Originally posted on Syncretic Politics September 2019
If you want more military style policing, warrantless surveillance, warrantless searches and seizures, and mass incarceration then the parkland kids have the perfect plan for you. Their plan includes creating a director of gun violence prevention, a federal gun registry, an assault weapons ban (read: scary looking semi-autos with pistol grips), red flag laws, and a mandatory buy-back (i.e. armed robbery) program. Just like all authoritarian ideologies this peace plan is based on a number of false premises and lies. For example: mentally ill people are inherently violent (an old eugenics lie), you can infer causation from correlation data (post hoc fallacy), and apparently our constitutional rights are optional and can be discarded if they become an inconvenience to power hungry psychopath
The bill of rights is not a buffet where you can pick and choose which one’s you’ll uphold at your own convenience. They are all inextricably linked; you cannot compromise one without compromising the others. Gun grabbers have already demonstrated this with such awful proposals as red flag laws and no buy lists, which not only removes firearms but also the right to due process and 4th amendment property protections. We have already witnessed the erosion of our constitutional rights with the war on drugs and the war on terror. The war on drugs gave us civil asset forfeiture, which is more often than not used to rob legitimate businesses of their hard earned money, Anti-Structuring Statutes, which allows LEOs to wipe out your bank account for making multiple deposits under an arbitrary amount, stop and frisk, an unconstitutional policy even gun control leftists protested, has allowed police to force college students to become informants and has led to the gutting almost all of our 4th amendment protections against searches and seizures without probable cause or a warrant. The war on terror has resulted in warrantless and suspicion less surveillance through the prism program , National Security letters, infiltration of minority communities, and cell site simulators. The war on terror has allowed the Feds to add Americans to a no fly list or FBI terrorist watch list and deprive them of certain liberties without their knowledge or ability to challenge their decision. Arming local police departments and sheriff’s offices with military grade weaponry such as .50 BMGs, mine resistant MRAPS, and tanks, things you would only need in an actual war zone, has been another perhaps intended effect of the war on terror. The war on terror has been the single most overused excuse for expanding the scope of executive power to allow the president to commit atrocities that we could only imagine a tin pot dictator doing such as extrajudicial execution and indefinite detention of American citizens. It is beyond naïve to think a war on “gun violence” would not produce similar mission creep. Of course, gun grabbers are really only concerned about private violence. State violence both as it currently exists and as a means to disarm American citizens is perfectly acceptable to them. If their plan came to fruition, you wouldn’t hear a peep from them about the people killed and maimed in no knock raids to seize weapons, as they currently do with drug raids, or the number of additional lives ruined in our injustice system for the heinous crime of possessing a firearm without the government’s permission. They don’t care that their plan would create a national police state where federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI and ATF, have absolute power. Jack bootlickers like David Hogg wouldn’t care about these unintended consequences as long as it doesn’t personally inconvenience them.
The Real Solution to Gun Violence
As I’ve already pointed out in a previous post, mass shootings and other forms of violent crimes are positively correlated with higher levels of economic deprivation, income inequality and low social mobility. This is a better starting point for dealing with something as nebulous as gun violence than trying to make causal inferences from isolated case studies that use correlational data. While the level of income inequality, and the mass shootings it predicts, cannot be directly reduced we can take small steps in this direction by relieving local and state tax burdens on lower income people, providing more affordable housing options, access to cheaper credit, higher education, and more lucrative job opportunities. Reforms in taxation, city planning, higher education, and occupational licensing, would also be needed to encourage greater social mobility and narrow the distance between social classes.