Gun Control and Gun Violence III

6.  Gun violence is a single SPECIES in the larger GENUS of violence that must be situated. 

The considerations in this section of my rant on guns should, also, be pretty basic to a discussion of the problem of guns in the U.S.  The problem prompting legislatures at the state and federal level to waste many hours in discussion of bills that have little prospect of becoming laws or standing up to Constitutional muster is not merely the production, sale, distribution, and possession of firearms, nor is it the mere utilization of firearms against human beings (police officers are sometimes forced to discharge their weapons in their own defense or in defense of the peace, but legislators are not concerned about this use of firearms).  It is a particular species of the use of firearms – the use of firearms by private individuals against other human beings in order to achieve effects that would be construed as illegal.  This variety of gun violence needs to be situated against other types of violence where, in an abstract philosophical sense, I would define violence as any human action intended to either disrupt (offensive/transformative) or reinforce (defensive/reactive) a social status quo.  What I am implying here is that we can construct a taxonomy of violence, where gun violence of different types could be situated in relation to other forms of violence. 

In this regard, there are multiple dimensions to what I characterize as violence.  The first, implied above, involves the relationship of a violent act to the social status quo – whether the act is intended to disrupt the status quo or to defend it (i.e. reacting to disruptive/offensive/transformative violence).  A second dimension involves the physical or non-physical nature of the violence – whether the violence is waged against persons or property or whether it is waged against non-physical institutions.  A third dimension involves the scale – both whether the violence is waged by individuals or by collective bodies/organizations and the geographic dimensions of the violence being performed (i.e. geographical continuity or dispersion, overall geographic size of affected spaces, pathways for transmission of effects).  A fourth dimension involves degrees of intentionality and contemplation – whether a violent act is premeditated and subject to extensive consideration and planning or an impetuous act undertaken within a state of emotional duress, if not a complete accident.  These four dimensions, considered as continua/continuous ranges relative to each dimension, might be enough to consider in theorizing what violence is, but I would go a little further to add that most violent acts are not singular processes, but assemblages/networks, where, when I am talking about a network I mean a collection/complex of processes or agents (human and non-human) that gets assembled together and described as if it was a whole even though it is just a collection of linked up parts.

The way I have conceptualized violence here sets it up as a fundamental philosophical issue that could be theorized over hundreds or thousands of pages as an inescapable part of the human condition – every change in the lives of individuals and the societies in which they live would be violence.  If I went too far with this it would completely overwhelm the rest of my rant on guns!  I want to play with it just a little more, however, because I think that the theme of violence is extremely important as a matter of political change (i.e. political violence/revolution) and, maybe a little bit, because it reveals a little bit more about me, my politics, and what I think about violence.

Reasoning through my dimensions and networks, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq involves a highly complex network of offensive/transformative lethal physical acts against human life and property, deliberately planned on a strategic level but subject to infinitely impetuous/subconscious variation on the most microscopically tactical level (e.g. the actions of a single U.S. Army infantryman or Marine, trained and armed to inflict deadly violence with minimal contemplation, confronting a single armed Mahdi militiaman while his squad tries to clear houses of opposing forces in Sadr City in the aftermath of the initial invasion).  It implicates whole organizations of agents (i.e. the Baath-party regime of Hussein in Iraq with its armed forces and militias against the military forces of a U.S.-led “alliance of the willing”) and is conceived with an offensive/transformative end goal, transforming a political status quo (i.e. “regime change”).  The geography of the invasion and the slew of network pathways involved in it, including not only the space of Iraq, but the space of U.S. and U.K. military bases and command facilities, bases in countries like Kuwait and Bahrain, and all the pathways (air, sea, and virtual/electronic) in between, underscore just the massive scalar dimensions of this assemblage of violence.  

If this constitutes one obvious species of what I regard as violence, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56 constitutes another, less obvious one.  This event constituted a deliberate, planned and executed assemblage of offensive/transformative, non-physical violent acts against property (i.e. the Montgomery city bus system) by a loosely configured collective within the Black community of Montgomery, organized through the Montgomery Improvement Association led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and supported, financially and otherwise, by a wider network of Black communities and other supporters of civil rights across the U.S.  In this regard, any commodity boycott constitutes a violent act because the organization of consumers to avoid purchasing a good or service undermines the capacity of the producer to profit from the sale of the commodity.  Whatever the strategic objectives of a boycott are, the tactical and operational motive is to (violently) damage/destroy the ability of a business to sell its goods and services and, thus, to prevent a business owner and his/her employers from earning a living!  The same could certainly be said about the boycott of imported Lancashire cotton textiles, called by the All-India Congress, under the moral leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, in 1921.  The strategic intent of this action was to revive indigenous Indian production of textiles (e.g. home spun materials), ultimately as a prelude to the demand for Indian independence from British rule, but the operational functioning of the boycott operated as an act of violence against British cotton textile manufacturers and their workers, many of whom ended up unemployed as a result of the boycott. 

Gandhi’s “non-violent” non-cooperation (Satyagraha) inspired Dr. King’s leadership of the Montgomery boycott, but, in both circumstances, I contest the notion this is actually “non-violence.”  They are intentional, planned, collectively executed offensive/transformative violent acts conducted with economic weapons rather than with firearms or bombs.  There are, obviously, many other economic weapons available to organizations seeking to undertake transformative violence.  The sanctions the U.S. and the E.U. have issued against Iran to force it to renounce nuclear development involve the violent use of an economic weapon – violence that might be evident to Iranian civilians trying to obtain particular scarce imported consumption necessities under circumstances in which the country maintains a diminished capacity to earn foreign currency for their purchase through trade.  The imposition of taxes may also be a kind of economic violence.  Thus, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall recognized that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy” (McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)).  Cigarette taxes, beyond the immediate goals of raising revenue and, hopefully, dissuading nicotine addicts from buying another carton, are, ultimately, oriented toward the goal of destroying an entire industrial supply chain, from tobacco cultivation, through processing and marketing of a legally-sanctioned good.  The legal or effective establishment of a monopoly might, likewise, be seen as an economic weapon in transformative violence.  The British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, which established a legal exemption from export duties for tea sold by the British East India Company in North America, involves just such an act of offensive violence, intended to undercut North American merchants and shippers not exempted from paying taxes on tea to establish a monopoly.  This action provoked the very defensive/reactive violence that has so captivated the contemporary American political right, the Boston Tea Party, and set in train a number of events culminating in the overthrow of British rule in the North American colonies.

Organized labor has always recognized the power of its own range of economic weapons in transformative violence.  Individual strikes as acts of violence against the property of an employer (i.e. depriving him/her of the immediate ability to produce goods or services with existing supplies of labor) regardless of whether there happens to be any defensive/reactive violence against strikers (e.g. bringing in scab workers; arresting strike leaders) and regardless of whether strikers physically damage the property of the employer – the UAW sit-down strikers at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant #1 in Flint, Michigan in 1936-37 actually performed necessary maintenance on the machines that they had forcibly idled while they occupied the facility.  On a more broad level, the idea of general strike has played very heavily on the minds of European leftists for over century.  The French theorist Georges Sorel made the idea of the general strike, embracing all sectors of an economy, the centerpiece of his larger theory of the formative value of transformative violence, arguing that the symbolic value of the general strike (or its mythological appeal) resided in its ability to shake the “working classes” out the embrace of the morally decadent spectacle of bourgeois consumerism – that taking the power at their disposal into their hands to bring the economy to its knees would revive the faith of workers in their own capacity to re-craft society in their image. 

            Violence is basic and fundamental to the human condition – the alternative is the permanent stasis of humanity as a species against a changing environment, implying certain eventual extinction.  Our lives, as individuals and collectively as individual societies and as a species, are continuously changing by our hands.  Every change in the life of an individual or of the society around him/her brought about by human hands is, by definition, an act of violence (good or bad).  If, in this sense, the violent acts that I’ve evaluated here are big, broadly experienced events, violence on a small scale between individuals is still violence, and all violence is subject to the dual rationalities of subjectively-defined moral consequences and instrumental efficiency.  I have already considered, in a previous entry, the instrumentality of firearms.  There are appropriate contexts to use firearms to commit violent acts and there are places where firearms are just not efficient for the acts we are trying to commit.  The same thing can be said for killing technologies in general.  If, for example, we desire “regime change” in, say, Iran, are there more efficient ways to achieve this than utilizing the tools of war?  What about using economic weapons like sanctions to cripple the Ayatollahs?  What about other kinds of economic weapons that confer benefits on the country, rather than exacting costs, in order to transform their behavior and make the regime act in ways that conform to our interests?  What weapons are most likely to get the job that we want done accomplished?

            Then there is the separate question of moral consequences, which is not really a separate question – the perception of moral implications always shapes our conception of what is necessary and/or sufficient to achieve the changes that we are trying to effect.  We are always simultaneously asking whether the ends justify the means while we evaluate what means are best suited to getting the job done.  Context, again, is everything and there are no absolutes, enforceable under every possible context.  Most importantly, every set of moral evaluations on violent acts is subjectively formed from the limited perspectives of the perpetrators, the beneficiaries, the victims, and the relatively impartial observers.            

With all this in mind, as someone who is committed to changing the world in particular ways, where do guns fit in when the ends supported by transformative violent acts happen to be ends that I agree with?  For example, can I categorically rule out the tactics employed by groups like the Weathermen/Weather Underground as morally inconsistent with the sort of transformative vision that I have in mind?  Maybe the bombings and other tactics employed by these radicals were simply instrumentally unsuited/inefficient given the possibilities for radical change available in the 1970s (a vision of revolutionary change too Blanquist – configured on small conspiratorial groups – to conform to my own preferences for democracy).  Under other circumstances, the situation might be different.  Guns and other killing technologies are always only instruments that can be put to use by human beings to commit (good and bad) violent acts.  Satyagraha is also a tool, however, and, under some circumstances, a useful and efficient tool for violent change – it did, after all, help in securing the independence of the world’s second largest country from imperial rule and its American variation helped to secure civil rights for African-Americans in the U.S. South (and, finally, given the numbers of people it requires to work, it can be very democratic)!  Ultimately, I cannot answer the question of where guns fit in a portrait of revolutionary/transformative violence because I cannot identify all of the possible contexts in which guns might be efficient to the ends I am seeking.  That said, could it ever really make sense to take guns completely off the table as a means to achieve change?