By Prince Kapone
Gun control…
Here’s the thing: I like guns and I believe that they are a necessary tool in the revolutionary struggle. Huey P Newton said that a disarmed population is at the mercy of the white ruling class and can be subjugated to slavery at any time. Allowing the state to have a monopoly of violence is dangerous and stupid, especially since the US government is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
On top of that, it isn’t clear whether gun laws deter people from acquiring and possessing guns. I myself went to prison for 2.5 years for illegally possessing a firearm, but the first thing I did when I got out of jail is buy myself a gun. Not because I want to go around killing people in mass shootings, but because the neighborhood I lived in is like a mini war zone, where many other people have guns who might intend to do me or my family harm. In an environment saturated with guns, having one yourself is a great equalizer. Without getting into details, I can say there have been numerous instances where guns have either prevented me from getting harmed, or prevented someone around me from getting harmed.
Then of course there is the fact the Amerika is a police-military dictatorship. It is beyond dispute that the State uses guns and violence to suppress popular uprisings that exceed the boundaries of accepted protest, such as riots. Although rioting is illegal and destructive, as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, riots “are the language of the unheard.” When peaceful protest fails to change oppressive and exploitative conditions, people can become so desperate that they are willing to destroy everything around them rather than continue to be subjected to such indignities. In such cases, as we know from Amerikan history, the State does not hesitate to unleash the most brutal and indiscriminate violence against civilians to protect the power of the white ruling class. In fact, policy makers are already envisioning scenarios of how the State should militarily repress the insurgencies they expect to arise in the near future as the crisis of imperialism continues to intensify at home.
I believe in revolution by any means necessary and its stupid to think that we will ever have a revolution in this country by democratic, peaceful means. Liberals seem to think that we can make revolutionary changes through protesting, demonstrating and other such tactics. I happen to know that the ruling class will use its control of the state to shoot us all down like dogs in the street before they ever relinquish their wealth and power. If thats not the case than why has the government spent tens of billions of dollars militarizing the police over the last several decades? Why did the state respond to peaceful protests in Baltimore and Baton Rouge with martial law, with police looking like robocops and occupation forces in Iraq or Afghanistan?
Having said all that, there is obviously a major problem with gun violence in this country. To be more specific, there is a major problem with violence in general in this country. Amerika, as we know, was founded on violence: genocide, conquest, slavery, lynch mobs and the like. It is only natural that a whole culture of violence would emerge from this genocidal edifice called Amerika. It is not altogether clear that imposing gun control would do much to reduce acts of mass violence. In Britain, for example, guns are illegal; yet there has been a sharp rise in knife violence over the years, including now several instances of mass stabbings. And let us not forget that recently there have been acts of mass terrorism simply using vehicles to run civilians over in public arenas.
In light of these considerations, it does not seem that gun control really gets to the root of the problem. The question we have to ask is: why is violence and gun violence so prominent in Amerika? Although mass shootings are starting to occur in other countries, why is the United States the epicenter of such atrocities? The answers to these questions can only be found in Amerika’s unique history as a settler colonial empire.
Not only was Amerika founded on violence internally, but it has achieved and sustained its domination of the whole world through violence. There is a dialectical relationship between the mass shootings that have occurred here in the belly of the beast and the mass killings the United States military has perpetrated abroad in places like Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria (to name a few). Not to sound cynical, but in a certain sense, mass shootings in the United States are a classic case of “the chickens coming home to roost.” A nation that spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the military, to support state aggression abroad, murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent world civilians, should not be too shocked when the same violence and terror it exports to the rest of the world returns home to devour its own citizens.
The issue here is not really guns; it is the genocidal system of imperialism and its corresponding culture of violence that we live under and impose on the rest of the world that must be abolished. As long as the Amerikan people keep participating in this vast system of murder and destruction, complacently consuming the blood-drenched products we extort from our colonial victims, we must expect that the violence we spread around the world will keep returning home to strike us again and again, like a boomerang. If we truly wish to end gun violence and mass shootings here in Amerika, we must stop supporting the very government and system that nurtures itself from such violence. We must stop electing sociopathic politicians, beholden to the interests of parasitic corporations that suck the life and blood from the rest of the human family, using guns, drones, and every weapon at their disposal. We must dismantle this entire edifice of genocide and imperialism so that we can finally establish peace and come into harmony with, not only the rest of humanity, but ourselves as well. Revolution is the only solution!
Weaponized Information 
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