THE RIFLE ON THE WALL: “The political principle at stake is simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force, and, obversely, to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the people... This is not a right-wing position...

The notion that an armed populace should have a measure of power of resistance to the heavily armed power of the state is, if anything, a populist principle, and has always been part of the revolutionary democratic traditions of the left. Per George, above, and Karl, here: “The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition… Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

...From a left-socialist perspective, then, the concentration of wealth and the concentration of armed power in the hands of a few, are both bad ideas—and the one has everything to do with the other... “regulations” are limitations on a right, and rights, though never absolute, are to be valued.

...Those who hold that gun ownership is a fundamental political right correctly perceive, and are right to resist, the intended threat of its incremental elimination in gun-control laws that will have little to no practical effect, other than to demand more acts of compliance and submission to the armed authority of the state...

When you ban guns, you are not just eliminating a right, you are creating a criminal offense – in fact a whole set of new crimes? How many months or years will you have to be confined by the armed guards of the state for having a rifle with a pistol grip or a 10-round magazine? How many of those fifty million gun owners are you going to lock up, after raiding their homes?

One has to be kind of obtuse not to understand that a War on Guns, no matter how liberally inspired, will end up like all other such campaigns. It will create crime and pre-crime, and, as Kevin Carson says, “take the level of police statism, lawlessness and general social pathology up a notch in the same way Prohibition and the Drug War have done.”

Can we really give up the right to gun ownership without giving up other rights? Can we pretend not to know that any new, stricter regime of “gun control” enforced by the American capitalist state will result in a greater curtailment of many rights, in more surveillance, in more criminalization of dissident radicalism, directed fiercely and selectively against the opponents of racism and imperialism?

...The net effect of eliminating the right of citizens to possess firearms will be to increase the power of the armed capitalist state. It will not be a more pacific, but a more authoritarian society, one in which the whole panoply of armed police we’ve already come to accept as part of the social landscape will be even more ubiquitous, while citizens’ compliance and submission will be more thoroughly assured. As Patrick Higgins puts it: “The formula for gun control seems pretty obvious to me. Less [sic] guns for the people who are most likely to need them, more guns for cops and soldiers and those sympathetic to them.”

...Here’s the thing, and everybody knows it: Whatever strictest possible gun-control regime is instituted by favored liberal and moderate politicians, the family who threw that party will still have all the guns that it wants at its disposal. Donald Trump (who always had one in New York City), Diane Feinstein, and their ilk will still have their carry permits. Goldman Sachs will have all the weapons it wants for its private army, which will still be working as an allied brigade of the supposedly public branch of the ruling class’s armed forces. There will be a system of waivers, fees, and private security armies for anyone in the .01%.

...Rights empower. Power is dangerous. Guns—certainly the personal firearms that are in question—carry a limited but real measure of inherent power, and therefore danger, that everyone should respect. Indeed, it is because guns are dangerous that the right to own one is important...

Let’s have a discussion on the left about reasonable gun regulations that firmly and sincerely recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental political right, which deserves a place of honor on our wall of historical achievements.

As Ida B. Wells put it, in the cauldron of the Klan’s lynching fever in1892, learning and teaching a valuable lesson (that Orwell would later echo): “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves … and prevented it.””

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/12/the-rifle-on-the-wall-a-left-argument-for-gun-rights/