The gun control we deserve

When it comes to gun control, many nominal “progressives” will express a remarkably candid willingness to suspend concerns about ideological principles in favor of “action.” In the aftermath of any high-profile massacre, commentators and interest groups propose a litany of measures that few on the left would tolerate for tackling other social problems (with the salient exception of international terrorism). From an embrace of Presidential powers beyond the pale, even in our era of the triumphant Unitary Executive, to an aggressive weaponization of the language of sedition and treason against their opponents, the terror frame can motivate many Americans to write blank checks to the surveillance- and security state when it comes to dealing with guns. Thus, after the San Bernardino shootings, many liberal Minimalists began aggressively framing all gun violence as “terror,” and calling attention to the threat posed by militant extremists who might legally buy guns. Tellingly, appeals from many politicians (including Hillary Clinton) consistently elided the Terror Watchlist and the No Fly List. While the former is a comparatively focused database, the latter is a trainwreck of a program that contains over 400,000 entries and has been condemned by the ACLU. But in the response to an act of high-profile violence, the distinction didn’t matter: the palpable imperative was just to do something, anything, on the issue—and to worry about the consequences for civil rights later. Meanwhile, the security state and policing apparatus grow.

A real fear here is that “gun control” measures will be used to produce new opportunities to entrap and criminalize people who are already disproportionately targeted, as well as those who might pose any threat to the status quo. From the perspective of the true power brokers, gun violence that takes the lives of disposable, marginalized people in inner-city ghettos may be a negligible cost of doing business—an economic externality within America’s own borders, if you will, or even part of their model for maintaining power and moving product. What these Deep State actors might have reason to fear—and what may discomfit many white liberals as well—is the possibility of a resurgence of disruptive, organized, and armed black radicalism. There is a simple way for the Deep State to get what it wants that would also allow white liberal Aversive Minimalists to eat their “we-did-something-about-guns” cake and reap the benefits of living in an over-policed security state: “gun control” measures that, in the guise of whittling away at some gun violence would lay the groundwork for the state to break the back of armed but nonviolent radical resistance before it even starts. Today’s Ardent Maximalists already have guns aplenty—in fact, research indicates that more than 6 million Americans own ten or more, and the data strongly suggests they are overwhelmingly white. Meanwhile, polls suggest that black Americans (like Americans overall) are viewing gun ownership with increasing favorability.