I shouldn’t feel the need to explain why I personally don’t want to own a gun, because back home in Denmark I think the general public opinion is that the idea of private gun ownership is completely insane (with the exception of professional hunters. Only hunting rifles serve any purpose in a civil society, and that’s in the woods – though I don’t particularly like hunters either). After a bit of research on various pro-gun websites I now feel a nausea brewing from reading all these macho statements and glorifications of real men, warriors and free people. But that’s not why I wanted to suddenly write about gun ownership. It’s because I recently had a handful of conversations with some of my US friends about gun ownership, where the right to bear arms is constituted in the Second Amendment. I found the issue really worth further debate, because I was surprised that none of my friends, all of whom I consider liberals, offhand took the same position as me, though their opinions differed from each other.

It started over a breakfast conversation with my friend who is from Texas, and part of the radical liberal environment there – my friend is very politically conscious, conscientious, responsible and thoughtful. He’s also vegetarian and a great cook.
Talking about the news in the US he mentioned that the Obama administration wants to instate new restrictions on gun ownership, and that people are praising it – ‘because it’s Obama, it’s all right’. I haven’t been able to actually find any real news on that, but my immediate thought when he told me was that that sounded like a really good idea.

But apparently my friend spoke of the news as a disappointment – though he doesn’t own and doesn’t want to own a gun – and that puzzled me. How could a young radical liberal and my friend support private gun ownership, when the notion to me opposes just about everything I stand for? When I’ve brought it up with other friends since, I’ve still received mixed responses, and I’ve come to realize just how deeply rooted the right to bear arms as constituted in the Second Amendment, and the idea of the individual’s sense of personal protection must be in US culture and tradition. I guess I had an idea that gun-supporters were generally conservatist republicans and neoliberals.

The argument from my friend was that the people should have the right to possess firearms because the government should not have a monopoly on strength of arms. Theoretically, if the government does not serve the people or turns against its own people, the people should be able to defend themselves against the government, and hence have the potential means to do so.
On my first year in art school, a supposedly radical institution, I was taught the definition of the state, central to the understanding of politics, as an entity which claims monopoly on the legitimate use of violence .. something I’ve later found out is the definition given by Max Weber. The idea is that authority is based on the threat of exertion of force, be that a financial penalty or community service on the mild end of the scale, imprisonment and physical force on the opposite end. Advocates for gun ownership who agree with this point to totalitarian regimes, where strict gun control accompanied by confiscation has often been followed by restriction in social liberties and ultimately in human rights violations; therefore, the people should have the right to protect their rights and resist tyranny.

I of course agree with that people shall have the right to protect their civil and human rights, and that in regimes throughout the World this is not the case. I’ll even say that I support instances of popular struggle which was won through an armed struggle – most obvious to me is when I look back at Guatemala’s 36-year long internal armed struggle, though the progress won is still questionable. However in the light of what I observe in the world, I think there’s a very long way from the guerilla uprisings against dictatorships and totalitarian regimes of Central America or South East Asia, to the United States – well, at least in terms of comparison … Anyway,

I’m going to make some arguments and counter arguments to why I’m completely against private gun ownership. Two differnent arguments but both in favor:

“People should own personal firearms so they can defend themselves against the government. The government has guns, so the people should be able to respond to that”

“Even if you are opposed to guns, because they exist and are available in the US, it’s important for people to be familiar with them so if you are ever in a situation where there ARE guns, you won’t be at a disadvantage because you’ve never used one”

My real concern with these arguments is that they are made by people who claim radical positive change on a grassroots level, which I define as policy change from enlightenment, criticism, and vision. The idea of defending yourself against an oppressive government ignores a number of issues. and certainly constitutes, for me, a conflict of interests. It is a non-political position that accepts status quo – the fact that there’s an awful lot of firearms in the US – and responds by claiming the right for more firearms. In terms of wanting political change this thinking strikes me as an admission of failure and resort to militant, in essence primitive, measures. It also dehumanizes ‘the State’ to a point where it’s two chess players against one another and a uprising against an abstract ‘authority’. Without taking into account the fact that handguns are designed to kill people, that serve ‘no function than to harm individuals’ as Obama said in a statement about getting guns off the streets. In the end, it is a device to be used by one person to inflict death on the other.

Not surprisingly there is a substantial correlation between ownership of firearms and the rate of homicides and suicides by gun – interestingly enough it seems the possession of a firearm becomes an incentive to crime, homicide and suicide, rather than just a tool in the process. Seems that suicide victims as well as homicide perpetrators by gun, are likelier to not carry out their plan if the means of a firearm is not at hand – they don’t turn to another means instead. I believe this must have something to do with the nature of the gun itself.

An argument from another good friend was that the government shouldn’t regulate everything. I agree with this, but definitely not in that the government shouldn’t regulate anything – and that a strong case could be made that the government is not regulating those things that are killing people at home and abroad – such as guns and the free market. Instead, its citizens tend to destroy each other by fear as well as by gun. Government should definitely regulate guns, and not to protect itself from its people, but to protect the people from themselves. Unfortunately the free flow of weapons correlate with the flow of the free market and with the interests of the multinational neoliberals.

The justification by political radicals (liberals and Greens) for owning firearms is thus self contradictory to their political goal. If you support the rights to bear arms and you own a firearm, then you naturally support the weapons industry, the end of which profits financially from the death of the other. An industrial complex that feeds on and into capitalism and the immensity of pain and human suffering that takes place in our world today.

I’ve twice been on the wrong end of a gun, but those two experiences didn’t give me any desire to be on the commanding end, rather they made me despise them even more. People should oppose to the nature of authority, of domination, of force; by denouncing its external means of upholding that authority instead of  resorting to primitive rhetoric of resistance, based on fighting fear with fear, externalized force through the barrel of a gun. That’s what the neoliberal agenda and the nations of dominance are about.

It’s this society of fear, built up in the Western world, that has laid bare entire nations within the last decade and is threatening to eat us from within. People who share this ideology do not deserve to call themselves radicals … at least not in the intended meaning of the word.

I remember a short discussion about this a long time ago, another dinner where in response to something I said about never wanting to shoot, even hold a gun, another friend said she liked to shoot her family’s hunting rifle, because it made her feel powerful.
If that’s power I would rather be powerless – but I’m not. I believe we can affect change by enlightenment and unity, by building a community of social cohesion, connectedness and trust.

Any comments are more than welcome.