Given all the issues that are off the table, Democratic strategists
probably view the public uproar over the Las Vegas massacre and the
continued persistence of school shootings as a gift from heaven or hell.
They offer a small area where there are discernible differences between
the two capitalist parties. But Democrats and their media mouthpieces
have to be careful. They have to contain and limit the discussion to
legal remedies, banning bump stocks and assault weapons, taking more
guns from domestic abusers (except cops and the military of course) and
the kind of no-fly-no-buy crap for which several members of the
Congressional Black Caucus staged a brief demonstration on the House
floor staged a sit-in last year. That kind of thing just might sustain a
high enough level of outrage against Republicans to flip a few seats in
Congress or a handful of state legislatures this fall.
The trick for Democrats will be to keep the public anger high, but
the discussion shallow, limited, and ahistorical. You won’t hear Rachel
Maddow or anybody on CNN or TedTalks explain what Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
and Gerald Horne will tell you, that the “well regulated militia” the
Second Amendment referred to was the universally armed white male
population, deployed to murder and steal land from Native Americans and
police the enslaved Africans. Democrats have to prevent anyone from
asking, let alone answering why 70% of the guns are in the hands of
white men, many of whom imagine themselves arming for a race war.
Democrats can’t talk about how the Texas Rangers massacred Mexicans and
Indians, when they bothered to tell the difference at all, or how the
nation’s first gun control laws were prohibitions against black people
and natives possessing firearms. The gun control debate will have to
avoid examining how the carceral state enforces existing gun laws with
the same thick layer of racist bias used for ostensibly race-blind drug
laws. Democrats will have to avoid talking up the link between mass
incarceration and ubiquitous stop and frisk policies, universally
justified with the excuse that they’re about taking guns away from black
and brown men. Democrats will have to blame mental illness or some
other made-up cause for mass shooters. Their media and academics will
have to keep discussion away from what the steps might look like to
disarming the police, away from reducing the level of violence in
society as a whole, and shutting down the nation’s world-leading arms
industry.
The left’s job is precisely the opposite. We have to raise all the
other issues Democrats won't, the issues that discredit both parties
from gentrificatin and housing to health care, We have to open the books
and popularize the history neither Democrats nor Republicans and the
bipartisan capitalist media want to bury. We have to ask and begin to
answer what it would take to make the US like many other countries where
most of the cops are unarmed, and how to disarm the US military as
well. The current outrage over school shootings is an opportunity for us
too, and it’s here, whether we’re ready or not.
-- Bruce A. Dixon, "Gun Debate A Narrow Opportunity For Democrats, A Wide One For the Left" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).