valorization of a standing army vs. an armed people that was held by a long tradition of radical democrats, and by many, if not most, "Founding Fathers." This skews the minds of everyone in society, and is no progressive achievement.

In the current gun rights debate, one does not have to think too hard to catch the tiny little fact that anti-gun-rights liberals, besides not really being pacifists, are not really proposing to eliminate guns at all. Is there one liberal gun-control proposal being put forward that makes the teensiest move toward diminishing the use of guns, including military assault weapons, by the police? Is there one that addresses, in the weensiest way, the continuing, massive militarization of the police that has been taking place in this country? Is there one that will take away one gun, one bullet, one armed personnel carrier, one drone, or one dollar from the bloated internal security apparatus (let’s not even mention the foreign war machine) of the American nouveau police state? From its corporate militia comrades?

No. What all liberal gun-control proposals seek to do, and all they seek to do, is to reduce and eventually eliminate the right of ordinary citizens to possess firearms. These proposals treat the armed power of the state with, at best, benign indifference. They ignore, or dismiss as of no importance, the way these policies will further weaken the power of the citizen relative to the state. There is a definite ideology underlying all this: That the state – the American capitalist state we live in – should have a monopoly of armed force; that this state is a benign, neutral arbiter which will use its armed force in support of and not against its citizens, to mediate conflicts fairly and promote just outcomes in ways that the citizens themselves cannot be trusted to do.

All the liberal gun-control proposals do, and I would suggest the anti-gun-rights position in general must, rest on this premise. For reasons set forth below, I think it’s wrong-headed, and I do not see how one can deny that it is elitist and authoritarian.

This ideology is most likely to exude from those whose lived experience is that the armed power of the state does overwhelmingly act on their behalf, that the police are their friends – people who are secure in their implicit understanding that they have nothing to fear, personally or politically, from the armed agents of the state, and that when they call those agents to help them, they will come and help them, and not beat them down or shoot them on sight, “by accident.”

At many levels, this ideology promotes the phony notion of what the American capitalist state is, an ideology that we should be helping to extirpate from people’s minds, not helping to perpetuate in the name of ensuring their safety. Under the guise of nonviolent pacifism, this ideology only occludes the violence of the armed state that underlies all of our lives in capitalist society. The state we live in is not a neutral class-agnostic arbiter. It is the instantiation of a relation of forces between classes, which “uses social crises to reinforce a range of social relationships and control certain populations.” In our case, it exists to guarantee, by armed force locked and loaded in advance and on call 24-7, the absolute hegemony of the corporations and the banksters (the ruling class/the1%/your-euphemism-for-avoiding-marxist-language-here) over the working people and dispossessed (the 99% and such). We should dispense with any of the comforting illusions about this. This state of postwar Euro-American felicity – the liberal, democratic capitalist welfare/social-democratic state – has reverted to its core class function.

Edited February 11, 2013 by leviramsey

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

So just how serious is this serious threat posed by North Korea?

[Chindie]

So just how serious is this serious threat posed by North Korea?

 

They're more of a threat to stability than they are a direct threat to peace. North Korea isn't going to launch a nuke at anyone, it'd achieve nothing for them, besides a very fast way of the having the entire regime turned to glass and ashen silhouettes on palace walls. They can easily spark a war without using one - they've a ludicrous line of artillery pointed straight at Seoul, for instance. If they wanted a war, they could do it tomorrow, and the outcome would be the same.

 

North Korea is pursuing nuclear armament for other purposes. Mostly, it's a threat to their enemies, a guarentee against invasion - 'try it and we'll escalate things to the final degree'. They know that they've got enemies on their doorstep and not many friends, they want something to assure their position as far as possible.

 

It's also posturing. They've fostered a belief that it's them against the world and they need to keep that in the headlines to maintain the narrative. And of course that extends to prestige - nuclear arms are the crowning jewel of any military system. North Korea getting one lets them pretend their army stands alongside (they would argue above, no doubt) any other.

 

And of course it also is just another stage in the game North Korea plays constantly of basically demanding aid with menaces. They play up, get some sanctions for the effort, and then get a degree of placation aid. They've done this for years.

 

The threat North Korea poses is that, despite all of the above, no right minded state that has any exposure to that region can ignore the fact that, yes, all of the above is certainly true, they might one day do something completely illogical, or make a mistake, or have an accident, with a nuke. So their pursuit of nuclear arms puts the region on tenterhooks. The problem is that that leads to other issues, which is where the threat is - one day this kind of instability caused by one of the players of the game doing something daft is going to change the rules of the game entirely, and that could lead to the whole region descending into war, which would rapidly expand into a global conflict, again.

 

The other threat a nuclear armed North Korea represents is a consequence of their main desire for having one - the safety guarentee. The US (and rest of the world) do not like a volatile presence in a region that is very important, having something that prevents them enacting change if necessary. The US (for arguments sake) know at the moment that, if North Korea really starts to pose a serious, serious problem, they can do something about it. It would not be pretty and they know it would be an absolutely hideous task for years, but they could get rid of the North Korean regime if absolutely necessary. If, on the other hand, North Korea gets a nuke, that task suddenly gets into unfeasible, unthinkable territory, game changing territory. Especially when you consider that if you KNOW that Korea has a nuclear arm, you cannot be certain they don't have more. In that scenario, you may try to incapacitate the nuclear capability, and suddenly find that they've got more stashed in some backwater and a reason to use all of them.

 

So yes, theres a definite threat. But it's not the threat that the rest of the world would have you believe. It's more complex than that.

Edited February 12, 2013 by Chindie

[peterms]

A tiny glimmer of hope that those who collaborated with the US government's programme of kidnap and torture may be held accountable for their crimes:

Italy’s former military intelligence chief was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday for complicity in the C.I.A.’s abduction of an Egyptian Muslim cleric ...