“I, [patroller’s name], do swear, that I will, as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God.”
—Slave Patroller’s Oath, North Carolina, 1828
The epidemic of mass killings continues to worsen across the U.S. Empire. For several years, since 2013, the rate of mass shootings in the U.S. has markedly and steadily climbed, increasing from 272 incidents in 2014 to 336, 382, 348, 336, 417, and 610 in the successive years, culminating in a staggering 692 mass shootings in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive. In 2022, as of June 21, there have already been 278 mass shooting incidents — 46.33 mass shootings per month. The GVA and other research centers and media outlets define a mass shooting as one in which “four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not including the shooter.”
Data taken from the Gun Violence Archive, the Washington Post, and Mapping Police Violence. Years with no entries are years where no data was available. Data from 2022 has been extrapolated from data available on 8/18/2022.
During that same period, police officers in the United States have shot about 2,000 people per year, killing over 1,000 per year: 1,850 in 2014, killing 1,049 people; 2,048 in 2015, killing 1,103 people; 2,017 in 2016, killing 1,070 people; 2,147 in 2017, killing 1,094 people; 2,189 in 2018, killing 1,145 people; 2,082 in 2019, killing 1,096 people; 2,224 in 2020, killing 1,132 people; and 2,222 in 2021, killing 1,145 people. So far, in the first six months of 2022, police have shot 1,180 people, killing over 500. This suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has had no significant effect on the rates of police violence; not even a mass quarantine situation, in which most people remain self-isolated in their homes, leaving only for essential services (grocery shopping, medical emergencies, etc.), can deter the police from shooting and murdering people. Meanwhile, on the other hand, the rate of mass shootings has exploded by over 50% annually since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Mass shootings have increased about 250% since 2014; police shootings have increased by 120%. Although there is not a one-to-one causal connection, there is a link between these numbers. They are connected through the increasing militarization of white militias and the spread of white terror groups like the Oathkeepers, Patriot Front, and NSC-131. All of these organizations serve the same purpose as the police: they are all active elements of a reactionary garrison that suppress class struggle through racialized violence.
Every established capitalist media outlet, whether it brands itself “liberal”, “conservative”, or “non-partisan”, profoundly misunderstands and mystifies the problem of “gun violence.” On the one hand, mass shootings are portrayed as isolated crimes committed by lone, “deranged” individuals — usually middle-class white men. On the other hand, only the most surface-level connection is drawn between each of these thousands of purportedly isolated tragedies, namely the tool — the gun — common to them all.
This leads to the same exhausting debate, down to exactly the same talking points, repeated in the aftermath of every press-covered mass shooting. It goes like this: On the one hand, the “liberals” point to firearms as the obvious common denominator, and point to the high levels of gun ownership and the ease with which guns, and particularly military-grade weapons (e.g., AR-15s), are purchased in the U.S. as the single factor that sets this country apart from all similarly developed countries (Britain, Japan, Denmark, Canada, and so on), where epidemics of “gun violence” are unheard of. Thus, they propose “gun control” regulation. On the other hand, the “conservatives”, unwilling to concede even the obvious point that guns might have something to do with mass shootings, instead shift focus to the individual shooter, blaming “mental illness”, and to a supposed “moral decline” in the U.S. Empire’s culture, blaming a societal departure from conservative Christian “values” and any number of cultural boogeymen — atheism, evolutionary biology, video games, hip-hop music, abortion rights, absentee fathers, and so on.
These positions are restated endlessly in soundbites, op-eds, Internet memes, and comment sections.
Politicians then react to “public opinion” accordingly: The left wing of fascism, represented by a “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, makes half-hearted attempts to introduce “gun control” regulations, such as increased restrictions on gun sales, harsher sentencing laws, and, in some cases, outright bans on civilian firearm ownership. All such legislation is inevitably defeated in the U.S. Federal Government, as well as in most state governments. The right wing of fascism, represented by the Republic Party and “moderate” Democrats, pass legislation on everything except for guns. Both wings of the U.S. Empire’s fascist government make mealy-mouthed statements about “mental illness,” despite the fact that persons who suffer from psychiatric disorders are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence — to succumb to suicide or to be murdered, most often by a family member, an intimate partner, or the police — than to be the perpetrators, and despite the fact that most mass shooting perpetrators are not driven by psychiatric illnesses, but by misogyny, racism, homophobia, and other basic features of fascist ideology. It is no wonder, then, that both factions of fascism in the U.S. government, left and right, Democrat and Republican, perversely take advantage of the terror instilled in the populace by continual mass shootings to continually expand police and “counter-terrorism” forces, jails and prisons, and restrictions on the rights of disabled people, especially those with psychiatric illnesses. Meanwhile, elementary schools are forced to carry out absurd duck-and-cover drills to “prepare” children for mass-shooting situations, which has the effect of repeatedly traumatizing them.
The debate dies down and the energy behind reform efforts fizzles out as one news cycle passes into the next, only to be reenacted the next time a mass shooting captures international attention.
Both of these positions, the “liberal” and the “conversative”, contain kernels of truth, but both profoundly and fundamentally confuse and mystify the problem of mass shootings in particular and “gun violence” in general. On the one hand, it is true that, in order to kill people using guns, it is first necessary to acquire guns. This is easily done in the U.S.: Rates of civilian-owned firearms per person are higher in this country, where there are approximately 6 civilian-owned guns for every 5 civilians, than in any other country in the world; firearms are purchased and carried in this country with remarkable ease, are stocked ubiquitously in stores, and are available in more powerful, ergo more deadly, varieties in this country than in any other. The “liberals” are “correct” insofar as they’ve stated the obvious, but rattling off data cannot alone explain why certain individuals commit murder, let alone why many individuals commit mass murder in one specific country. On the other hand, the “conservatives” have it “right” when they say that something is “wrong” with a person who commits a mass shooting, and that something is “wrong” with a society in which mass shootings are commonplace; it is true that a form of social sickness, which might be called a “cultural” sickness, particularly among white men, that lies at the root of our “gun violence” epidemic. But this sickness can’t be diagnosed by pointing to various countercultural boogeymen, or by appealing to moral panic. The real “cultural sickness” lies much deeper in the fabric of American society, and lingers much closer to home than any WASP would comfortably admit.
These two factors, a deeply-rooted “cultural” sickness and an abundance of guns in the hands of civilians, are, in fact, inextricably connected. What connects the murderous attitudes of certain white men and the prevalence of weapons of war in their civilian-fascist hands is their role in the continued subjugation of the many colonially oppressed peoples and nationalities within the U.S. Empire. Gun “culture” and violence in the U.S. was originally created, and is daily recreated, by the realities of this oppression, namely by the armament and recruitment of property-owning settlers as fascist stormtroopers. This facet of U.S. settler “culture” is an institutional pillar of the settler-colonial regime.
The Historical Basis of U.S. Gun Culture
To get to the historical roots of this institution, we must get to the historical roots of the modern colonial order itself.
As firearm technology spread through Europe, every European state placed restrictions on their use and availability. Henry VII and Henry VIII of England both outlawed wheelock guns in the 15th and 16th century because they gave equity to the poor in combat. In 1541, English Parliament limited the ownership of handguns to nobility and freeholders who earned more than £100 a year from property holdings alone — at a time when the requirements for voting, considered restrictive, were a mere forty shillings a year.
During the early stages of Europe’s colonization of North America, the European powers constructed forts wherever they went; behind these defensive walls, they could safely reload their flintlocks and rain fire onto the Indigenous resistance fighters, who were struggling desperately to defend their territories, homes, and ways of life. This stamped the pattern of settlement with a martial character.
The European powers also used guns for diplomacy and economic warfare. They were also a valuable trade item, which the Europeans could sell to Indigenous hunters and warriors in exchange for resources, including assistance navigating the North American geography, that were vital to the settlers’ survival. Further, European settlers and merchants strategically sold guns to certain Indigenous communities and not others, in order to exploit existing social contradictions. By marking certain communities as conditional allies and selecting them for arms sales the colonizers could provide those communities with a military edge over their traditional rivals. This provoked asymmetric warfare among the Indigenous peoples of a given region, allowing the European colonizers to indirectly weaken the overall position of the Indigenous population of that region, and to preemptively nullify future Indigenous resistance. Such temporary alliances between the colonizers and Indigenous communities were also used to tie some societies to new settlements and trading outposts, effectively rendering those communities dependent on the nascent trans-Atlantic trade network.
Part of this strategy relied upon never sharing the technological forces involved in manufacturing firearms — ironworking and gunpowder, for example. As a result, once an Inidgenous people or community began to rely on European guns, they were compelled to continue trading with the colonizers to keep their weapons in working order and to maintain a supply of ammunition. This state of dependency was a key factor in the early colonization of the Americas.
On June 8, 1610, after a devastating war with the Powhatan, the besieged and starving Jamestown colony was rescued by the fleet of Lord De La Warr (he gives his title to Delaware). De La Warr subsequently transformed the colony into a military bastion. Every weapon became part of the general arsenal; every free man was inducted into the colonial militia. From then on, the policy of the Jamestown settlement changed, from one of fragile coexistence between the colonists and the Indigenous population, to one of indiscriminate extirpation.
The colonists launched genocidal raids against isolated communities, destroying them one by one. For this task, they adopted a barbaric tactic: The colonial militia would approach a village or encampment, often by night, fire a volley of muskets, and then rush in with sword, halberds, and torches drawn, murdering anyone they could reach and burning the settlement to the ground. Similar tactics were employed by the English settlers in Connecticut. By way of justifying their own brutality, the town of Milford, Connecticut passed a resolution stating: “Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.” In other words, the English settlers appointed themselves divine crusaders and committed genocide in the name of Christ. The Jamestown colony’s campaign against their Indigenous neighbors persisted until May 24, 1624, when the English Crown dissolved the Virginia Company and converted Virginia into a directly-ruled royal colony. The new colonial authorities were willing to make “peace” with select Indigenous communities along previously established lines.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony, through its General Court, declared in the preamble to their 1643 militia law that “as piety cannot bee maintained without church ordinances and officers, nor justice without laws & magistracy, no more can our safety & peace be preserved without military orders & officers.” Provisions were thus once again enacted to induct every free man in the colony into its militia. “Bring every man a musket or fowling piece,” wrote Edward Winslow of Plymouth, “Let your piece be long in the barrel; and fear not the weight of it, for most of our shooting is from stands.” The New England colonies sent commissioners in 1653 back to England in part to ask for even more guns and ammunition.
Firearms were not the singularly decisive factor in every invasion, occupation, and genocidal campaign launched by the European colonial empires; for example, the Spanish were repeatedly repulsed from southern Florida, despite their superior weaponry, due to their failure to missionize among the Indigenous peoples there. Even so, in the English psyche, firearms became the quintessential tool of conquest. Thomas Harriot, in his Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), proclaimed that settlers had “advantages against them [in] so many maner of waies, as by our discipline, our strange weapons, and devises else” and that, for the natives, “running away was their best defense.”
English colonial authorities viewed the defense of their outposts, settlements, and strongholds and the conquest of new territories as a collective duty, to be borne by all free white settlers. The English authorities passed laws requiring armament and participation in militias, so that bearing firearms shifted from a privilege enjoyed by the landed aristocracy and select professional soldiers to a general obligation of free men in the colonies. These laws, however expansionary, were still careful about circumscribing who could own firearms. Broadly, only white, Protestant, adult male property-holders could own guns. In 1637, Massachusetts disarmed the Antinomians, an unorthodox Puritan sect. Maryland disarmed its Catholics in 1670 and mandated prison terms for Catholics concealing arms in 1756; indentured servants and slaves could neither bear arms, nor serve in Maryland’s militia. Generally speaking, English colonial legislatures barred slaves and indentured servants, free Black people, non-assimilated natives, propertyless whites, most non-Protestant and heterodox Protestant Christians, and most non-Christians from owning firearms. Despite these restrictions on armament, the English colonial authorities encouraged and sometimes begged merchants to continue importing firearms. Liberal historians see this as a contradiction: Didn’t the colonial authorities know that, by their policy of maintaining settler militias, and thus by their enormous demand for arms imports, they would, sooner or later, allow some of those firearms to fall into the hands of the very same people — slaves, natives, indentured servants, and others — the settler militias were established to repress, terrorize, and extirpate? Perhaps the colonial authorities did know this, and perhaps they accepted it. As early as 1632, for instance, Virginia recognized that they faced a danger from their own indentured servants, and the House of Burgesses passed legislation to restrict their movements, as well as to ensure their masters went armed.
In 1676-77, Nathaniel Bacon of Jamestown disturbed the crown policy toward Indigenous peoples and led a rebellion against Royal Governor William Berkeley. The dispute centered on this very policy of forming strategic alliances with select Indigenous peoples and communities. Bacon and his co-conspirators harbored bloodthirsty ambitions of expanding into new territory by extirpating the Indigenous peoples, but were prevented by the English colonial authorities, who disallowed colonists from raiding and settling in the territories of their Indigenous allies. After a series of raids by the Doeg people, in retaliation for expansion into their territory, the governor organized militias to carry out massacres against the Doeg and other previously uninvolved communities, killing hundreds. But this didn’t appease Bacon, who mobilized a few hundred men from the Virginia colony, among them planters, indentured servants (white and Black), and slaves, into a militia that would carry out a genocidal campaign on multiple fronts in the region surrounding the colony. Berkeley wrote, “I would have preserved those Indians that I knew were houerly at our mercy to have beene our spies and intelligence.” By contrast, Bacon’s credo: “Our Design [is]… to ruin and extirpate all Indians in General.” Following the governor’s victory over Bacon’s rebellion, the English Crown implemented a more direct rule over its colonies and, in order to prevent future alliances between white indentured servants and Black slaves, hardened the legal demarcations of race in the regime of chattel slavery.
By the middle of the 18th century, the New England states were chronically short of arms and ammunition for their campaigns. In 1756, during the Seven Years War, the Connecticut General Court reported its militia was dangerously under-armed. New England was constantly requesting firearms from the Crown to replace those that degraded in the colonies where there were no gunsmiths to repair them. In 1758, Connecticut bought and impressed every gun it could find to supplement the eighteen hundred guns they had stored on hand. The General Court offered extra pay to those militia members who came with their own guns. By 1762, Prime Minister Pitt promised the governors of the North American colonies “Arms, Ammunitions, and Tents, . . . in the same Proportion and Manner as is done to the rest of the King’s Forces.” In the colonies, the citizen-militias were to be provisioned like royal soldiers.
Thousands of guns poured into the colonies to fight the French. As a result of this war, the North American colonies were suddenly very heavily armed. Thanks to the restrictions placed on gun ownership, the white Protestant population received them all. In the 1760s, the colonies took this newly armed, newly trained, battle-tested force of militiamen to fight against the Indigenous peoples all along the frontier. These were men who had trained with the Brown Bess and its bayonet; the old tactic of massed fire and charging had been updated. Now, the settler need not even discard his firearm during the charge, but could use the bayonet for close quarters fighting.
The Police Power
Following the American War of Independence, late-18th century reliance on the colonial (now state) militias was challenged by changing property relations in the new country. The war ended in 1783 and almost at once businesses in Europe ended their lines of credit with colonial merchants and demanded payment in currency. This vastly increased commodity prices in the new United States settler-republic, which the impoverished rural population was unable to meet. Class divisions opened in the North between urban merchant capital and rural smallholders. Those smallholders who were unable to pay their debts or meet their tax obligations had their plots and property seized by the courts, which were then purchased by the wealthy at foreclosure auctions.
On August 29 of 1786, a smallholder protest in Northampton Massachusetts prevented the state court from being held. When the court moved along its circuit to Worcester on September 5, more protesters arrived, complaining about the court’s seizures of their property. When the court called the militia to muster and disperse the protests, the militia refused. Daniel Shays, a poor farmhand, led another march to shut down the court at Springfield on September 26. If the court couldn’t open, it could not foreclose on anyone’s property.
In Springfield, the militia did muster, but Shays called up around 300 men to combat it, and the court refused to sit. In September and October, further protests shut down courts in Great Barrington, Concord, and Taunton. Shays organized 3,000 or so men and attempted to seize a federal armory. The governor of Massachusetts was forced to outfit a privately funded army to combat Shays and his men. The rebels were defeated, in part due to their disorganization in battle.
Shays and his followers, who had been acting in the tradition of the English leveling movements that periodically sprung up in Great Britain, had been attempting to establish a communal equality amongst all English settlers. After their defeat, eighteen of these rebels were hanged. Reliance on the settler-militia decayed as a result: in Worcester, the militia had not mustered. In Springfield, the militia had been ineffective. Worse, men who should have been part of the militia had gone over to join Shays, and only through hired mercenaries had they been stopped from taking control of the state.
The war of 1812 revealed the deficiency of the settler-militia for defense, during which the militias proved just as poor at repelling the English crown as they had at stopping Daniel Shays. A stronger Federal army was the solution and by 1830, the militias were essentially defunct. In their wake, and as the contradiction between the slave power of the south and the wage labor of the north intensified, vigilantes began to appear throughout the settler-republic.
Vigilantism, the self-arming of private individuals, took over where the militia failed. The vigilantes were nearly always middle-class men. They formed gangs like the Alabama Slicks, roaming the countryside, protecting petit-bourgeois and bourgeois white property. In 1835, a vigilante gang in Vicksburg hanged five gamblers. The Slicks and other gangs enforced the law when they felt the government wasn’t taking a firm enough hand. “Slick law” in Alabama included beating free Blacks and terrorizing anyone who they felt were impeding their “rights in life and property” as one newspaper put it.
The purest incarnation of the vigilante gang was the slave patrol. In the years leading up to the civil war, vigilantism and slave patrols increased in frequency, in violence, and in arms.
Southern violence accelerated from 1835, the year that abolitionists launched a major pamphlet campaign and sparked a slave-insurrection hysteria. Southern mobs beat and burned their abolitionist opponents, with the direct support of the authorities. At the slightest whiff of slave insurrection, local whites requested (and were delivered) guns from their local government. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave these slave patrols and vigilantes the authority to take into their custody “runaways,” even in free states, and often subjected even those who were “free” Black persons to their violence and intimidation.
The 19th century marked the emergence of the institution of the police in response to the intensifying class struggle and the sharpening contradictions between the planter-aristocrats, who relied on slave power, and merchants and industrialists and their workers, who relied on wage labor. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first U.S. police force; New York established one in 1845. Albany and Chicago established theirs in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, Newark and Baltimore in 1857. It is no coincidence that the settler-republic was rocked by its civil war in 1861-65, and then the Long Depression of 1873-1896, just after the founding of a new form of settler civil order. The one did not prefigure the other, but rather the growing class conflict first necessitated the formation of the police to reign it in, and then broke out in the U.S. Civil War, the St. Louis Commune, and mounting strikes, riots, and rebellions of the late 19th and early 20th century.
But what do these police have to do with guns?
The Continuing Basis of U.S. Gun Culture
“[C]olonization work to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.”
—Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955
The United States police force is funded to the tune of $276 billion from state and local governments. This is over a quarter of the U.S. federal defense budget — $773 billion — and for good reason. As we have seen, control over the ownership of guns, not precisely what liberals mean when they say “gun control,” has been impressed into the legal structure (what Marxists sometimes call the “superstructure”) since the first English colonies erected their fortress walls on North American soil. Fortress America, the fortified, white (formerly white Protestant, although the religious restrictions have been eased throughout the 20th century to accommodate a larger demographic of Europeans and expand the ruling class in the face of major demographic changes in the country), settler-stronghold exists first and foremost as an economic reality and, secondarily, as a social idea, a thing which a sufficient number of people believe in to give it real social force.
The white population of the U.S. Empire feels the need for armament very strongly. Their list of fears and needs is astounding: the ongoing settler extermination of Indigenous peoples (the U.S. Supreme Court just held that the doctrine of tribal sovereignty need no longer be recognized by the states in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta); the continued presence of slave patrols and searchers for guns in the New Afrikan communities of the Black Belt and the Federally-created ghettos; and the fear marketed and sold to white families that the lawless, the anarchistic, the “thugs,” namely social revolutionaries, Indigenous peoples, and New Afrika will seek to overturn the unjust social order by force (for this is the underlying message of every gun advertisement and of every “good guy with a gun” trumpetd by the National Rifle Association). The market of gun making and gun ownership has become a substantial driver in the expansion of firearm ownership in the U.S.
There is another source of this commodity fetishism, this drive to own guns as symbols of “freedom,” “manhood” (white manhood in particular), and “liberty.” This derives from the real economic exploitation of the periphery by the U.S. Empire. From its early days as a settler-republic, the U.S. has now expanded to incorporate into its territories most of the earth. Alexander Hamilton’s drive to expand weapons manufactories has found its final expression in the firms that drive U.S. imperialist war: Colt, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Sig Sauer, Alliant Technosystems, Beretta, Raytheon, and all the other large- and small-arms manufacturers that hold contracts with the federal government and the police. In order to maintain a sufficient number of arms to supply the U.S. imperialist armies and the police — the garrison-militias that maintain property relations in the U.S. — these manufacturers must constantly expand their production according to the laws of capitalist accumulation.
50% of white households report owning one gun, as compared to 30% of Black households and 21% of Latinx households. 70% of all gun owners report that they own the gun for protection rather than for hunting, sport shooting, or for a job. Police in the U.S. are responsible for the vast majority of gun deaths in the country each year.
The twin prongs of colonialist imperialism abroad and at home, the relation of imperialist dominance (the 750 foreign military bases maintained by the U.S. empire), the more than 800,000 police officers for a population of 300 million, some 350 “peace” officers per 100,000 people in the United States, make the United States even more heavily policed than some of the countries of the colonized periphery, including its subject state, Israel. The upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the increasing militarization of the domestic police, the infiltration into the “civilian” population of military-grade surplus equipment from the imperialist armed forces.
The United States relies on armed violence to control both its colonized and semi-colonized subjects within its territorial borders, and potential class-enemies during times when class warfare reaches its highest pitch.
Gun violence in the United States represents the expression of fundamental contradictions; this is the explosive valve through which white terrorists exert energy downward to “control” the Black, Chicanx, and Inidgenous nations in the U.S., to reinforce the economic domination of the white ruling class. Yet, it is not only that; it is also the expression of the ideological forces unleashed when this relation is made fundamental to the “defense” of the country — to the basic policy choice of “arms independence” and imperialist domination of nearly the entire earth. It is the expression of the brutality learned by the burgeoning white fascists abroad when they serve in the imperialist military and dehumanize themselves, it is the ideology of the young white man who watches wars on T.V. and acts them out in Call of Duty, the vile and poisonous overspill of settler-patriotism.
As the economic situation deteriorates within the U.S., certain segments of the ruling class have begun encouraging the reactionary tendency that naturally emerges among fractions of the white working classes: the reversion from the police-form to the militia-form. The intensification of the class struggle threatens the ruling class with the ghost of a unified working class movement. To prevent this movement from emerging, the right-fascist elements in the ruling class have funded, platformed, and supported the most reactionary groups among the white population.
In this case, they ask class-collaborationists to take up arms in defense of whiteness. This is a “wage” or a property relation based on the imagined militia-form of the early U.S. slave-republic. Just as the fascist movements of Europe reimagined the medieval past as a period of class collaboration between peasant and lord focused around an imagined Volkskörper, an “ethnic body” or nationalism that certainly did not actually exist in the middle ages, so too do the right fascists of the U.S. Empire project this militia-form onto a völkischer past in which white men (neglecting to mention that the 18th century construction of whiteness only included English Protestants) were universally armed against Indigenous and slave violence.
The development of this movement pushes the social illness behind gun violence to ever more intense expressions; it acts as a catalyst and a driver at the same time, drawing on the internal contradictions of U.S. settler society and the property relations of nationality that underlie the more broadly understood racism, to bring about heightened violence, heightened national (völkisch) pride among the white settlers, and help fuse together an alliance of white class collaborators.
To end the plague of gun violence, the problem must be addressed at its evil root: the fundamental economic relations of the United States Empire.
