In a court ruling, Mexico is now able to bring charges against gun manufacturers for their countless imperialist crimes in arming criminal syndicates which have made Mexico a de facto failed state and together with our historic destabilizations of democracy and campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Latin America created a humanitarian crisis at our border which is driving the subversion of our democracy by fascism with the captured Republican Party as its institutional arm in electoral politics and subversions of our legislative and judicial branches of government.
This is more than a consequence of amoral capitalism perpetrated by merchants of death; it is part of a clandestine war of destabilization and imperial conquest and dominion waged by the American state against her neighbors, designed to produce limitless quasi-slave labor and control of hemispheric natural resources.
To free ourselves from fascist tyranny and identitarian politics, we must free ourselves from fear; and this requires abandonment of the gun and the social use of force.
Guns are the business of empire, and we require an open market in guns both here in America and globally so that we can remain fully industrialized to wage vast and multiple wars to protect the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites. We also use arms as an instrument of dominion in our proxy states like Israel and of destabilization in our many de facto colonies.
What is to be done?
Gun violence confronts us with many parallel and interdependent issues; among them police gun violence, white supremacist terror, patriarchal terror, and state terror against other nations. Gun violence brings into question issues of unequal power, the relationships between fear and rage, the use of social force, the legitimacy of authority and systems of law and order, ideas of citizenship in a democracy, models of retributive and restorative justice, how and why our society creates monsters to terrify the rest of us into obedience and what we can do to heal broken people.
Solutions include repeal of the Second Amendment, red flag laws, ongoing and comprehensive screening, outlawing the manufacture of firearms and other weapons of mass death, and holding merchants of death responsible for any shootings not judged to be in self defense as if they pulled the trigger themselves, as murderers.
If our courts can hold gun manufacturers, shareholders, distributors, and sellers responsible for the death they profit from in Mexico, why not for that in America as well? To grant the power of death by providing a gun to someone is a bond of blood which makes you responsible for how it is used.
To bear arms is to be a bearer of death; choose life.
As written in The Guardian, in an article entitled US appeals court revives $10bn lawsuit by Mexico against American gunmakers: Case seeks to hold manufacturers responsible for coordinating weapons trafficking to drug cartels across the US-Mexico border; “A US appeals court on Monday revived a $10bn lawsuit by Mexico seeking to hold American gun manufacturers responsible for facilitating the trafficking of weapons to drug cartels across the US-Mexico border.
The Boston-based 1st US circuit court of appeals overturned a lower-court judge’s decision dismissing the case on the grounds that a US law barred Mexico from suing Smith & Wesson Brands, Sturm, Ruger & Co and others.
That law, the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), provides the firearms industry broad protection from lawsuits over their products’ misuse.
Mexico’s lawyers argued the law only bars lawsuits over injuries that occur in the US and does not shield the seven manufacturers and one distributor it sued from liability over the trafficking of guns to Mexican criminals.
Judge William Kayatta, writing for the three-judge panel, said that while the law can be applied to lawsuits by foreign governments, Mexico’s lawsuit “plausibly alleges a type of claim that is statutorily exempt from the PLCAA’s general prohibition”.
He said that was because the law was only designed to protect lawful firearms-related commerce, yet Mexico had accused the companies of aiding and abetting illegal gun sales by facilitating the trafficking of firearms into the country.
The Mexican foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, called the ruling “great news” in a post on Twitter/X. The country’s US lawyer, Steve Shadowen, called it “an important step forward in holding the gun industry accountable”.
“It should now be clear that those who contribute to gun violence must face legal consequences, regardless of borders,” Shadowen said in a statement.
Representatives for the gunmakers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mexico says over 500,000 guns are trafficked annually from the US into Mexico, of which more than 68% are made by the companies it sued, which also include Beretta USA, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Colt’s Manufacturing Co and Glock Inc.
In its August 2021 complaint, Mexico estimated that 2.2% of the nearly 40m guns made annually in the US are smuggled into Mexico, including as many as 597,000 guns made by the defendants.
Mexico said the smuggling has been a key factor in its ranking third worldwide in the number of gun-related deaths. It also claimed to suffer many other harms, including declining investment and economic activity and a need to spend more on law enforcement and public safety.
The companies deny wrongdoing. Their lawyers say Mexico’s lawsuit is devoid of allegations the gun manufacturers’ gun sales themselves did anything that would create an exception to PLCAA’s broad protections.”
As I wrote in my post of June 12 2019, Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act; Those who manufacture, sell, or trade guns must be held responsible for the harm that they do, and we must support this important legislation which ends their immunity from being sued by the victims in whose suffering they are complicit. This industry of death must be pursued to its utter destruction.
As Gabrielle Giffords said, “The gun lobby convinced politicians that an entire industry deserved to operate without fear of ever being held responsible in a courtroom. Today, we stand up and fight again to restore the fundamentally American principle that no industry, including the gun industry, is above the law.”
Surely a least-restrictive policy of gun ownership would say, demonstrate that we can trust you with our lives, that you have earned the right to bear arms through a history of honorable conduct and self-discipline, that you are able to make kill/no kill decisions rationally and with a judgement free of racism, rage, jealousy, vengeance, the need to dominate and control and the desire to subjugate and inflict pain and terror, or other mental illness or impairment, and unclouded by drugs or alcohol, and you are free to openly carry a weapon except in areas otherwise restricted.
Who could pass such a test? Who can be trusted to bear death among us, with de facto powers of summary execution?
Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Possession of a gun proves intent to kill. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.
Choose life.
This declaration was met with replies from friends in support of our right to bear arms, a right whose intention to guarantee the freedom and independence of individuals from government force and control I fully endorse. This does not mean we must allow terrorists and madmen to commit murder and mayhem, nor that access to guns and other instruments of mass destruction should be free to all; we must sift very fine in choosing who if anyone can be trusted with the power of death. For this is exactly what the right to bear arms authorized; the power to bear death among us. It is a dreadful power, which bears a weight of responsibility like no other.
I would begin the restoration of balance in our society by disarming the police, not our citizens. But we need not foster madness nor enable violence.
Without federal and universal red flag laws and ongoing means of identifying possibilities for violence as requirements for ownership, and by permitting civilians to own military weapons, we are doing exactly that.
Here is my rebuttal to the objection that gun control abrogates our right to bear arms:
Forbidding things does not align with my ideology; my ideal state is a world free of violence and the social use of force. Here I mean police, prisons, laws and the authorization of identity, state terror and military imperialism. These we must resist, by any means necessary.
But we must also resist the pathology of dominance and control which is written into the history of our form. Ours is a culture of death, of the fetishization of guns as masculine jewelry and symbols of patriarchal power. Power, like the beauty of weapons, is seductive and a force of degradation and dehumanization.
Where force is the only means of seizing power to restore balance and ensure liberty and equality, it is positive. That same force is negative when used to subjugate others. America today remains the same nation won by conquest and theft from indigenous people, built by African slave labor, and become an empire through military conquest and economic dominion.
We must abandon the social use of force if we are to become a free society of equals and of autonomous individuals. In a nation founded on the values and ideals of Liberty and Equality, we send no police or armies to enforce virtue. This does not mean we surrender our power of self determination, our own safety, or our freedom from the ideas of other people.
To be free is to be free from compulsion by force, and from control through surveillance and propaganda. It also means that we must be free from each other.
So for guns as instruments of power over others and our lives as raw material for the power of hegemonic elites and their carceral states of force and control. An important question remains if we are to free ourselves of the tyranny of force and our addiction to power, dominance, and control; why does our government refuse to abandon the gun? Why does America need a free market for guns?
As I wrote in my post of February 20 2021, Who Bears Arms Bears Death; President Biden has once again seized an intractable problem by its horns, speaking on laws he intends to pass to limit gun violence and free us from the spectre of death, fear, and vote suppression by fascists and white supremacist terrorists.
This is no longer only an issue of racist gun violence, including that of our own police, but of the survival of democracy from political intimidation and terror. We can never permit another January 6 Insurrection, nor revival of the historical legacy of the KKK’s reign of terror on which it was based.
But we not only limit access to guns for the insane and members of organizations of racist terror, but for the police as well. Disarm the police and they cannot murder nonwhite people with impunity as they do now. These are the two halves of a whole, state and civilian terror and gun violence.
As reported by Nikki Carvajal, Devan Cole, and Ali Zaslav on CNN; “Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” Biden said in a statement.
“This administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call,” the statement reads. “We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer.”
The call from Biden comes three years after a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, leaving 17 people dead. The tragedy led many of the survivors to speak out against gun violence and confront lawmakers about gun safety reform.”
President Biden concluded his message by underscoring the urgency of action, and by placing the issue in a human frame of suffering, loss, fear, and grief; “We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change,” he said. “The time to act is now.”
These are good words, even glorious ones, which resound with history and the reimagination of America and all humankind, as we now expect from our President. But if we are to eradicate the origins of gun violence as a pervasive and endemic threat both to democracy and to public safety, we must go further, to the true reason governments refuse to abolish guns.
Analysis of the structural relationships between government needs for massive industrial war production and the commercial arms sales required to keep it in full readiness reveal the real reason America provides an unrestricted market for guns, indeed energetically promotes it; to be prepared at all times to fight multiple and vast wars. This is the business of empire, and the random deaths of schoolchildren and other innocent citizens to gun violence is considered an acceptable cost of doing that business.
This must change, but it cannot change without also changing the profit driven motives of the military – industrial complex, as President Eisenhower warned us so long ago.
As written by Priya Satia, author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, in Time; “Those in favor of firearms control in the United States today often point in exasperated envy at laws in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom. Why can’t the United States behave like these civilized countries?, they ask.
The reality is that these countries were able to pass their strict laws partly because American laws are so lax. At just 4.4% of the world’s population, Americans own roughly a third of all the firearms in the world. According to a 2007 survey, American civilians own about 275 million of the world’s 875 million firearms. For the world’s gun manufacturers, this fraction of the world’s population is their largest single market. As long as it stays open, they can count on business, and governments around the world can feel secure about the health of an industry they rely on for defense.
Since firearms became central to warfare, governments have faced a structural problem: They need gun manufacturers but do not generate enough demand themselves to keep those manufacturers in good health by serving the military alone. Peace, in particular, is bad for gunmakers.”
“The Glorious Revolution of 1689 established a new regime in Britain. It had to defend itself against rebels at home and abroad who wanted to restore the ousted king. To that end, the new government set about developing a new hub of firearms manufacturing in Birmingham, to ensure an alternate source for guns in case rebels captured London’s firearms manufacturing capacity.
For the next century, Britain was almost always at war, and Birmingham’s gunmakers thrived: from an initial annual production of tens of thousands of arms, they could produce millions by 1815. The government also launched its own factory, at Enfield, to further diffuse the industry.
To keep this industry healthy during interludes of peace—in an era in which firearms possession was largely an entitlement of the upper classes—the government helped it find other outlets. British gunmakers sold firearms all over the world: in West Africa, as part of the slave trade; in North America, to Native Americans and colonial settlers; in South Asia, as part of trade and conquest. Occasionally, British officials worried about arming their own enemies. But inevitably, the logic prevailed that not selling guns to potential enemies would merely send those enemies to a rival supplier, like the French, and the British would forfeit both profit and influence.
The government also encouraged gunmakers to diversify into products that could be sold to British civilians: buttons, buckles, harpoons, swords, bells. Diversification became more necessary in the 19th century as the empire’s fear of armed colonial rebellion increased. The Birmingham Small Arms company (BSA), the largest privately owned rifle manufactory in Europe until the 1890s and the largest in the U.K. through World War I, also made bicycles, motorcycles and cars. The government’s machine-gun supplier, Vickers, made various civilian goods, too.
This strategy freed the government from worrying overly about the health of its firearms industry. In 1934, it selected a Czech design for the new army light machine gun, over protests from BSA and Vickers. After World War II, the Ministry of Defense stopped maintaining an R&D team for small arms design. BSA ceased military rifle production in 1961 after a government decision to let them go. They turned out other metal goods and motorcycles until they were edged out of those businesses in the early 1970s.
The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, meanwhile, did develop and supply the SA80, the standard postwar military firearm. In 1985, it and other government arms factories were made into a public corporation, Royal Ordnance, which, in 1987, was bought by British Aerospace, the then-reprivatized company in which Vickers had merged during the 1960 nationalization of the aircraft industry.
That year, 1987, was also the year of the mass shooting known as the Hungerford massacre. Gun control in the U.K. got tighter as the gun industry shrank to vanishing point. The next year saw both the closure of the Enfield unit and amendments tightening existing firearms controls. After the Dunblane shooting in 1996, private possession of handguns was banned almost entirely; thousands of guns were surrendered. By that point there was essentially no firearms industry to put up a protest; U.K. military arms were mostly sourced abroad. In Australia, too, passage of tight gun control laws in 1996 was eased by the absence of a major Australian gun industry.
The United States followed a different path.
To be sure, American gunmakers also diversified to cope with whimsical government demand. Most famously, Remington, the country’s oldest rifle maker, turned out sewing machines and typewriters during the slump in firearm demand after the Civil War. But, for the most part, American manufacturers could rely on sales to civilians to cope with lulls in government demand.
Between the world wars, the federal government and the American gun industry both opposed suggestions for controls on sales to civilians, out of fear that they would endanger an industry essential to national defense. During the Cold War, the U.S. became the new firearms depot of the world. When the Swedish firearms manufacturer Interdynamic AB could not find a civilian market for its TEC-9 submachine gun at home, its Miami subsidiary Intratec sold it to Americans, who made it a notorious instrument of mass shootings.
If gun-control advocates focus on the NRA and politicians who take money from the group as the sole obstacles to sensible gun control laws in the U.S., they’ll be missing a larger structural reality: selling arms to American civilians has become crucial to an industry on which both the United States government and governments around the world depend. Indeed, it is the American public’s very division over gun control that keeps the industry healthy, given the saturation of the civilian market: without panic buying triggered by recurring fear of impending controls, companies like Remington and Smith & Wesson face dismal prospects. (Remington has now filed for bankruptcy, though its operations remain unaffected.)
The more the rest of the world limits gun possession, the more American civilians keep the world’s firearms makers in business. The NRA and gun manufacturers benefit from promoting intense cultural and ideological commitment to their reading of the Second Amendment, but so does every government that needs firearms for its military and law enforcement services. Studies have shown that the presence of astronomical numbers of guns in the United States is a specific cause of the high rate of mass shootings, but the presence of those guns has become a matter of global security. This vision of global security has thus perversely come to depend on continual insecurity about mass shootings in the United States.”
An elegant solution to gun violence; repeal the second amendment.
Enacted to enable the formation of Guard units by states which feared the power of a standing federal army and restore the balance of force between the two levels of our government, the right to bear arms was never intended to apply to private individuals or non-state militias.
As the current language of the second amendment has been misinterpreted and used to justify fraudulent policies and the malign influence of the NRA, it must be repealed.
Thus far the deaths of children and of innocent civilians has been considered an acceptable cost of doing business; of keeping an enormous trade in war materials tooled up for imperialistic foreign adventures, colonial wars, and other use of armed force to gain a favorable climate of investment and a hegemony of global power and privilege.
I say that there is no profit worth the life of a human being, and that we must begin to evolve nonviolently.
As written by John Paul Stevens in The New York Times, in an article entitled Repeal the Second Amendment; “Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century .
For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”
During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.
That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.
That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.”
As I wrote in my post of August 12 2019, The NRA Weaponizes Fear in Service to Power and Wealth, But Also to Fascist and Racist Political Ideologies As Hate Crime and Terror; The National Rifle Association has long used fear of immigrants and White Replacement to sell guns; as a lobby for the firearms industry it defends the market and profits of the manufacturers and distributors of weapons of white supremacist terror and mass destruction, but that is not its true goal.
While needing a vast and unregulated arms market to ensure that our government has a fully operational manufacture and supply capability, what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, to support imperialistic wars and other acts of force and violence against our enemies real or imagined, that is also not its true goal.
The true and primary goal of the NRA is to defend the hegemony of white supremacist and patriarchal power and privilege, to shape some of us into monsters as deniable assets with which to terrify the rest of us into supporting the abandonment of democracy and of our equality and freedoms, to drive us like frightened cattle into an autocratic and totalitarian state. This is the true goal of the emerging global Fourth Reich; an all-powerful government of surveillance and force, a police state of secret power, covert armies, concentration camps, and the re-enslavement of nonwhite labor.
So we have a pyramid of three parts in the goals of the NRA and the corrupt politicians who have seized our government; to subvert democracy and build a fascist totalitarian state through gun violence and racist terror, to support the business of empire by keeping us in a state of constant readiness for war, and to incite fear of others in the public to create a market for guns.
Finally, we cannot free ourselves from the legacies of our history as gun violence without interrogating and bringing a reckoning to racism.
As I wrote in my post of August 9 2019, Racism Is at the Heart of America’s Gun Violence; Why does America resist commonsense legislation to protect us from gun violence and white supremacist terror? This has little to do with guns and everything to do with race, otherness, and the social and structural hegemony of white power and privilege.
Racism is the context within which American gun violence, and our lack of political will to do anything about it, occurs. This is a problem of cultural, social, historical, political, and psychological dimensions, a network of mutually reinforcing issues which must be addressed as an interconnected whole.
At root, racism and white supremacist terror are a failure of our founding ideal of equality and of the concept of citizenship as co ownership of our government and full and inclusive membership in America as a free society of equals.
In the words of Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, as quoted in The Guardian; “The country’s refusal to pass new gun control laws has everything to do with defending racial hierarchy. Who gets to carry a gun in public? Who is coded as a patriot? Who is coded as a threat, or a terrorist or a gangster? What it means to carry a gun or own a gun or buy a gun – those questions are not neutral. We have 200 years of history, or more, defining that in very racial terms.”
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, Priya Satia
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, Jonathan M. Metzl
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/25/per1-j25.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/28/politics/trump-second-amendment-repeal-tweet/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/politics/biden-parkland-anniversary-gun-reform/index.html
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