Most think guns should be banned because various psychopaths shot children in schools, fired into concert crowds or attacked religious services. Horrible enough to justify banning guns. The NRA’s solution, of course, is more guns. They claim that putting more guns in more hands will stop or dissuade vicious killers.
But more guns in more hands means the gangs, death squads, terrorists and private armies of Haiti, Central American, Africa and Eastern European states. It means everyone can take the law into their own hands – and will – indeed they will feel like they have to. It is an argument only an insurrectionist could like because it supports plans to start a revolution.
Plenty of evidence establishes that proliferation of weapons is the surest predictor of insurrection and the breakdown of law and order.[1] I want to stress the connection between the availability of guns and the likelihood of insurrection and violence because I don’t think the public gets it. Gun violence across the world isn’t confined to individual events. Guns become tools of revolution and systemic chaos. Kids become targets for gangs, women for rape, and their world is dominated by threats and extortion. One girl we know was sent here because her parents feared she would be forced into a terrorist organization in their country. In her case we knew and communicated with her parents when they were making that decision. In fact, many people arriving at our southern border struggled to get there because they’ve been threatened, and fear their children will be abused by or forced into the gangs. More, those groups seek to dominate their countries. We’re negotiating with gangs in Haiti because there is no choice – they have the weapons and weapons put them in control. Across the globe, guns rule and make life hell. We have to throttle the prevalence of guns or turn our country over to force, intimidation and revolution.
This Supreme Court won’t reconsider the nonsense perversely called “gun rights,” in opposition to the rights of people, citizens, men, women and children. That’s why I’d pack the Court with decent Justices and change its rulings before it tears the country apart as surely as Dred Scott contributed to the Civil War.
For our country to survive, we have to stop shooting our way out of every disagreement, stop producing guns for the private market so that more and more can shoot their way out of more disagreements even against heavily armed police, militia and military forces, and stop sending guns to resellers in more and more lawless countries. This has got to stop for the sake of our country. And it has nothing to do with immigration – immigrants are actually less likely to kill or commit other crimes than native born Americans – hostility to immigrants has been about blaming others for our own sins.
People who care about our country need to get themselves to the polls, vote and skip the third parties who will tip elections to the supporters of gun-toting insurrectionists. Today, I should add, is primary day in New York.
— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 2, 2024.
[1] Stephen E. Gottlieb, Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown Of American Politics 11, 175 (NYU Press 2016).
Constitutionalism and Democracy 
Interesting.
Certainly, this had an impact in the Former Yugoslavia, where the official defense doctrine had been for the Yugoslavian National Army *the “JNA”) to resist invasion from both NATO and the Warsaw Pact and then for the nation in arms to continue to resist using armories of modern weapons kept fpr that purpose. That (and the fact that people’s National Service for about 40 years prepared them for this0 had an impact on the wars in the Former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999.
Yemen is the “Wal-Mart of small arms and Explosives.” That had an impact on Somalia, where many people are pastoralists, who have AKs to protect their flocks, just like a rancher in the West might have a carbine in his truck to deal with wolves. It certainly did not make our activities in Mogadishu easier in 1993,
It made the process of state sunsidance easier while at the same time making foreign interventions more difficult. However, there are real advantages to giving the state a monopoly of the use of force, so long as the state is a net force for good..