Is Anywhere Safe?

A Socialist’s Response to Gun Violence

By Rosemary Dodd

The nation is reeling from a spate of mass shootings, including a racist rampage at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, a massacre of school children and teachers in Uvalde, TX, and a 4th of July parade shooting in Highland Park, IL. It seems before we can even catch our breath from one mass murder, a new act of gun violence rocks the county. Shootings in churches, shopping centers, concert venues, and schools have become a grisly part of American life, leaving millions asking: is anywhere safe? And, crucially, what can be done to curb the carnage?

Why is this Happening?

We live in a deeply violent society, and I’m not talking about the video games conservative pundits like to scapegoat. Completely unaware and ignorant of what he was revealing, Pete Buttigieg tweeted on October 2: “I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen.” The US was founded on slavery and displacing native peoples, we have one of the most deadly police forces in the world with more police killings than any other developed nation, racist mass incarceration, and the ruling class is engaged in perpetual imperialist wars, either directly or via proxy. That’s not to mention the day-to-day systemic violence of poverty, inequality, brutal working conditions, and the denial of basic services such as living wages and universal healthcare.

It’s no wonder that the social decay of the capitalist system and a society torn apart by contradictions creates a pressure cooker that leads to destructive behavior. And when you add on top of that more guns than there are people, you get a powder keg of potential violence. The US has the highest number of guns per capita, nearly double that of the second place country.

Other capitalist nations do not have nearly the level of violence we have in the US. The US’s unique position as the leading imperialist power and enforcer of the global economic order leads to a particularly violent culture. Society’s values are ruling class values: competition and individualism dominate over community and altruism. It’s not just gun violence that reveals the societal decay: drug overdose deaths topped 100,000 last year, up almost 30 percent from the year before (CDC.gov).

The relative success of mass workers´ parties in the past in other advanced capitalist countries brought more affordable healthcare for all and some social safety nets, leading to reduced tensions in society and a higher value of human life throughout society. The organizational and political weakness of the labor movement in the US allowed much deeper contradictions of economic and racial discrepancies to foster despite tremendous wealth and luxury for the billionaire class. This led to a much more tense, brutal and violent culture.

What Mainstream Parties are Offering

Politicians from both major parties offer no meaningful solutions to out-of-control gun violence. The grotesque Republican politicians rode into office on a mix of gun lobby money and a toxic individualist ideology that embraces a libertarian, anything-goes approach to guns. Their “solution” to gun violence? You guessed it – more guns.

Republican politicians parrot the discredited “good guy with a gun” narrative to advance absurd ideas like arming teachers. They also propose increasing already bloated police budgets, but those proposals are falling flat in light of the disgraceful police inaction in Uvalde, where armed officers waited over an hour while students and teachers were murdered before acting. Increasing policing in schools doesn’t protect students, it leads to more violence and enforces the racist school-to-prison pipeline.

Republican lawmakers’ refusal to implement even modest gun reforms is wildly out of step with their own base. 77 percent of Republicans support expanding background checks to all firearm sales (Morning Consult, March 2021). Even 72 percent of National Rifle Association (NRA) members agree with universal background checks, a position the NRA firmly opposes.

Democratic politicians only seem better on this issue because of how extreme the Republicans are. Despite making reducing gun violence a central campaign promise for decades, they have done next to nothing on the issue, including when they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress during Obama’s first term. In fact, prominent Democrats poured resources into supporting a pro-gun, anti-abortion politician in Texas against a primary challenge from the left. Now, one and a half years into Biden’s term, Congress has passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first significant gun legislation in nearly 30 years. The Democrats and the couple dozen Republicans who bucked their party’s traditional line to vote in favor only acted due to mass outrage over gun violence. But what will this legislation actually do?

It mostly creates funding and incentives for states to implement gun control, allocating money for “red flag laws” that temporarily remove guns from people who have been found to pose a risk to themselves or others. It closes the “boyfriend loophole,” meaning those convicted of abuse but who are not living with or married to the victim will be barred from buying a gun. It also includes enhanced background checks for prospective gun buyers under 21. Measures that Biden advocated for but were not included in the bill were a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines, universal background checks, and provisions allowing gun manufacturers to be sued for how their products are used.

While some of these measures may help, they largely tinker on the edges and fall far short of the sweeping change necessary to address not just gun regulation, but the social ills that lead to gun violence in the first place.

Gun Control

At least some gun control proposals could save precious lives, although the likely efficacy of these measures can be overstated. For example, many gun control advocates have suggested banning assault weapons, but they account for only three percent of gun deaths, while handguns account for 59 percent (PEW Research Center, February 3, 2022). High capacity magazines increase fatalities in mass shootings, but, while terrifying and all-too-common, mass shootings accounted for 513 deaths in 2020, versus 45,222 overall gun deaths. However, in mass shootings in which a high-capacity magazine was used, five times as many people were shot, suggesting that banning this type of weapon could reduce deaths in mass shooting situations.

One of the most popular proposals, with 84 percent support, is universal background checks (Morning Consult. March 10, 2021). Universal background checks should disqualify people from purchasing weapons who have demonstrated violent behavior, not exclude people with non-violent drug offenses.

Gun control has historically been passed and implemented in racist, anti-worker circumstances. For example, gun control was first passed in California (and championed by then-Republican governor Ronald Reagan) to target the open carrying practiced by the Black Panther Party. This sparked a wave of racially-motivated gun control laws across the country, which were supported by the NRA.

It’s also worth noting that gun control measures would be enforced by the police, an institution involved in mass murder of Black people on a daily basis, the purpose of which is to protect private profit, not preserve human life.

Another proposed reform is to allow regular people to sue gun manufacturers when their products take lives. Companies have been shielded from liability since 2005 by a law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Despite this, the families impacted by the Sandy Hook massacre were able to successfully sue the company Remington, the first time a gun maker has been held accountable for the role of its weapon in a mass murder.

This demand correctly points to the criminal role these companies play in promoting and profiting off of violence. While holding manufacturers open to civil lawsuits is a step in the right direction, it would be much more powerful to take weapons manufacturing into public ownership. The US government is certainly not the ideal steward of weapons, but taking the profit motive out of the equation would be a huge step in the right direction. It would eliminate advertising for guns that preys on vulnerable young men by suggesting owning weapons is the best way to keep your “man card,” as a series of Remington ads put it. Research shows that men who feel like their masculinity is threatened are more likely to want to purchase firearms, and Remington is just one of many companies that exploit these insecurities for profit.

While certain gun control measures and policy changes could save lives in the short term, the fundamental question is who controls guns, capitalists and their politicians, or the working class? Right now, the workers’ movement is atomized and disorganized and unable to self-regulate weapons, leaving a vacuum filled by the ineffective and brutal policing system. Ultimately, arms need to be controlled by all of us under a truly democratic workers’ state that would provide collective, responsible control over guns.

Socialism is the Answer

The ruling class and their two political parties have no realistic answer to the rampant violence because they are intrinsically opposed to restructuring society to be based on human need rather than private profit. There’s no panacea for interpersonal violence, but imagine for a moment a world where all people have healthcare, adequate food and shelter, education, childcare, eldercare, and free access to fulfilling things like art and entertainment. Where grassroots democracy was extended to schools, workplaces, and all other parts of society, giving regular people real agency in their own lives. Where, as a society run by and for working people, we strove to root out racism, sexism, transphobia, and other ideologies that divide us.

Of course, such a world would still have problems, but it’s hard to imagine the same level of violence in a society where people’s physical, social, and emotional needs are met to the greatest extent possible. And that’s the society socialists are fighting for, meaning we have the only realistic solution to drastically reducing violence in the long term. But does that mean we need to wait for a socialist society before we can work to stem the bloodshed? Of course not!

Our Program for Reducing Gun Violence:

• Demilitarize and disarm the police. Elected civilian oversight of police with full hiring and firing powers to point towards a community model of safety. This will unfortunately not change the fundamental character of the police, but put some breaks on the violence spread by this force today.
• Release non-violent drug offenders and end the war on drugs
• Drastically slash the military budget and stop funding wars abroad
• Take weapons manufacturers into public ownership
• Fund programs that reduce inequality and provide basic services like Medicare for All (including free, high-quality mental healthcare), free college, and raising the minimum wage
• Build mass movements to fight racism and other bigoted ideologies
• Cut military and police funding and tax the rich to invest in communities most affected by gun violence, particularly Black communities

As the movement against gun violence grows, it’s vital that socialists join and fight earnestly alongside those who are rightfully outraged about gun violence and the inaction of politicians. Socialists have a role to play in building the working-class, radical wing of this movement. While fighting for short-term reforms, socialists must continually point to capitalism as the system standing in the way and raise the need for a socialist society based on human need rather than private profit.