Just when you think the anti-gun left has moved as far, well, to the left as it can, you discover acres of new ground way out there on the fringes.
As an indication of Jacob Bacharach‘s view of American society, the sub-head on his piece is, Despite the upswing of progressive politics, little has been said about our country’s problem with guns. Seriously.
In Bacharach’s orange-skied world, Eric Swalwell and Kamala Harris are too embarrassingly right wing on the subject of civilian disarmament.
The proliferation of “stand you ground” laws and the insane efforts to arm teachers, too, are reflections of a culture that is intensely eager to kill, a society that accepts chaotic violence not just as endemic but as inherent, and which desires to meet it with a righteous violence of its own. The fantasy of being “the good guy with a gun” is a fantasy of homicide, even if in the dream that homicide is a justified one. It is a longing for an exculpating reason to kill.
A left position on gun violence must therefore move beyond a narrow fixation on guns as implements and to a broader, moral argument about militarism, imperialism, and acceptable violence, just as the left is trying to move beyond narrow fixations on “good jobs” or health savings accounts or tax incentives to think in very broad terms about economic equity.
So far, candidates and officeholders have done and said very little in this vein. Among major Democratic contenders, Sen. Bernie Sanders has talked about “gun safety,” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren has talked about using something other than our “military might” in constructing a foreign policy. Many of the well-known candidates have, as yet, avoided policy altogether. And while former Vice President Joe Biden has professed his support for greater measures on guns, the task force to which President Obama appointed him after Sandy Hook failed to accomplish anything meaningful. Only Sen. Cory Booker has outlined a gun-control proposal in any detail, issuing today a 14-part plan to ban assault weapons and establish a gun-licensing program.
– Jacob Bacharach in Where is the left on gun control?
Read the whole thing. If you can manage it.
