A friend of mine recently shared a blog post by a friend of his on liberty and guns in the Republic of Georgia. In the post, the author, Neal Zupancic, argues that people who need to be armed in order to feel safe cannot be said to be free or safe, and by implication that widespread firearms ownership ought not to be a part of a free society. Further, he argues that calls for women to arm themselves in order to resist violence are an aspect of rape culture, and that a gun culture is a failed culture, a culture in which individuals are unfree because of their fear and because they bear undue responsibility for their own safety.
Needless to say, as an anarchist, I entirely disagree, and think Zupancic is putting the cart before the horse. Zupancic is right when he argues that a widespread perceived need for firearms in a given culture is a sign of dysfunction in that culture, but he is wrong when he assumes that treating the symptom will effect a cure. A world in which we need not fear deadly violence from oppressors would be a wonderful world indeed, and one in which I long to live. Unfortunately, we emphatically do not live in such a world today. In our world today cops and soldiers in countries the world over routinely murder our brothers and sisters. In our world today rape is still something to be feared. I would love a world where my female coworkers felt comfortable and safe walking to their cars alone at night, but we do not live in that world, and it is dangerous folly to pretend we do, madness to imagine we can create such a world by pretending amongst ourselves that it already exists.
Further, I would argue that assuming responsibility for one’s own safety is liberating. Knowing that one can defend oneself in any situation, against any likely attacker, is liberating knowledge, especially for those who belong to commonly victimized groups. Zupancic longs for society to assume responsibility for each individual’s safety, but here he commits a basic error — “society” can do nothing without individuals acting; for “society” to be responsible for something means that some individuals are going to be responsible for that thing. No one will ever be able to react more swiftly to something that happens to you than you will. Delegating responsibility for your safety to others means rendering yourself defenseless for however long it takes “society” to respond. Or as they say in firearms circles, when seconds count, help is only minutes away.
Firearms are of course weapons, implements of violence, and the victims of violence have a natural tendency to fear and hate that which has harmed them in the past. I maintain, however, that the proper response of the oppressed to guns is not to fear them but to seize them, to master them and to learn to meet violence with violence. Rather than fetishizing guns as evil objects to be feared, let’s identify our real enemies and learn to turn their violence back upon them. I share Zupancic’s longing for a peaceful society in which no one feels the need to carry a firearm, but we aren’t there yet. To imagine the rapist will abandon violence if we encourage women to do so is madness. To disarm before the ruling class does is simply suicide. I would love my children to live in a world without guns, but I won’t disarm until the cops do.
Citations to this article:
- Jonathan Carp, Guns: Putting the Cart Before the Horse, Before It’s News, 11/24/13
Sorry that this is so long it's probably longer than your post… I'm wordy.
"I share Zupancic’s longing for a peaceful society in which no one feels the need to carry a firearm, but we aren’t there yet."
The question is, how do we get there? Do we get there by arming the individual more and more until crime and violence magically disappear? Or do we get there by making a commitment to each other to try reasonable policy changes that have worked in other countries (or even in other areas of our own country) to see if we can get the violence under control?
My argument is that we must take the second pathway. Can you give me a single example of an individual who was so well-armed that he won a shootout with the police? If you are going to invoke madness, I think that believing you can make yourself safe from police officers by owning and carrying guns qualifies. Clearly the solution to this problem is to reduce the level of force used by the police, not to increase the level of force used by regular citizens. That's a social solution, because it exists at the level of social policy – of our shared laws and ordinances and policies, that we must come together to change for the better.
(As an aside, it is not a "basic error" to refer to a group of individuals as a society, nor to the actions of a group of individuals acting in concert as collective action or as the action of society. When I say that society should take responsibility for preventing violence, I mean that every single person who wants to live among other people should each, individually, contribute to a reduction in violence, for both selfish and altruistic reasons. I believe that my point, and my understanding of the relationship between individuals and society was made abundantly clear in this sentence: "[The fight against rape culture] is a struggle to convince people in society to collectively reduce the number of rapes by engaging in positive individual and collective action.")
Guns vs. crime:
There is no established relationship between disarming society and submitting to violence. Crime rates aren't necessarily higher in countries (or cities or states) with tougher gun control laws, or lower in areas with more access to guns. Maybe guns prevent some crimes, in some cases, but that fact has to be balanced against the number of crimes that become more violent and dangerous when guns are involved, and against the number of suicides and accidents that widespread access to guns does have an established correlation with.
I can understand that an individual might feel selfishly safer knowing that he or she can kill any potential assailant, but what if we could trade that (largely false) sense of security for the benefits of living in the kind of country/state/city that finds ways to prevent crime that have fewer drawbacks? There is freedom of movement in the US – ask the 8 million people who live in NYC how many of them are thinking of leaving New York because they aren't allowed to walk around armed. It seems like a lot of people have already decided, one way or another, that they prefer the safety of gun control (to that point, violent crime in NYC has been dropping for 23 years) to the safety of guns.
Guns and rapes:
About 80% of rapes are committed not by strangers in the dark, but by someone the victim knows. I'm all for a solution addressing the other 20%, but the vast majority of rapes would not, and could not, be prevented with guns. We as a society, or rather a group of individuals sharing some of the same laws and customs, have a duty to address that 80% of rapes – rapes at parties in college dormitories, rapes in prison, rapes in the military by members of a soldier's own unit, rapes committed with the help of drugs and alcohol, rapes by an older relative, a family friend, a teacher, a coach, or a priest – this is what rape looks like in the real world. 20-30% of rape victims are under 12 years old, and another 30% are under 18. Are we going to arm every child, every teenager, every sorority girl and altar boy? At what point can we no longer look at the "dysfunction" in our society and respond with a call to double down on the violence?
Anti-rape advocates fight this culture war not with guns, but with education – we tell every man, woman, and child who will listen what they can do (as individuals) to prevent rape, and we tell them why they should do it. We tell the Joe Paternos of the world that they have to report the Jerry Sanduskys of the world. We tell the military that rape reports should not be handled by the victim's unit commander. We tell everyone what the warning signs are for date rape and how to be a responsible bystander (for instance, that they should try to stop the rape rather than filming it with their iPhone). The police can't be everywhere, and we wouldn't want them to be, which is why society works much better when every individual takes on the personal responsibility to be a good Samaritan whenever possible. That's what I mean when I say that the burden of preventing crime should shift to the society (that is, all of us working together) rather than the individual (all of us working alone).
Guns and anarchy:
It seems to me that non-violent revolution works better than violent revolution a lot of the time, especially in modern times. I don't think the civil rights movement would have worked out as well if MLK had picked up a gun and stormed Washington with the intent of overthrowing the government. Also, this isn't Libya – there is no foreign government that will provide your cause with air support if you decide to try to rise up against the "ruling class". If anything, the ruling class lets you keep your guns because the illusion of power the guns provide keeps you docile and ineffective at standing up for all the other rights they are taking away, like the rights to privacy and due process that Americans used to have a decade or two ago. It's sadly ironic.
In conclusion:
It's a dangerous world, and we can either work together to make it less dangerous, or we can escalate the violence and make it more dangerous. Guns are only useful along one of those paths.
"(to that point, violent crime in NYC has been dropping for 23 years)" As it has in many urban centers with different firearm regulations.
" but what if we could trade that (largely false) sense of security for the benefits of living in the kind of country/state/city" This is a false dichotomy. There is no reason that one cannot both keep firearms and train in thier use, and partipate in organizations that actively intervene to prevent violence before it starts.