The conservative has a fantasy. In it, he stands alone, a rugged individualist with his rifle against the world. The liberal, in this fantasy, is a quivering pacifist who would call the police, who fears the very object that guarantees freedom. This fantasy is not just wrong. It is a lie crafted for a purpose. It is a story told to paint the left as weak, and to disguise the right’s true project: not the defense of liberty, but the maintenance of a monopoly on violence.
They have erased history. They have taken the narrative of armed rebellion and scrubbed it clean of its most potent chapters. They do not teach you that the Mulford Act of 1967, the law that forbade the public carry of loaded firearms in California, was passed by a Republican legislature and signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. It was not a response to crime. It was a direct response to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense conducting armed patrols against police brutality. The law was not anti-gun. It was anti Black, anti-poor, and anti-dissent. The state moved to disarm the exact citizens who needed arms most. The right’s love affair with the Second Amendment began not with a principled stand for freedom, but with a racist effort to confiscate guns from Black people.
They do not tell you about the labor wars, where Appalachian miners fought Pinkerton mercenaries and company thugs with their own rifles. They do not mention the Spanish Civil War, where anarchist and socialist militias held back fascists with little more than grit and borrowed guns. They have erased the image of the leftist as someone who understands, more deeply than any weekend plinker, that power flows from the barrel of a gun. They erased it because that image is dangerous.
The modern myth is about class. They have sold a story that gun ownership is the domain of the rural, salt-of-the-earth conservative. This is a marketing campaign. Look at the statistics the NRA does not advertise. Gun ownership among the urban poor, a demographic that votes Democratic, is significant. It is a quiet, desperate fact of life for people who live in neighborhoods the police do not protect, and predatory systems do not serve. Their guns are not for sport. They are for survival. The right does not champion their right to bear arms. The right prosecutes it.
This is the core of the lie. The modern right does not believe in an armed populace. It believes in an armed base. It supports the unfettered right of its own supporters to open carry rifles into state capitals, while supporting the hyper policing and mass incarceration of Black and brown communities where a single bullet can mean a life sentence. Their ideology is not pro-gun. It is pro hierarchy. The goal is not a nation where everyone is armed. The goal is to be a nation where their enemies are disarmed, and their friends are a militia.
Their entire political identity is built on a story of armed resistance against tyranny. They stockpile weapons for the day they must fight a fascist government. Now watch them. That government is here. It is passing laws that erase trans existence. It is banning books. It is criminalizing protest. It is constructing camps. And their weapons remain silent. Their militias are not marching on the capitals of Florida or Texas. They are providing security for rallies where politicians promise more of the same. The rebellion was always a story they told themselves, a fantasy of masculine virtue. The reality is a bargain. They get to keep their toys, and in exchange they look the other way as the rights of others are stripped. They are not a resistance. They are the armed wing of the regime.
Meanwhile, the left is rearming. Not for aggression, but for defense. The John Brown Gun Club trains communities in de-escalation and firearm safety. The Socialist Rifle Association has chapters across the country. Groups like the Pink Pistols and Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club formed explicitly in response to hate crimes. These are not preppers waiting for a race war. These are people who read the news, who see the rise of fascist violence, who have experienced state violence, and who have decided that hoping for the best is a luxury they cannot afford. They are not buying AR-15s to feel powerful. They are buying them because they feel targeted.
The Democratic Party platform of background checks and assault weapon bans is not the whole story. It is the moderate, liberal flank of this issue. It operates within the framework of the state. The radical left looks at that same state, its militarized police, its carceral system, its imperial wars and asks a different question: who will protect us when the state is the threat? Their answer is community defense. It is the logical, material conclusion of slogans like “defund the police.” If you dismantle the monopoly on violence, you must answer the question of what replaces it. For a growing number on the left, the answer is mutual aid backed by mutual defense.
The right’s caricature of the gun-grabbing liberal is a straw man. It is useful. It raises funds and gets votes. Reality is more complex and more threatening to them. The reality is that a multi-racial, working-class left is rediscovering the tool they tried to convince everyone was feared. An awakening reminder that when you strip away the mythology, a gun is just a tool. And tools can be used to build a wall, or to tear one down.
The fantasy of the unarmed left is a fantasy that serves a political need. It maintains a power dynamic. That fantasy is being challenged not by rhetoric, but by a simple, material fact: the side that believes it is facing a fascist threat is increasingly deciding that disarmament is not an option. Letting go of it is not an act of aggression, but of clarity.
The myth was always the weapon.
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First this:
It is a quiet, desperate fact of life for people who live in neighborhoods the police do not protect, and predatory systems do not serve.
Followed by this:
It supports the unfettered right of its own supporters to open carry rifles into state capitals, while supporting the hyper policing and mass incarceration of Black and brown communities where a single bullet can mean a life sentence.
First off, it’s news to me (and to any jury) that carrying around a single bullet can mean a life sentence – unless it’s “inserted” into someone else’s body.
Also, how is it that within the same article, you complain about lack of police presence and too much police presence in the same neighborhoods?
I’m pretty sure that the people in those neighborhoods aren’t necessarily “progressives”, and don’t view you as speaking for them. But maybe if you told them that you were a progressive, you’d be safe there.
The author of this piece clearly believes the world is binary—this or that. The reality is that the world is far more complicated than that; many things exist in between.
The author argues that the Left has always understood “gun power,” yet conveniently leaves out that almost all of the most restrictive gun control efforts come from states that are further to the left on the political spectrum. In fact, the political parties that want to disarm most Americans are not those on the Right.
I would also note that the Peace and Freedom Party has long held a very nuanced position on disarming the public. Much of their view was formed as a result of the Mulford Act, which was mentioned by the author. They recognize that disarmament is often used as a tool of state control against the working class.
Finally, the data does not back up many of the author’s claims. The idea that the “urban poor” make up a massive portion of gun owners is statistically inaccurate. Gun ownership in rural areas is more than double that in urban areas. Furthermore, when broken down by race, roughly 36% of White people own guns, compared to 24% of Black people and 18% of Latino people. The “material facts” simply don’t support the author’s narrative.
I totally agree with both Max and Ron.