I’m a left wing tree hugger, an old hippie woman and veteran of the 1960s movements.
I get insulted by people who describe me as a liberal because I despise the cowardly stands liberals take on almost ever question they are confronted with. While I vote Democratic I am usually incredibly disappointed by the Democratic party, which I view as merely the kinder and gentler wing of the corporate fascist neo-con/neo-lib police state that has come into existence since the 1960s.
I’m not a pacifist. I believe non-violence is a tactic and not the only path one can take when faced with the violence of others or the tyranny of a government.
I am a gun owner and target shooter. I own semi-automatic handguns and even a civilian version of the AK47.
I can claim membership in numerous minority groups that would be described by the words of Thurgood Marshall as being “among the despised and dispossessed.”
I am well aware of the hate speech that is regularly directed at minority group people. It doesn’t much matter if one is a person of color, LGBT, hippie, or a tree hugger. Hell one can simply be a woman, who believes in women’s reproductive rights.
Did I mention being an atheist. Seems like atheists draw the same level of hatred in this country as visibly Middle Eastern people.
Having lived through the 1960s I feel free to assure you that Dr. Martin Luther King was not the only voice of leadership in the civil rights movement, nor were lunch counter sit-ins the only form of protest. For those with sketchy knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement there were also racist lynchings of civil rights workers and the burning of major portions of large cities by fed-up black people.
While this violence was going on our government was committing mass murder in several small southeast Asian nations, notably Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
In the 1950s African Americans took up guns to defend themselves against the white racist KKK:
From Liberation: Civil rights and the self-defense tradition: Armed Black groups protected nonviolent activists, kept Klan at bay
The Monroe NAACP chapter engaged in a variety of struggles seeking desegregation in the latter part of the 1950s. Unlike other trends in the movement, Williams’ group often openly armed itself to ward off trouble.
Monroe County faced a truly vicious Ku Klux Klan organization led by Catfish Cole. When the NAACP sought to desegregate a swimming pool, Cole stated that any African American going “to a white swimming pool is not looking for a bath … he is looking for a funeral.” Amidst an escalation of Klan violence throughout the state, Williams and his counterparts began to arm themselves more systematically, developing military-like organization, digging trenches and other strong-points in their community, and setting up a rifle range.
In October 1957, after a very large rally, the Klan decided to threaten Monroe’s Black community by assembling a large armed motorcade. To their surprise, the well-organized forces of Monroe’s NAACP let loose a hail of gunfire, causing Klan members to flee at high speed in what quickly became a rout. Clearly terrified of the implications of armed Blacks ready to fight terrorism, the next day white city leaders banned KKK motorcades. The Klansman—true cowards—never again returned for night rides in Monroe County’s Black community.
From The Black Past: Deacons for Defense and Justice
On July 10, 1964, a group of African American men in Jonesboro, Louisiana led by Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick founded the group known as The Deacons for Defense and Justice to protect members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) against Ku Klux Klan violence. Most of the “Deacons” were veterans of World War II and the Korean War. The Jonesboro chapter organized its first affiliate chapter in nearby Bogalusa, Louisiana led by Charles Sims, A.Z. Young and Robert Hicks. Eventually they organized a third chapter in Louisiana. The Deacons tense confrontation with the Klan in Bogalusa was crucial in forcing the federal government to intervene on behalf of the local African American community. The national attention they garnered also persuaded state and national officials to initiate efforts to neutralize the Klan in that area of the Deep South.
The Deacons emerged as one of the first visible self-defense forces in the South and as such represented a new face of the civil rights movement. Traditional civil rights organizations remained silent on them or repudiated their activities. They were effective however in providing protection for local African Americans who sought to register to vote and for white and black civil rights workers in the area. The Deacons, for example, provided security for the 1966 March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. Moreover their presence in Southeastern Louisiana meant that the Klan would no longer be able to intimidate and terrorize local African Americans without challenge.
The strategy and methods that the Deacons employed attracted the attention and concern of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which authorized an investigation into the group’s activities. The investigation stalled, however, when more influential black power organizations such as US and the Black Panther Party emerged after the 1965 Watts Riot. With public attention, and the attention of the FBI focused elsewhere, the Deacons lost most of their notoriety and slowly declined in influence. By 1968 they were all but extinct. In 2003 the activities of the Deacons was the subject of a 2003, “Deacons for Defense.”
Sources:
Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Deacons for Defense and Justice in Africanaonline, http://www.africanaonline.com/orga_deacons_for_defense.htm
Then there was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Founded October 1966 in Oakland, California by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. The Panthers rose to fame by advocating and carrying guns to defend their community from the brutal racist police department.
In May of 1967 the Panthers demonstrated their right to keep and bear arms by carrying their weapons into the capitol building in Sacramento. Later that year Ronnie Raygun was elected governor. He signed what was a really strict gun control measure.
Seems like Black Folks having guns scared the shit out of conservative White Folks.
In reality racism, classism and anti-immigrant tendencies have long been intertwined with gun control measures. Indeed the Sullivan Laws in New York were aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of Jewish and Italian immigrants, who were considered to be part of a dangerous criminal underclass.
Through out my adult life I’ve watched the erosion of rights and freedom in the name of both the war on crime and the war on drugs. Then in 2001 we entered the war on terrorism. Now we have a new war, which is actually an old war, the war on private ownership of guns.
Through out my adult life my encounters with not only the police departments but other parts of the judicial system have taught me that I am part of a group that has very few rights. I am also part of a group that has been deemed unworthy of police protection. Crimes against people like me are treated as non-crimes.
Ask people of color who have been randomly stopped and searched by police, who have had drugs and or weapons planted on them, been tried, convicted and sent to prison while innocent. Or if not innocent, not guilty of the crime for which they are serving time.
As a nation we arbitrarily overthrow the democratically elected rulers of other nations. In the name of freedom and democracy we have invaded Iraq, slaughtering who knows how many people.
Yet Bradley Manning lingers in prison where he has been systematically abused and tortured for revealing the war crimes committed by the American military and Julian Assange is forced to seek asylum in an embassy to avoid arrest on what smell like trumped up charges.
During 2002-2003 I lived out on Long Island. I took classes at NYU and the Art Student’s League. I would take the Long Island Rail Road into Penn Station and take a subway down to 18th. St. Some days I would exit Penn Station. At the entrances to Penn Station there were NYPD officers with M4s (AR15s)or some sort of submachine gun (probably Heckler and Koch MP4s) slung over their shoulder.
It felt very police state. This was before we learned about renditions and torture of suspected “terrorists”.
We surrendered so many rights with the PATRIOT Act.
We have TIA and all sorts of intelligence gathering agencies spying on us, collecting and scanning all our e-mails and purchases. There isn’t a god watching everything we think or do but thanks to all sorts of secret police agencies and intelligence gathering agencies there is some one who knows when you are sleeping, knows when you are awake, knows what coffee you drink and books you read.
I have a hard time believing that the people who fought the revolution that created this flawed country would tolerate this sort of abrogation of the basic freedoms they concentrated upon in writing the Constitution.
In 2011 we had massive protests in the form of Occupy. Peaceful non-violent protests by people who for the most part were committed to keeping those protests non-violent. I many cities those protesters were greeted by riot cops in full armor, clad in black from head to toe and heavily armed. These cops thought nothing of violating the most basic rights of the people of Occupy. Recently we learned that the Feds had snipers ready to murder selected leaders of the Occupy Movement.
Out spoken atheist Sam Harris angered a large number of the liberal gun control advocates recently when he published: The Riddle of the Gun.
Most of my friends do not own guns and never will. When asked to consider the possibility of keeping firearms for protection, they worry that the mere presence of them in their homes would put themselves and their families in danger. Can’t a gun go off by accident? Wouldn’t it be more likely to be used against them in an altercation with a criminal? I am surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs.
But, unlike my friends, I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor. This is an expensive and time-consuming habit, but I view it as part of my responsibility as a gun owner. It is true that my work as a writer has added to my security concerns somewhat, but my involvement with guns goes back decades. I have always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I have never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called. I have expressed my views on self-defense elsewhere. Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics.
What Sam Harris didn’t mention was how atheists too are considered a despised minority, one the police often do not feel they have a duty to protect. Indeed Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who was for many years considered to be America’s most famous atheist was murdered.
As a member of the LGBT communities as well as a number of other communities that are targeted for hatred by various right wing conservatives and their followers, I am certainly concerned by the right wings casual threats of violence directed at people like me.
I learned long ago that I am considered less worthy of protection from crime than are members of more privileged classes.
I am part of a generation of women who took up the martial arts in the 1970s as a form of protection from male violence. I studied Taekwondo and Hopkido long enough to realize my physical limitations against someone stronger and more socially conditioned to dishing out physical brutality. I realized that many of the moves one sees where the protagonist takes knives and other weapons away from attackers are staged and not real.
Further as I got older I realized I was pretty good with a handgun. I even discovered that I liked shooting, that guns had the same sort of fine mechanical feel that I liked in cameras.
I am old now and yet I am capable of defending myself should someone try to break into our house. Before scoffing at my feeling the need to have this capability, I feel I should point out that during the first few months we lived here we had a large window broken by a shot from a pellet gun and our house egged. All this stopped when word got around we were target shooters.
Unlike many of the liberals who are demanding gun control laws that sound like they will eliminate gun violence the same way the war on drugs has eliminated illegal drugs; I actually go to gun shows. Tina and I are friendly with a number of gun dealers who sell at these shows.
We are much further left than is commonly implied by the term liberal, yet we often find we share many of the same concerns as those on the far right. They too talk about how America is becoming a police state. At most of these shows there are people selling heirloom seeds due to concerns regarding Monsanto and the GMO seeds. There are people selling water filtration systems that one can use on a daily basis as well as in emergencies.
Much has been made of so called assault weapons, guns that are on the one hand so dangerous that no civilian should ever be able to own one and that are on the other hand so ineffectual to make absurd the proposition that one might at some point have to make a stand against the ever increasing police state. They can’t be both.
I sometimes think that those who would be pacifists in the face of an out of control police state are giving tacit approval and showing support for the actions of that police state.
We have surrendered freedom from warrantless searches, right to know our accuser and the right to have an attorney representing us in a public court of law. Both Bush and Obama seem to think nothing about murdering people from afar with drone strikes.
We have surrendered the freedom of privacy to read and communicate our thoughts, even when our thoughts are subversive to the established order.
Protests against elected officials are confined to free speech zones that are often located outside the sight of the official being protested.
Too often when I find myself thinking a subversive thought I catch myself and think, “I had better not say that much less write it.” Spray painting a protest upon a wall is now a felony and can subject one to a serious prison term.
Mean while the US government spends more money on weapons and weapons systems than the next dozen or so countries combined. Weapons and violence are as American as apple pie.
Until we end the Patriot Act and see a restoration of the rights that we have lost over the last 30 years or so and a demilitarization of the police forces in this country I find myself loathe to give up yet another right from the list of ten fundamental rights listed in the Bill of Rights.
It feels like we are giving away our freedom to a corporate police state that wants us to be a docile mass of worker/consumer drones who only think what our corporate police state overlords tell us to think.
It is an unsettling feeling no matter if one is far left with a serious analysis supplied by Noam Chomsky or a Tea Party activist, who may lack an analysis but knows something is wrong.
The other thing that is seriously bothering me is this. I know Obama is merely a slightly kinder and gentler shill for the ultra rich, the corporations, banks and Wall Street. The same sort of neo-con/neo-lib as the ones the Republicans put up only without the misogyny and blatant homophobia.
I have a feeling that if he thought he could get away with it he would sell out the senior citizens of this nation along with others who are dependent upon the social safety net as quickly as Ronnie Reagan, an man Obama expressed admiration for.
From Greg Palast: Assault Gun Ban -Weapon of Mass Distraction
Monday, January 21, 2013
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
George Bush told America he’d keep us safe from terrorists by having us take off our shoes at the airport.
Yesterday, Barack Obama again took the Oath of Office. And this Obama 2.0 is also going to save America from insane killers – by limiting ammo clips to ten bullets instead of 30.
At a television press conference about the Newtown school massacre last Wednesday, a tearful President called this, “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this”.
It won’t.
But, once again, we get to pretend that our presidents protect us and save us from what is murdering us and destroying us.
But The Great Assault Rifle Debate, like the War on Terror, is just another Weapon of Mass Distraction.
