My pace on writing these blog posts has slowed considerably since I started, but I still have a lot to write about related to why I am so focused on dismantling Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) and the authoritarian structures it props up, so whether I get to 100 posts before the end of December or not, I am not done with this project yet. It has been a heavy couple of months with a lot to think about and little time to write about it, but I started to talk about Misogyny and Guns in post 55 of 100, and given that US cities are in the process of being occupied by federal troops and law enforcement enforcing presidential decree, it seems like a necessary time to talk about why I continue to not want to own a firearm.
Firstly, I am not a pacifist and never have been. It is not my place to tell anyone how to respond to violent acts of oppression and control they have experienced in their lives and armed revolutionary movements have accomplished both great and terrible things in the world. I have close friends who have guns and I don’t think it is bad or wrong for anyone to want to be trained in how to use them or how to coordinate their usage with others safely and effectively. I especially don’t advocate for trying to use the state to disarm people, as that will almost inevitably result in focusing on taking guns away from the most marginalized, oppressed and surveilled people in this country and almost certainly not taking them away from the people I am most scared of encountering with guns. It is a very real possibility that community defense collectives are going to be a necessary part of the process of abolishing the police and prisons, and I have absolutely no desire to pretend like that might not necessitate some people from possessing firearms for some significant amount of time into the future. I am not here today to preach an end to gun culture, or to make people who own guns feel bad. But I am going to call out the connections between US gun culture and PM and draw attention to some of the realities that has created that make me much more comfortable facing what ever is coming in the US political future without a firearm in my home.
The idea that people generally use personal firearms to protect themselves or their families from direct harm is a myth. I wanted to say it is a lie, because the people who profit off of manipulating studies and statistics to get people to believe that “good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns,” absolutely do engage in knowing deception to perpetuate the myth, but I think it is valuable to acknowledge that, even with my incredibly skeptical position towards the institutions that repeat and reinforce this myth, it is so foundational to the existence of the United States and the shaping of an “American” identity that I think it is probably more harmful to call it a lie at this point than it is to acknowledge that the traditions and stories that have been created around the relationship between firearms and safety have become nearly supernatural justifications for explaining social and cultural phenomena I the US, and in the heads of many of its citizens. The gun in the United States is a religious artifact and conversations about what that means, or the world it has created are essentially conversations as core to a person’s identity as their religious and spiritual beliefs. While I believe this is directly connected to the long term project of PM colonialism, I also recognize that many people in the US believe it to be true that guns are an ultimate tool of safety and not political violence, and there is probably little that can be discussed philosophically to change that belief because it is a belief that built this nation into everything that it is today.
What I do think is important to point out though, is that no matter how hard you believe in the myth that it is possible to own a firearm with the intention of using it defensively, there is a very dangerous and difficult reality that accompanies this myth, and that is how much gun ownership increases the likelihood of everyone around the gunner of getting shot. People who live with owners of handguns are more than twice as likely to be killed by a gun as people who do not live with an owner of a handgun, and spouses and intimate partners are seven times as likely to be shot by a partner who owns a handgun than they would by a partner who does not own a handgun. Additionally, related to my last 2 posts, People with access to firearms are three times as likely to die by suicide as those who do not own guns. It is important with that last one too to understand that isn’t people who own guns, it is people who can get access to them, which includes the children of gun owners.
The decision to own a firearm or not is not one of personal freedom, protection or responsibility…even though it is almost always framed that way in contemporary debate…even though the framing of the second amendment to the US constitution frames the right to bear arms as being a subordinate clause to the need for a well regulated militia. This is probably because of the 2008 District of Columbia v Heller Supreme Court ruling that basically changed 200 years of court precedent to prioritize the myth that guns are necessary (or even statistically useful) in protecting oneself or one’s property. So I don’t know, maybe my own belief that it is necessary to entertain personal “Defensive Gun Use” as a myth instead of lie is not some deeply rooted artifact of US American culture but is actually a fairly recent construct of an out of control gun lobby who’s exact profitability is not even reported (or those accurately measurable) in the US. Personally, I know too many people who have been shot by firearms or shot at by firearms. I have even had a guns pointed at me more than once. I don’t know that I know anyone who has ever been in a situation where they drew their own firearm and used it to protect themselves. Perhaps this personal experience is coloring my perspective on this topic in ways that make me more inclined to disbelieve the myth of defensive gun use than is justified, but at least the statistics seem to support my anecdotal experience more than counter it.
There are communities around me and in the US that need protecting, and I am not going to tell the people in those communities how they should do the work of protecting themselves or that they are wrong for considering armed defense to be necessary or strategically viable in their given circumstances. But the odds of me showing up in those communities armed, especially armed with military weaponry, and being welcomed as an ally or accomplice seems like a pretty intense delusion on my part. The fact that I have no where personally to store such weapons safely is a very strong indicator of how delusional such an attitude would be for me.
Back when I was in the middle of being investigated by the FBI, being followed everywhere I went, having my friends and family questioned and harassed, and feeling like the state repression I was experience was going to define the rest of my life, I sincerely considered trying to form an armed anarchist militia. For over a year after the FBI stopped following me around, I discussed the idea with friends and comrades and I know many folks who ended up going that route in their own communities. Thankfully, I, personally, was too economically unstable to be in a position to purchase a firearm, because I was also in situations where I was living collectively with lots of other people, including a child, and I was not going to be in any position to safely or securely keep a firearm, and safely and securely keeping a firearm is a much bigger commitment and responsibility than is represented in US culture. Our movies are filled with people carrying firearms on themselves at all times, even while consuming drugs and alcohol, and often even while making out or engaged in foreplay. Guns are very frequently portrayed as symbols of power, authority and sex appeal in US culture, and in St. Louis, when I was growing up, people would frequently go outside and fire guns into the air during New Years Eve and sometimes even on the Fourth of July. None of that was about respecting firearms as tools of self-defense. Firearms in the United States are much more about demonstrating the power to be able to pro-actively claim property and the willingness to use violence to “defend” that claim, than they are tool of personal self defense. Even in the face of growing authoritarianism and state violence, I think the strategy of buying a gun for personal self-defense and keeping it in my own home is only buying in to colonial and PM ideas about power and authority, and I don’t see how feeding into those narratives is worth placing the people I live with and love in greater danger.