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Title: Gun Control? No, Youth Liberation! Author: CrimethInc. Date: March 20, 2018 Language: en Topics: gun control, youth liberation, student movement Source: Retrieved on 16th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/03/20/gun-control-no-youth-liberation-mass-shootings-school-walkouts-getting-free
Following the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School last month and
ahead of the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC this coming weekend,
people all around the United States are talking about gun violence. As
politicians seek to exploit horrific tragedies to consolidate even more
power for the state and channel youth outrage into support for the
Democratic Party, we have to direct attention back to the structural
factors that cause these mass killings in the first place. We’ve
prepared the following poster, zine, and handbill addressing the root
causes of school violence and the solutions that genuine grassroots
organizing can offer. Please print these out to distribute at your local
high school, walkout, or protest!
Another mass shooting. We’re horrified, but we can’t say we’re
surprised. These shootings have been going on for as long as we can
remember. The victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School weren’t
even born when Columbine happened—and mass shootings have only gotten
worse since then. Four of the ten deadliest mass shootings in American
history have taken place in the last two years.
Why the last two years? The answer tells us a lot about this society.
2016 and 2017 saw a wave of backlash against the struggles and
visibility of queer and trans people, women, and people of color,
especially the Black Lives Matter movement. The reactions came in many
forms: “men’s rights,” the alt-right, the Trump campaign. But all of
them were based in the anxiety that straight, white men are losing their
power over society—and it’s no secret that mass shooters tend to be
angry white men with a history of hating women.
Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a black church in South Carolina
in 2015, left behind a manifesto claiming that black people are inferior
and bewailing the supposed “disappearance” of the white race.
Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in
2016, was training to become a police officer. He had physically abused
his former wife on a regular basis.
Stephen Paddock, the white Trump-supporting millionaire who carried out
the deadliest civilian mass shooting in American history in 2017 in Las
Vegas, was notorious for berating his girlfriend in public.
Devin Kelley, who beat his wife and stepchild while in the Air Force,
looked up to Dylann Roof and copied his attack, entering a church in
Sutherland Springs, Texas in 2017 and shooting over forty people—25 of
them fatally.
Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School, posted comments online degrading Muslims and threatening to kill
anti-fascists. His classmates knew that he wore a MAGA hat, had been
abusive to his ex-girlfriend, and had assaulted her boyfriend and called
him racial slurs. Later, it was discovered that Cruz carved swastikas
into the ammunition magazines he used on the day of the shooting.
The problem of mass shootings goes much deeper than just the last couple
of years. It cuts to the heart of American culture. Our whole society is
built on a competition to take power over others: rich over poor,
politicians over citizens, men over women and gender non-conforming
people, white people over people of color. Politicians on both sides of
the gun control debate agree on the need for more resources to diagnose
and treat mental illness; but the desire to have power over others is
not a mental illness, it’s a social one. Mass shootings will continue as
long as this competition for power is the basis of our society.
The US government is holding 2.3 million people captive in prison—as
many people as there were in the Soviet gulag system at its peak. Police
routinely brutalize and murder people of color with impunity. In 2017,
cops shot and killed almost a thousand people, over twice the number of
people who died in mass shootings that year. Where are the Democrats
clamoring for gun control when cops routinely shoot unarmed teens?
The United States itself was founded on genocide, slavery, and white
supremacy. Last year’s shooting in Las Vegas may have been the deadliest
civilian shooting in US history, but the two deadliest gun massacres on
American soil were carried out by the military—against former slaves in
the Fort Pillow Massacre and against the Lakota Nation in the Wounded
Knee Massacre. Soldiers shot between 200 and 300 people in each. We
won’t even mention the countless invasions, coups, and massacres that
the US has perpetrated elsewhere around the world.
White people have carried out some of the most violent acts in the
history of the world, but you don’t hear them described as terrorists
when they shoot up a school or bomb another country. Why? Violence
directed down the hierarchy gets normalized and becomes invisible, while
violence from those lower on the hierarchy against those above them
provokes shock and outrage.
This is why those in power cannot offer real solutions—they’re too
invested in the same system of power that causes mass shootings.
What’s different this time is that instead of waiting for solutions from
leaders, one of the groups targeted by mass shootings—students—took
power back into their own hands. Not power over, but power with each
other.
In the days after the Parkland shooting, teens across the country walked
out of their schools. On the one-month anniversary, the largest school
walkouts since the civil rights movement took place. It’s only thanks to
disruptive direct action outside the normal political channels that the
topic of mass shootings has remained part of the national conversation.
Authorities have responded by threatening suspension in some school
districts and imposing limits on the walkouts in others. (“OK, but just
for 17 minutes.”) In Florida, politicians and even the NRA hurriedly
responded to student demands in order to seem relevant. Whether they
were for or against gun control, they all wanted to send the same
message: “You have to go through us to change things.”
It’s time to stop depending on adults who are invested in America’s
system of power to solve the problems it produces. It’s time for young
people to get together and set out on a different path.
Gun control is a false solution—and not for the reasons you hear from
the NRA. In fact, the NRA has backed the most significant steps towards
gun control in order to impose limits on black people’s efforts to
achieve liberation.
The NRA was founded in 1871, immediately after the original version of
the KKK was outlawed. One of their primary goals was to keep guns out of
the hands of recently freed slaves. Later, in the South, the NRA crafted
the legislation and licensing schemes that denied Martin Luther King,
Jr. the weapon he applied for after his house was firebombed. You’d
never know it from NRA propaganda, but modern gun control began when the
NRA backed Ronald Reagan in outlawing open carry in California in order
to disarm the Black Panthers’ armed citizen patrols.
The United States government is racist—its cops are racist, its courts
are racist, and any new laws they pass will be used chiefly against the
poor people and people of color who are always targeted by the state.
More laws won’t protect us when it’s the same racist system enforcing
them.
Making schools even more like prisons won’t give us freedom or safety.
School is already violent. Teachers focus on obedience more than
education, administrators control where you can be and when, school cops
routinely brutalize and criminalize students. The cop at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School did nothing when he was needed most!
There is no safety without self-determination. The people who knew best
about the threat that Nikolas Cruz posed were his own classmates—they
knew about his bigotry, the threats he repeatedly made, and the way he
was abusive to his ex-girlfriend. The solution is not to deputize
students to report on each other to adults, but to take that power from
teachers and administrators and school security and give it back to the
students themselves. Students should have power over their lives and the
conditions of their education.
Mental health efforts aren’t enough. The alienation we feel from each
other in a world mediated by technology and the ways the economy and the
school system condition us to compete against each other can make anyone
feel worthless, helpless, and desperate for power. We need to create a
society in which our self-worth isn’t based on competition, in which
each person’s well-being is understood to depend on everyone else’s.
Linking mental health efforts to state control, surveillance, and
incarceration will just give the state another tool to increase
incarceration and social control. The government doesn’t sincerely care
about stopping mass shootings—they’ve been getting worse for decades now
without any change coming from the halls of power.
Try youth liberation! If you can shut down your school, why not
downtown? Why not the highway? The economy itself? The same people who
are letting oil companies poison our water, helping racist police get
away with murder, keeping us from getting the health care we need, and
trying to force us back into the boxes of gender—they’re the ones who
want students to stay in their place, obeying orders and conforming and
regurgitating what teachers tell you. Administrators need students for
their schools, but you don’t need them.
Start a secret club for the abolition of principals. Form a union to
defend students from authoritarian administrators. Host viewing parties
or reading groups about cool ideas and discuss what you would want to do
and learn if you were in control of your own lives. Students like you
have organized assemblies in Quebec, forced back police lines in Chile,
shut down airports in Mexico, and stood up to tanks in Tiananmen Square.
You can network with young people around the world who are rebelling
against the same things. Talk to each other, learn from each other’s
efforts, and take that inspiration to the place you live. Adults might
be able to help you with these things—provided they’re not too busy
trying to control everything—but they can’t do them for you.
Solidarity! The student-led fight to end mass shootings connects to lots
of other struggles for liberation. People working against police
oppression can tell you how cops perpetrate and exacerbate gun violence
in black communities. Anti-fascists can tell you how they track white
supremacists who aim to promote the toxic masculinity and white
resentment that cause mass shootings. Agitators from worker-led unions
can share ideas about how to organize and make decisions collectively.
Women and gender non-conforming people who practice self-defense can
share techniques that young people can use too.
Show up to other actions against oppression. See what you can learn—and
what you can offer.
Don’t hold back. You don’t have to wait until you’re 18—or for the
elections if you’re over 18—to get organized and take action. This is
your chance. RIGHT NOW. Don’t let adults set limits on your imagination.
Don’t let political parties or school boards tell you what counts as
appropriate protest. They can’t run those schools without you. Together,
we can make the changes they never will.