Not very far away from where I live, just the next county south, a 13-year-old boy was arrested today for unlawful firearm possession. In addition to having 23 firearms and ammunition, including handguns, hunting rifles and tactical rifles. The boy had assault rifle magazines in his room upon which he had written references with school shootings all the way back to the 1999 mass shooting in Columbine High School, and the police had come investigating because the boy had been making very threatening social media posts about wanting to kill people and posting photos of himself dressed like past mass shooters.
This is a pretty unsettling, not the least because it happened so closely to Seattle, but also because I have a son now, and I am going to have to consider what that means in relationship to living in a country where masculinity, a culture of violence, and access to firearms are so inherently linked together. I wrote a little bit in post 56 of 100 about why I am personally not interested in owning a firearm, because of the danger that brings into the lives of the people around me, and some of the links in that blog post go into detail about the risk of minors gaining access to loaded firearms, but I don’t think any of those cover a situation quite as complicated, ugly and difficult as something like a 13-year-old getting access to so many guns, with such clear and dangerous intent.
Now, the kid’s mother insists that the child was not actually a threat to anyone, and that he was just aesthetically into all the mass shooting stuff to be cool amongst his peers. I am incredibly sympathetic to this plea, both as a parent myself, and a teenager who got myself into a fair bit of trouble for pretty stupid reasons. Mine was mostly dumb property related bad choices, but there was a kid in my high school who said he wanted to “kill the president” just to see what would happen…this was right before president Bill Clinton came to speak to our high school, and the Secret Service was all over our building, crawling through the ductwork and covering up all the windows. The kid was arrested almost immediately and not released until a few days later, after the president had spoken. The point is, kids do say very unthoughtful things, just to see what will happen, and sometimes even as a cry for help. Is that what this kid was doing, posing with guns and dressing up like mass shooters? It is possible that the answer could be yes and that this kid still was/is a threat to shoot a lot of people, and there are very few ways to collectively handle the situation that are not going to either absolutely trample this kids future or leave a community in serious threat of mass violence.
The child is facing 5 charges related to unlawful firearm possession and making threats (4 of which are serious felonies), and, as of the writing of this post, the parents do not yet face any charges of their own. I kinda suspect that will change as the case builds up, as it seems like a lot of the firearms were displayed throughout the house, so there is little evidence that the parents were unaware of what had been going on in this situation. I am not stating any of this as personal opinion of what I think should happen legally, only what seems probable given the way I have seen the US legal system operate previously. I have a hard time imagining this kid doesn’t spend nearly all of his teenage years incarcerated, and it is likely his parents will do some time as well, because this feels like the kind of case that the state of Washington is going to want to go after pretty hard. Remember that just back in June, in the next county over from Pierce County, a bunch of stolen military weapons, alongside Nazi paraphernalia, was found in a joint federal and state law enforcement raid. Washington is also a state pushing heavily for laws allowing the state to force people convicted of domestic abuse charges to have to surrender their guns, with a particular case, the Flannery decision, likely to end up before the Supreme Court. Which is all to say that I doubt the State of Washington is going to spare any expense in trying to make this kid and his parents an example of what states can do to stop gun violence.
I know I know folks who want the State to be able to stop gun violence. Or maybe that is an unfair way of stating that I know a lot of people who are tired of hearing “the State can’t do anything about this,” especially when there are a lot of examples of states taking actions that have massively reduced the frequency and severity of gun violence within their borders. I agree that it is really hard to imagine any kind of cultural shift happening in the US around gun ownership and the responsibilities of gun ownership that isn’t compelled by the state, but I think expecting the US government to fix this the problem of gun violence with laws regulating individual firearm usage is excessively problematic because the US Military is largest purchaser of weapons in the world and the largest exporter of weapons. The United States of America is a country built upon gun violence, profiteers off of gun violence, and uses gun violence as tool of political authority on the rest of the world. The US does have a massive gun problem, but that gun problem starts with excessively funding weapons manufacturing and then looking to turn a profit on that industry, selling off the inevitable excess and obsolescence around the world, including within our borders. This is what makes the US different than all the other countries in the world that seem to be able to limit gun violence with laws around gun ownership, even as many of those countries are being undermined in their ability to do so by the influx of cheap, illegal weapons manufactured in the United States and sold all over the world. It is not the existence of the Second Amendment that has led the US to being a culture that worships firearms and the violence of which they are capable. It is the foundational embrace of firearms and their use for the purposes of genocide across North America, violently seizing land, and policing indentured and then slave labor that led to the Second Amendment in the first place. Owning weapons more powerful than any of your neighbors and believing whatever bogus philosophy allowed you to preemptively use them (white supremacy, westward expansion, American Exceptionalism, etc.) are the bedrock of US imperialism that has persisted from before the colonies seceded from the British crown through to today. It is my very firmly held belief that trying to regulate firearm ownership internally, after 250 years of defining American exceptionalism by our collective capacity for violence, by overly focusing on creating laws that regulate who individually can own and purchases guns within the US is just going to end up targeting the most scrutinized, surveilled and repressed people in this country, again and again. It is going to result in situation after situation like the US Justice Department considering how to ban trans folks from buying guns (or replace transgender folks with any other minority group who are overwhelmingly more frequently the target of violence than the perpetrators of it). Expecting the most violent, weapon obsessed nation on earth to regulate its population’s access to weapons is inevitably a practice in deciding who should be victimized by state authoritarianism, and that is never going to be the most heavily armed and most powerful communities within this nation. We are already seeing how wealthy corporations are building their own heavily armed private security forces that will almost certainly bypass any kind of restrictive firearm legislation that passes within this nation, assuming such legislation could ever be passed.
And so that leaves hundreds of millions of regular folks living in the US having to face a difficult and constant reality that incredibly lethal firearms are all around us, all the time, and easily within the reach of 13-year-old boys that go on to idolize school shooters, because school shootings and shooters are the constant spectacle that affects the psyche and daily lives of US school children. Unlike tornados or earthquakes or other natural disaster phenomena that results in drills and discussions that disrupt the normal tedium of school days, school shootings are something that are easily replicated by any student who feels like the institution of school (or the social environment created within that institution) is preventing them from living the life they want to live…and who has access to the weapons to do it…and who is not normally under such heavily surveillance by social and state security measures that they can formulate and act upon these plans before being stopped. This is an untenable long term reality that will inevitable spiral into heavily fortified micro communities that all hate each other, and seek to increase surveillance and authoritarianism against each other.
That is why, even though I never intend to own a gun in my life, I think it is still a massive mistake for the left to embrace measures that target individual gun owners and not focus instead on defunding all of our institutions of State violence, while simultaneously taking responsibility for destroying surplus military weapons instead of selling them around the world. We absolutely must stop subsidizing weapons manufacturers with massive governmental contracts that finance the infrastructure of their industry and allow them to mass produce cheap weapons, and we must collectively acknowledge that US global power is rooted in our willingness to employ overwhelming violence and come to terms with what culture that has created here at home and into the minds of our youth. Until the US can actively disarm itself as a global bully that earns its respect through extortion and protection racketeering, efforts to disarm US citizens and limit access to firearms are always going to be a question of “which US citizens are we going to disarm,” because the ones with the power and wealth this nation has bought with violence will make sure that it is not going to be them.
PS: I wrote the vast majority of this post last night and this morning, before Charlie Kirk was shot while discussing mass shootings in the US. There will probably be more to add to this conversation as details about that situation become clearer, but I am not going to try to speculate them into this conversation right now, because I am not even sure what I would say.