Recently, another Republican voter tried to kill Donald Trump. This one was a Vivek Ramaswamy supporter and one of those “Never Trump” people. That attack, as well as the ongoing problem of mass shootings in the US, has led many people to again contemplate limiting access to firearms. Or at least, that’s how the media is portraying the situation. It does makes a great deal of sense because even though guns don’t kill people by themselves, they do require a person to operate them, so preventing the gun and the bad actor from meeting up would clearly prevent that person from shooting others.
Literally everyone agrees with the idea of trying to prevent the wrong people from possessing firearms, and of course, if a particular person should not possess a gun, it’s even more clear that they should not possess an effective gun (even though we also might not agree on what characteristics an effective gun has). Even the “any person, any gun, any time” people have limits — they just think the wrong people should be executed on the spot. We need to stop pretending that we disagree on this point.
The real question is: Who are the people who should be prohibited from owning firearms?
Conservatives have been very clear for a very long time that they intend to use their firearms for the purpose of gaining total control of America. They have a long list of the wrong people, and have made clear that the wrong people should be sorted into 3 general categories: dead (e.g., liberals), banished (e.g., people with brown skin whose parents were not born in the USA), and completely dis-empowered (e.g., women). To complete that sorting process, they would like to have a monopoly on violence — or at least come close. They are constantly worried that liberals are going to “come for their guns” because that would foil their plan, and also make them vulnerable to the same kind of actions they have planned for others.
Meanwhile, liberals think only “the government” should have a monopoly on violence, but they keep forgetting that the government is made up of individual people, and that most of the agents of violence within that government are c0nservatives. Moreover, they willfully ignore all the times that the government’s agents of violence failed to act (e.g., Uvalde), over-reacted and killed someone (e.g., Mike Brown), or straight up murdered an innocent person (e.g., Breonna Taylor). If we widen our analysis to outside of the USA, we see the US military and its allies and client states committing all sorts of atrocities; most liberals are opposed to those actions, but only after they are historical. When the current genocide is actively happening, liberals are strangely unwilling to call for our government’s agents of violence to be disarmed.
The conservative insistence that a private individual with clear mental health problems and a history of violence should not be prohibited from obtaining a firearm is just as absurd as the liberal insistence that a police or military group should not be prohibited from obtaining firearms despite a history of violence based on bigotry or even active genocide.
I’m not going to try to pretend that the left’s view on who shouldn’t be allowed to have guns is perfect, but it is better. There are certainly genuine leftists who who are opposed to guns — but unlike liberals, they are consistent in that opposition because they are opposed to literally everyone having guns. More commonly, though, leftists want to prohibit fascists from having guns. You could expand that to “all violent, immoral people” but leftists generally see things like domestic abuse and bullying as faces of fascism, so that would be redundant.
In essence, the left will not tolerate intolerance, and that means intolerance must not be allowed to be armed. This is not some kind of logical fallacy because fascists have no respect for the general social contract, and thus exist outside of it — they ought not be protected by it. The only people who view fascists as a legitimate part of society are fascist collaborators — which is just another way to say fascists. This might be a shocking framing for both liberals and conservatives since they are both currently engaged in a contest over who can most thoroughly lick the boot of US authoritarianism, but that’s how it is.
Here’s a great example:
Recently in New York City, police pursued a man in the subway who had avoided paying the $2.90 fee. They claim he had a knife, but have been unable to produce a knife that they can connect to the man. They opened fire on the fare-evader hitting him, two innocent bystanders (one hit in the head and in critical condition), and another cop. What should happen is that any cop who fired their weapon in that crowded space loses their ability to possess a firearm for some number of years — at the very least. But what actually happened is that the mayor talked about how brave these hotheaded cops were, and the police have arrested at least 18 people protesting their extremely dangerous actions. Various representatives of the cops and the city are blaming the incident on the “armed perpetrator” but it was the cops who escalated a petty theft to an attempted murder and there is no proof that the fare-evader was armed. NYC has recently upped their spending by $150 million/year in order to reduce fare evasion, which costs them approximately $690 million dollars/year in fares. To put that in perspective, however, they received $5 billion dollars in fares in 2023, so those lost fares are only about 14% and — here’s the kicker — subway fares are a regressive tax. Fare evasion is essentially a way for citizens to naturally reduce the regressive nature of that tax; it’s no different from an impoverished person stealing bread.
Related: Protests erupt after four hurt in New York subway shooting
Related: Cracking down on fare evasion on New York’s subways and buses
Below is the Inrange TV episode on the incident in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.