kanyeweggst:

queeranarchism:

It’d be nice to have anarchist conversations about guns that aren’t dominated by emotional US-centered conversations about school shootings or macho glorification of armed revolution.

‘cause like, as far as I can see there’s:

1. Criminalization: Only the state has legal guns, anyone else only has guns if they’re willing to break the law.
2. Legalization: The state has guns and you can get a gun if you can get a
   license.
3. Decriminalization: Anyone can have any amount of guns they like.

Criminalization obviously works out heavily in favor of the state, but by observation, the state might also be less tempted to arm all their cops in full military gear if they know most citizens are not armed. It also means all the people with guns disrespect the state enough to break the law, which could be a really good thing?

Legalization works out heavily in favor of people who are white,
rich, without disabilities, without a criminal record, without anything else that could be stereotyped as
dangerous. So people with privilege. That’s probably not working out in our favor, right? 

Decriminalization is the least likely scenario, but it’s also difficult to say what it would mean. Would it result in widespread gun ownership and a bigger chance of armed revolution? Or would it work out mostly in favor of rich white people who are not likely to be shot by police and communities with a strong gun culture?

So which of these scenarios is actually the best for an anarchist movement that tries to take power back and knows that this is only every going to be achieved by taking power without asking for it and being willing to defend that power, but would prefer to do so without a full-on bloodbath?

Like, the answer probably depends a lot on how you think power is achieved, but it’d be nice to hear some perspectives and go beyond ‘we just gotta have a full on war’, ‘cause like, marginalized people know who is gonna be first to die and we want a revolution but we also wanna survive, ya know?

Perhaps I’m somewhat bleak in my outlook but I’ve never thought everyone having guns would make an armed resistance easier? At least here in the U.S. the presence of the military at home, the willingness to use tanks, chemical weapons, bombs and other lethal force has always spoken to me as sort of a “what can a machine gun do against that?”. Even if everyone was somehow well armed and trained, it feels as though the government would be better equipped and better trained.

Secondly it feels like if /everyone/ had a gun, it would make civilian defense forces much easier for the government to organize- they don’t have to pull from active recruits, they’ve got a patriotic fighting force armed on every street. I haven’t read up on the history of what that sort of revolution looks like but it seems to me that current social trends and the massive budget and equipment advantage would spell out bad things for an “everyone’s armed, lets take back our streets” kind of movement. Way back when, the right to bear arms thing was relevant because it if a civilian had a gun he was probably on level pegging with the government enforcers. Now, there’s no way to catch up, even if everyone is armed. Guns are likely less useful now to a resistance than they have ever been in the past.

What you’d be speaking of in this case would be guerrilla warfare: 

This is type of warfare where the revolutionary combatants are indistinguishable from the general public and armed only with light weapons. 

Guerrilla fighters avoid a direct confrontation, because there they lose. Instead, they use surprise attacks before disappearing into the crowd. 

So guerrillas use things like ambushes, sabotage, raids,hit-and-run tactics, and mobility to exhaust and discredit a larger and less-mobile traditional military whose sense of ‘success’ relies on total control of an area and very low casualty numbers among its own ranks.  

Invariably, the guerrilla revolutionaries are declared ‘terrorists’ by the opponent. 

In practice, whenever people fight back against the state, whether it’s one brick or a full uprising, this is already how we fight. Whenever we resist in any form, we use the fact that the state can’t be everywhere simultaneously. We hit them where they are weakest and disappear again.

There are endless examples of succesful and unsuccesful guerrilla wars so it is difficult to give a clear answer on the circumstances under which such a war can be succesful. History does show that such a war can be won. 

What is pretty much always true is that the state, who perceived the guerrilla warrior as a ‘cheat’, tends to retaliate with extreme brutality against any population that is perceived as giving shelter to guerrilla fighters. The price in human misery of such a war tends to be extremely high as a result.