13.04.2023
End right to bear arms
Spurred on by a whole series of mass killings and a fascist militia movement, Daniel Lazare calls for the repeal of the second amendment
On March 27, Audrey Hall - a 28-year-old transgender man now known as Aiden - drove to a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, parked and took out an AR-15 assault rifle which he then used to shoot out a set of glass doors and kill six people inside: three nine-year-old students plus three employees.
In an emergency call made public a few days later, a teacher huddling with her students in an art-supply storeroom can be heard telling a police dispatcher: “Yes, please hurry, I’m hearing shots.”
“They’re coming, they’re coming,” the dispatcher replies. “OK, try to stay quiet, I don’t know what’s going on there.”
“OK, be quiet,” the teacher then whispers to the children.
With that, a police assault team charged into the school, confronting Hall on the second floor and shooting him dead. It was a far cry from last May’s school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which police huddled in a parking lot for more than an hour, while a teenage shooter named Salvador Ramos murdered 19 children and two teachers one by one. But ‘practice makes perfect’, which is why American police are getting better and better at such interventions, the more common school massacres grow.
Events then took a political turn. Three days later, thousands of protestors descended on the state capital nine miles to the south, with signs reading, “Ban assault weapons now”, “Only in America” or simply “Do something”. Hundreds of students jammed the state capitol, chanting and clapping in the visitors’ galleries and utterly disrupting the proceedings below.
When Justin Jones, a young and fiery black Democrat from Nashville, complained in the state house of representatives that his microphone had been cut off, the speaker declared him out of order and called a five-minute recess. As five minutes stretched into 50, Jones and Justin Pearson, a black Democrat from Memphis, used a bullhorn to denounce the second amendment - the part of the constitution conferring an inalienable right “to keep and bear arms” - and led the protestors in chants of “Enough is enough”. A week later, Republican legislators voted to expel Jones and Pearson for “knowingly and intentionally bring[ing] disorder and dishonour to the House,” while a motion to expel Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a third Democrat who had taken part in the protest, failed by a single vote - perhaps because Johnson did not use a bullhorn or perhaps because she is white.
Related issues
It was another day in a country in which mass shootings involving four or more victims are running at 10 or 11 per week and political tension is shooting through the roof. But the Nashville massacre and its aftermath are especially important, because of all the issues they touch upon - not just guns, race and poverty, but gerrymandering, the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection, and America’s growing crisis of democracy to boot.
These are questions that are tearing the US apart, so let us unpack them one by one. Tennessee is a 500-mile-long border state that was torn during the Civil War between anti-slavery Appalachia in the east and pro-slavery lowlands leading to the Mississippi River in the west. Known as the Volunteer State, Tennessee provided more troops for the north than any other Confederate state, and more soldiers for the Confederacy than any state in the south other than Virginia. It was a major battleground, with key engagements at Nashville, Knoxville, Shiloh and Chattanooga. But, with Reconstruction cut short in 1870, Democratic neo-Confederates quickly took over, imposing a racial dictatorship every bit as terrifying as Jim Crow in neighbouring Mississippi or Alabama.
In 1866, white mobs invaded black neighbourhoods in Memphis, killing 46 people, injuring 75 more, and burning down scores of homes, churches and schools - structures that newly-freed blacks were using to build themselves up, but which now lay in ruins. Shortly later, an ex-Confederate general named Nathan Bedford Forrest founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, a town hard on the Alabama border. Beginning in 1900, the Tennessee state legislature hit on the bright idea of freezing legislative districts in place, so that white rural voters would gain an edge over fast-growing cities. With the differential as much as 10 to one by the 1950s, the US Supreme Court had little choice but to step in with an epic 1962 decision, known as Baker v Carr.
But gerrymandering is in Tennessee’s bones, so to speak. Even though Donald Trump swept the state by 61% in 2020, local Republicans have artfully felt compelled to redraw legislative boundaries in order to bump up their own margins even higher - to 82% in the state’s 33-member senate and 74% in the 99-member house of representatives.
The result has been a carnival of reaction. Republicans have used such super-majorities to ram through a long list of legislative horrors: a near-total ban on abortion following the Supreme Court’s overthrow of Roe v Wade last June; a rule allowing faith-based adoption agencies to discriminate against gays, even while benefiting from state funds; a bill requiring businesses to post warning signs if transgender customers receive equal access to toilets, etc. They showered corporations with freebies totalling $1.58 billion in 2010-12 alone and provided Volkswagen with $637 million in grants to build and expand a manufacturing facility in Chattanooga.1
As if that was not enough, they voted in February to ban drag shows on the grounds that they are turning America’s children transgender or gay. This was despite a photo showing governor Bill Lee, an ultra-conservative rancher, dressed as a female cheerleader at a high-school sporting event that quickly went viral.2 Cross-dressing is a sin when liberals do it, apparently, but A-OK when hearty male conservatives don lipstick, padded bras and wigs.
Then there are guns, guns, guns - an American obsession whose symbolic importance continues to grow.3 Since US politics tend to play out along constitutional lines, the country is increasingly breaking down into two separate groups - one loyal to the first amendment with its seemingly blanket protection of free speech and a free press; and the other devoted to a second amendment that conservatives see as no less protective of the right to bear arms. Just as one side defends shows and performances that rural folk might find weird and offensive, the other does the same with guns - not only because the sight of militia members parading about with assault rifles is sure to drive liberals nuts, but because second amendment devotees see such heavy armaments as essential in warding off the incipient governmental tyranny that liberalism represents.
This is why protestors in Nashville felt like they were talking to a stone wall when they confronted legislators on March 30. Republicans do not support guns on practical or utilitarian grounds, because they think they contribute to the greatest good for the greatest number. Rather, they support them on moral grounds, because they see them as vital for the maintenance of liberty. In their eyes, a few dead bodies scattered about here or there are merely the price America must pay for freedom, the highest value of all.
As bad as it is when children turn gay, it is even worse if they are forced to live in a liberal tyranny. So it is a case of live free or die. They must die so that Republican politicians can continue making deals and racking up corporate campaign contributions.
Then there is January 6 - yet another fault line in the US political structure. With Democrats seizing on the 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection as an example of what far-right lunacy leads to, Republicans counter that the uprising was merely a case of a justifiable protest going slightly awry. While they do not support the insurrection, they do not exactly condemn it either and thus end up making common cause with the Proud Boys, the militias and other neo-Confederate putschists of the pro-Trump right.
Absurd statement
This is why Republicans were quick to describe the March 30 Nashville protests as a mini‑January 6: to deflect attention and get themselves off the hook. “Two of the members, Representatives Jones and Johnson, have been very vocal about January 6 in Washington”, House Speaker Cameron Sexton told a radio talk show a few hours later. “What they did today was at least equivalent - maybe worse, depending on how you look at it - of doing an insurrection in the Capitol.”4
The statement was absurd. Protestors did not set up a noose, smash windows, battle with police or send legislators fleeing for their lives. While upset and vociferous, they were otherwise polite and well-behaved, as news videos make clear. All were adamant, while some were in tears. One woman explained:
It was important for me to be here today because I have children, I have grandchildren ... we just don’t have a government here in Tennessee that’s willing to do anything about gun laws. And no-one in my opinion needs an AR-15. I think all weapons like that - assault weapons - should be banned.5
And before some pseudo-leftist pipes up that workers need AR-15s to take power, let it be noted that the purpose of arming the working class is to establish a monopoly on violence that is collective, class-based, and hence the diametric opposite of individual, US-style gun ownership. This does not mean that privately-owned guns will vanish, once the proletariat takes power. But a workers’ democracy will necessarily impose a strict, utilitarian standard requiring owners to explain how and why their weapons serve the common good - a standard that privately-owned assault rifles, needless to say, are unlikely to meet.
Finally, there is the breakdown of democracy. Any government that refuses to address rampant gun violence is one that has surrendered all claims to democratic legitimacy. With 45,222 in 2020 alone, American gun deaths are growing by 14% per year. Even in comparatively civilised northern states, the rate is extreme by international standards - 3.7 per 100,000 in Massachusetts, 5.3 in New York and 8.5 in California - versus 2.64 in France, 1.22 in Germany, 0.24 in the UK and 0.08 in Japan. But the rates in the Deep South are off the wall: 28.6 per 100,000 in Mississippi, 23.6 in Alabama and 21.3 in Tennessee. That is higher than Honduras at 19.74 or Mexico at 17.22.6 Yet Washington is paralysed in response.
Southern states like Tennessee and western states like Wyoming and Montana are places where the second amendment is next to god and where gun violence, consequently, is off the charts. The effect - indeed, the goal - is to atomise society by causing citizens to huddle in fear inside fortified private homes. Collective political activity grows more and more difficult, since ordinary people will scatter as soon as some self-appointed vigilante shows up with an AR-15 - a pattern that was increasingly evident during the mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Democracy is weakened because the second amendment encourages Americans to view collective political action as implicitly threatening. Since democracy and freedom are seen as mutually antagonistic - one imposes tyranny, while the other prevents it - the upshot is the sort of twisted logic that led Tennessee state legislators to expel Jones and Pearson and nearly expel Johnson as well. In order to preserve the right to bear arms - the original freedom on which all other freedoms rest - they felt justified in tossing democracy overboard. And so they did.
Newsflash: Justin Jones took back his legislative seat on April 10 after the Democratic-controlled local government in Nashville voted unanimously to restore him to office, while the Democratic local government in Memphis, 210 miles to the west, was expected to return Justin Pearson on April 12 as well. But that does not mean that the contradictions that led to the expulsions are about to disappear. On the contrary, more explosions are on the way.
-
. www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2021/03/16/tennessees-problem-state-debt-wealthy-governing-state/4723223001.↩︎
-
. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/28/tennessee-governor-ban-drag-shows-photo-bill-lee.↩︎
-
. For more on this, see ‘Rittenhouse and white backlash’ Weekly Worker November 25 2021: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1373/rittenhouse-and-white-backlash.↩︎
-
. www.timesfreepress.com/news/2023/apr/02/tennessee-house-speakers-likening-of-protest-over.↩︎
-
. www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm; worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country.↩︎