That, along with a thorough-going misunderstanding of the second amendment, is the substance of Socialist Action's two articles on the recent school massacre in Florida.
The first, by Bruce Lesnick and modestly entitled A surefire plan to address gun violence, advocates such reasonable & relevant goals as
- Free, single-payer Medicare for all
- Free quality education for all
- Guaranteed jobs for all
- Slash the war budget
- Abolish the "War on Drugs"
and last, but certainly not least,
- Address the root causes of depression, anxiety and alienation.
Nobody ever accused our Trotskyist friends of being practical.
At bottom the whole article is a slur on poor people, who are painted as mindless victims/puppets of some all-powerful ruling class. Consider, for example, this sentence:
People who are happy, healthy, loved, well-educated, and constructively employed rarely become mass shooters.One should add--just to be fair--that people who are unhappy, unhealthy, unloved, poorly educated, and unemployed also rarely become mass shooters. Fortunately mass shooters are an unusual breed. Indeed, there seems to be little correlation between the listed traits and becoming a mass shooter. The Columbine shooters, for example, arose from stable, middle-class families.
I've never been poor myself, but I did spend a year in Uganda--a country with poverty beyond the imagination of nearly all Americans. I didn't meet a single mass murderer there. Accusing poor people of being mass murderers just because they're poor is a slander.
To buttress their case that all problems in the universe have to be solved before one can make a dent in school shootings, Mr. Lesnick cites a recent book by Johann Hari entitled Lost Connections--Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression.... Mr. Hari's thesis is that the biological causes of depression are exaggerated, with more blame properly assigned to factors including childhood trauma, meaningful values, and status & respect. (Even Socialist Action's ambitious program won't address those concerns.)
I think discounting genetic and brain-chemical causes puts Mr. Hari outside consensus opinion. Still, even if he's right it hardly proves Socialist Action's case. For just as there's no clear link between poverty and random homicide, so also there is no real connection between depression and high school shootings. How many millions of people are depressed? And what tiny fraction of them go on to become high school shooters? Depression isn't much of an indicator--I think Mr. Hari's book is irrelevant here.
The fact is that school shootings are so rare that no good statistical profile of the malefactors exists. Obviously there's a screw loose somewhere. I'll hazard that it's biological as much as anything, but even if I'm wrong it's silly to think that anything on Socialist Action's to-do list is actually going to solve the problem.
Gun control won't solve the problem, either. Socialist Action also opposes gun control, but their reasoning is so absurdly ludicrous as to embarrass the NRA. The offending article is by Gary Bills, entitled Gun control & workers' militias: How socialists view the issues, originally published in 2007.
Mr. Bills completely misunderstands the second amendment, which reads in full:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.Mr. Bills interprets this to mean that the people have the right to form a "well-regulated militia," thus justifying his call for workers' militias. He claims that the original impetus of the amendment was precisely to form such vigilante groups. But he's got it precisely wrong, since of course the supreme court has never in the history of the republic interpreted the amendment in that way.
The modern name for a "well-regulated militia" is the police department. The amendment rightly points out that, without a police department, civilization could not long endure. It insists, however, that despite the existence of a police department, citizens still have the right to keep and bear arms for use in their own self-defense.
- Citizens do not have the right to form vigilante squads, such as what Socialist Action suggests in its title. Pursuing criminals is the duty of the "well-regulated militia."
- Similarly, citizens do not have the right to own military-style weapons, which cannot generally be used for self-defense. The responsibility for the armed forces is vested in the president, not in individual citizens.
The way I might rephrase the amendment for our age is Citizens have the right to armed self-defense until the police arrive. Since it typically takes the police 20 minutes to get anywhere, the first line of any defense is the citizen, many of whom own guns for that purpose. They have a constitutional right to do so.
Or, put another way, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
Admittedly, my reformulation doesn't take into account the utter incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff's office, who were actually on the scene but then didn't do anything. Surely that re-emphasizes the importance of the second amendment.
The problem with "gun-free zones" is that they deprive citizens of their constitutional right to defend themselves and their neighbors. I think such zones are (or at least should be) unconstitutional. I agree wholeheartedly with President Trump's sentiments on the issue.
Crackpot school shooters will not be dissuaded by gun control. All that will do is render students and teachers defenseless in the face of evil.
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