++Daniel Defense, the manufacturer and marketer of the AR-15 used in the massacre of 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Texas, secured a $20 million contract from U.S. Special Forces in 2002 to provide the accessories for combat rifles. The company’s military contracts led to civilian sales of AR-15s produced by the company, promoted by military-style marketing campaigns that advertised how civilians could “use what they use” (NYT, May 28, 2022).
++The sales of military-style assault rifles to civilians accelerated after 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired. U.S. wars post-9/11 in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world through expanded counterinsurgency wars deepened this military-to-gun pipeline. Politicians, joined by prominent journalists and commentators, breathlessly celebrated dramatic expansions of the U.S. military budget, adding more fuel to an already expansive pipeline of foreign arms sales and domestic civilian sales, increasing the use of high-powered, military-style firepower from the ranks of the armed forces to police departments to gun manufacturers, with civilians being encouraged to “use what they use” (Goodman, Counterpunch, June 9, 2002).
++The U.S. gun culture is not a simple recent historical development. There was the political mobilization of the National Rifle Association in the 1970s as a purveyor of a single-minded expansion of unrestricted gun rights as the embodiment of “American freedom” guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. This NRA-turn was reinforced by a mix of profit motivations, white supremacist ideology baked into U.S. history, the culture of rampant individualism, and a pervasive fear of “crime and disorder” accelerated by a white counter-reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that was strategized and encouraged by U.S. politicians–most notably President Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign.
++As Roxanne Doty documents in her excellent book, Loaded, the emergence of the U.S. gun culture has deep historical roots in the founding of the U.S. Property owners used “citizen militias” in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th centuries. Landowners deployed men with guns to expand land ownership by the forced expulsion of Native Americans. Settler colonialism provided one of the original justifications for gun ownership, as did genocidal forays against Native popuations that stood in the way. Slave patrols used to track down, retrieve and force escaped slaves back to their owners, or to kill them outright if deemed necessary, was another motivation of property-owning gun rights enthusiasts early in U.S. history. Guns have long been linked to the protection of property rights regardless of the costs or consequences.
++The Cold War militarization of U.S. culture directly contributed to the expansion of more deadly firearms that could be accessed by the civilian population. As with the post-9/11 increases in military-style weapons made available to civilians, the increases in the U.S. military budget during the late 1970s and early 1980s coincided with a flood of high-powered weapons sold to civilians. Gun manufacters, backed by the NRA, moved aggressively to expand the manufacturing, marketing and sales of advanced weaponry, part of a strategy to reverse declining weapons sales. The ready availability of military-style rifles and high-capacity, high-caliber semiautomatic pistol designs since the 1980s provided opportunities for U.S. gun manufacturers to sell more deadly weapons at home and abroad (“The Miliarization of the U.S. Civilian Firearms Market,” Violence Policy Center, June 2011).
++The combination of U.S. militarization, white supremacy, rampant individualism, conspiracy theories that invent threats to property ownership in the form of government plans to “take away your guns,” and profit motivations of gun manufacturers has created a dystopian nightmare of routinized mass violence.
++The Republican Party has long embraced the availability of military-style assault weapons as equivalent to foundational “American freedom.” The Party’s open embrace of weapons-wielding citizens confronting Black Lives Matter protesters is the modern equivalent of historical trends of white supremacy and armed vigilanteeism that have fueled the weaponization of U.S. society. The embrace of militarization by both political parties further takes us down this untenable path, as police department budgets continue to explode and militarization of law enforcement continues to be used as puntive means to safeguard the interests of property owners while maintaining the conditions of rampant inequality that further fuels gun violence.
++What are the solutions? The left needs to target all sources of the violence, recognizing the ways that gun massacres are woven into a history of systemic institutionalized violence encouraged and abetted by militarization, policing, racism, profiteering gun companies, a war against oppressed and marginalized people, and conspiracy theories that provide fuel for rabid individualism that turns deadly. Two resources that can help: “It’s Time to Dismantle America’s Residential Caste System,” Politico, 9/12/21, and “Uvalde Police Didn’t Move to Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do,” The Intercept, May 27, 2022.
View From Left Field 