The photograph above is of the protest I went to with my two teenage boys in late May. I’ve only been to the one protest so far, but like many, I’ve been doing some quiet thinking about the movement for racial justice now coursing through American society. To a large degree, as a white person, I’ve felt like it’s a time to listen and reflect, which is one reason my reboot of prospericity has been on temporary hiatus.
The second photograph, below, is from a week earlier. It depicts the corner of J and 24th Street in Sacramento, an area affected by widespread property damage. I thought the juxtaposition of the Black Lives Matter message against the sign for the gun shop said a lot visually.
If you follow my poetry, you will know that when it comes to guns I’m already on record in the online journal The Write Launch. I think the Second Amendment right to bear arms should apply only to revolutionary war period guns like muskets. This may sound tongue in cheek, but it’s not. I’m not supportive of an individual right to bear assault rifles. I’m not even supportive of an individual right to bear handguns. Non-automatic hunting rifles are a different story as long as you are fully down with non-white hunters running around the woods and fields and forests and deserts of rural America, and believe that these hunters won’t be harassed by local white people. If not, the hunting rifles have to go too and we can stick with the muskets. Call me a Second Amendment historicist.
But I’ll go even further. I’m a Second Amendment abolitionist. We need more than what is mildly described as “gun control.” The biggest reason for this relates to the sheer scale of unneeded carnage in America. But I’m also an abolitionist because the Second Amendment is definitely racist. There is just too much bad history with white individuals bearing arms and killing black people, and “well-regulated” militias of white people bearing arms and killing black people. James Baldwin long ago made the point that white people are terrified by the very idea of well-regulated militias of armed black men like the Black Panthers, and I appreciated how director Raoul Peck brought this forward in his movie I Am Not Your Negro. I am embarrassed to say I have not read Baldwin except for snippets in bookstores. I hope to soon rectify this.
There is also a bad, in fact terrible, history, and present, with police bearing arms and killing black people. I’m interested in the voices talking about abolishing the police, defunding the police, and reforming the police. I can also understand voices saying the police are being scapegoated for much deeper social problems. I don’t really know. I am trying to listen.
But I do know for sure that we should abolish the Second Amendment. And I feel on pretty solid ground in saying this as a white man since the right to bear arms as part of a well-regulated militia was expressly constructed to benefit people of my race and gender. I’m not convinced that the framers meant to create an individual right to bear arms for anybody, even for white guys like themselves. It’s certainly the case that the words of the Second Amendment begin with “A well regulated Militia …” The phrase “individual right to bear arms” does not appear.
One might argue that a repeal of the Second Amendment is unrealistic. Fair enough, but I think it’s a better idea on the merits than abolishing the police, and no less unrealistic if by abolishing the police you mean literally abolishing a robust government law enforcement role. Also, we live in a constitutional democracy. The true structural change that people seek is probably not going to come without changing the Constitution. The fact that we cannot with real hope speak of such change is a reflection of the disease and despair afflicting our great democratic experiment.
One might also argue that even if the Second Amendment were to by some miracle be abolished, and that even if a sustained effort to peacefully buy back firearms were to somehow take place, George Floyd would still be dead. So would Eric Garner. And it’s true. Sometimes the police really are just racists bastards. But I wonder if a society less filled with weapons might have led to very different police tactics being used in the action that killed Breonna Taylor. I wonder if radically reducing the number of firearms in the society might have saved the life of Stephon Clark here in Sacramento. I wonder, given that law enforcement is a necessary function of government and that law enforcement (call them police or not) will always have reason to be afraid of erratic people in tight spaces in the dark, whether anything else other than de-arming the society at large might have saved the life of Stephon Clark. Again I do not know, but I am also sure that good people should not be ashamed to ask such questions.
The focus right now clearly needs to stay on police violence, and on measures to rein in this violence given the horror of recent incidents and the data pointing to more than 1,000 police shootings per year (see The Washington Post police shootings database on this). But I also think we need to be talking about how America’s gun culture is creating environments in which tens of thousands are getting killed year after year. And, though I’ve already made the point, if we are really talking about structural change, we need to talk about the Constitution. Otherwise, it’s not going to be structural change.
But with regard to the broad environmental impacts of American gun culture, the issues are strongly demarcated by race. On the one side of the coin, American gun culture and liberal gun laws are foundational to the construction of urban environments in which black and brown men are getting murdered, mostly by each other, by the thousands every year. My point here is not to pontificate about “black on black” violence. This article by Yolanda Mitchell and Tiffany Bromfield, who are black, covers the data on gun murders in urban areas in a clear and non-ideological way. But my point is that high murder rates are typical in environments everywhere where people have strongly embedded reasons not to trust government authority (imagine Sicily here, or white and rural Humboldt County in far Northern California, or catastrophic situations like El Salvador and Honduras). We need to give real reasons for the young men murdering each other in urban America to trust authority. This is going to take very large amounts of time and money and creativity. It is part of what should be meant by reparations. But it would also help enormously to de-arm the society at large (which mostly amounts to finding ways to peacefully take guns away from the white men who own most of the guns).
The broad environment created by the gun culture the Second Amendment upholds negatively affects white people too, and especially white men. I want to end with an observation about my own demographic group being hurt by the admixture of guns and racism, an observation I mostly hope to develop in a future review of the book Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzel. But what I am having a hard time saying here, because it is so tragic and pitiful, is that huge numbers of white men are dying by gun suicide. According to the Giffords Center, there are some 22,274 gun suicides each year in the US. These suicides are very disproportionately cases of white men killing themselves. This is one of those issues, like for instance the health care price structure, where the US is utterly on its own in terms of the numbers. According to the Giffords Center, the US is home to about 4 percent of the world population but 35 percent of global firearm suicides. Guns are integral to the pathology of white despair and are the cause of the premature and horrifying ends of the lives of too many white Americans, mostly men. Guns, in other words, are utterly inconsistent with white men’s pursuit of happiness. I’m saying it as a white guy. This is yet another reason, rooted in race, that we need to abolish the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.