Gun Control, Abolition, and Transformative Justice

On May 18, 2018 Dimitrios Pagourtzis walked into an art class at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas and began shooting, ultimately killing ten people and wounding more than a dozen others. Of course, by now, this scene is almost banal in the United States. So common are such acts of mass murder - and so feverishly documented and ubiquitously broadcast - that Paige Curry, a student at Santa Fe High School, resigned to the inevitability of the horror that had befallen her, said in an interview that “I’ve always kind of felt that it would eventually happen here, too.” 

Just as the shooting - or, at least, a shooting - was inevitable, so too the responses to the shooting at Santa Fe High School rolled out according to the iron laws apparently governing such things. Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick appeared on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos to blame abortions, video games, and divorce.  Nearly simultaneously, newly minted NRA-president Oliver North appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to decry a “culture of violence,” referencing violent films, television, and video games. He also claimed a (non-existent) link between mass shootings and Ritalin. On the Left, of course - and, in fact, among the majority of Americans - calls for increased regulation of firearms again resounded.

Such calls are by now orthodoxy among Liberals and Progressives. Nonetheless, there remain many on the radical Left who resist gun control for a number of important reasons. As Nivedita Majumdar has detailed in her defense of gun control, Left arguments against increased regulation are based on two significant premises. First, that the criminal legal system in the United States is hopelessly racist such that tighter restrictions on gun ownership will be used to further criminalize and surveil people of color, exposing them to even greater amounts of state violence. And, second, that armed resistance is sometimes necessary. Since stricter gun laws would compromise the ability of the oppressed to defend themselves against their oppressors, the argument holds, the Left must support rights to gun ownership. Majumdar criticizes both of these arguments.

Unlike Majumdar, I take the first argument very seriously. In contrast to what she suggests, I do not think the criminal legal system is an otherwise neutral tool which is only applied or used in a racist way by bigoted individuals. Rather, as I see it, the system is constructed on fundamentally racist premises. As I have argued previously, the modern state is not an expression of the will of the people so much as it is an expression of the rule of dominant groups over subordinate groups. It is important that we consider concretely who will be affected by new gun control legislation and how they will be affected.

According to Mujamdar, those who support laws against homicide, sexual assault, and other violent crimes are inconsistent in their opposition to gun control legislation. After all, these other laws are also applied in racially biased ways. “If in the cases of those laws,” she writes, “the answer is to challenge racist implementation (emphasis in original), rather than the laws