Gun control

Armed members of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, circa 1971. The National Rifle Association supported the 1967 Mulford Act, which banned the open carry tactics that the Black Panthers used to defend themselves and their communities from police.

Gun control refers to laws, regulations, and policies which restrict or regulate the possession, acquisition, manufacture, transfer, carrying, storage, or use of firearms and other weapons. Gun-control policies do not exist independently of class struggle: their character depends upon which class exercises state power, which groups are permitted to possess arms, which groups are disarmed, and which institutions retain organized armed force.

To Marxists, the question of gun control cannot be reduced to whether there should simply be "more guns" or "fewer guns." It includes the political questions of who is armed, who is disarmed, who controls the armed bodies of the state, and against whom those bodies exercise force. A state may restrict civilian weapons while maintaining heavily armed police, military, intelligence, and paramilitary institutions. Conversely, revolutionary and national-liberation movements have historically regarded access to arms as necessary for resistance against slavery, colonialism, fascism, or counterrevolution.

Gun control may serve different class purposes under different social systems. Restrictions imposed by a bourgeois state upon oppressed populations or revolutionary organizations are politically distinct from regulations adopted by a socialist state governing hunting, sport shooting, storage, training, or public safety.

By country

Brazil

In Brazil the purchase and possession/carrying of guns is allowed to the citizen that fulfill some requirements, such as being over 25 years old; employment and a fixed residence; proving good standing via criminal record clearance certificates , not being under investigation; technical proficiency test and a psychological test for handling a firearm. There several different allowance levels in gun permits (rural, functional/police, sport/colelctor) with different conditions to probe a genuine need for possession along with carrying. Firearm regulation policies were implemented through the enactment of the Disarmament Statute (2003) and the update of the pre-existing National Weapons System regulations , which had its last change in 2014 , allowing correctional officers to carry their firearms back home.

Chile

In 1972, during the government of Salvador Allende, Chile enacted Law No. 17,798 on Arms Control. The law placed firearms, ammunition, explosives, and related materials under the control of the Ministry of Defense and assigned important offenses under the law to military jurisdiction.

This arrangement became politically significant during the CIA sponsored coup in 1973. The armed forces which possessed supervisory authority over civilian weaponry became the principal force overthrowing the elected Popular Unity government. The subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet used the Arms Control Law and military tribunals against political opponents.

Germany

German Democratic Republic

The German Democratic Republic permitted civilian possession of some firearms while maintaining substantial regulations over their storage and use. Hunting rifles could be individually owned but were generally stored at hunting clubs when not in use. Hunters received instruction concerning wildlife identification and accurate shooting, while sport shooters were likewise organized through clubs and training.

United States

Second Amendment

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, states: "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." The actual distribution of this proclaimed right has historically been shaped by settler colonialism, slavery, race, and class. Black and Indigenous peoples were frequently denied rights to possess weapons even while armed settler militias and state institutions used weapons against them. Some Marxist and anti-colonial writers have consequently interpreted the historical militia system and Second Amendment within the wider development of white settler power, in which armed settlers were mobilized against Indigenous peoples and escaped enslaved Africans.

After the Statesian Revolution, the Statesian ruling class restricted gun ownership to white citizens in order to prevent slave rebellions. The Supreme Court ruled in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sanford that Africans could not carry guns.

Slavery and Black disarmament

During slavery, restrictions on the possession of weapons by enslaved Africans served the material purpose of preventing resistance, escape, and slave rebellion. In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the United States Supreme Court denied that Black people descended from enslaved Africans were citizens under the Constitution. Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority opinion argued that recognizing Black citizenship would entail rights including freedom of movement, public political meetings, and the ability "to keep and carry arms wherever they went.""Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393". Justia.

During the Statesian Civil War, large numbers of formerly enslaved Africans armed themselves and served in Union forces against the Southern slavocracy. Following emancipation, struggles over Black access to arms continued throughout Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, gave Africans formal equality under the law, however, when Reconstruction ended in 1877, white-supremacist governments and organizations sought to disarm freed Black populations while white armed groups carried out racial terror. Formal equality before the law therefore did not eliminate the class and racial character of armed power.

Martin Luther King Jr.

After the home of Martin Luther King Jr. was bombed in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956, King applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm for self-defense. Local authorities denied the application.

Although King later became internationally associated with nonviolent resistance, the episode demonstrates that even prominent advocates of nonviolence could confront the practical question of armed self-defense when subjected to racist violence.

Black Panther Party and the Mulford Act

The Black Panther Party openly carried firearms while monitoring police activity in Oakland and other California communities. The Panthers regarded armed observation as a form of community defense against racist police brutality.

At the time, California law permitted the open carrying of loaded firearms under circumstances utilized by the Panthers. Republican assemblyman Don Mulford subsequently introduced legislation prohibiting the public carrying of loaded firearms. The legislation became known as the Mulford Act.

On 2 May 1967, armed Panthers entered the California State Capitol to protest the proposed legislation. The Mulford Act was later enacted and signed by governor Ronald Reagan. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation

The episode is an important example of the class and racial character that gun-control politics can assume. Organizations and politicians later associated with expansive gun rights supported restrictions when armed Black revolutionaries publicly exercised those rights.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X defended the right of Black people in the United States to protect themselves against racist violence and rejected demands that oppressed people remain defenseless while their attackers used force.

At the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York on 28 June 1964, Malcolm X described the organization's objective as the attainment of freedom and justice "by any means necessary."

The phrase did not mean indiscriminate violence. It expressed refusal to accept a political doctrine in which an oppressed population was required to remain passive regardless of the violence inflicted upon it.

Malcolm X repeatedly distinguished aggression from self-defense. In this framework, armed self-defense was not presented as violence for its own sake but as a possible means of defending Black communities when the state failed to protect them or itself participated in racial oppression.

His position connects the question of firearms to a larger issue: whether an oppressed population possesses a right to resist coercion rather than whether weapons are inherently morally good or evil.

Gun violence and capitalism

Gun violence cannot be understood solely as a mechanical consequence of the existence of firearms. Violence occurs within definite social relations.

Under capitalism, factors including poverty, economic insecurity, alienation, racism, gender oppression, organized criminal economies, domestic abuse, social isolation, militarism, and the destruction or privatization of social services can contribute to conditions in which interpersonal violence develops.

A Marxist analysis therefore opposes explanations which treat a weapon as an independent social actor. A firearm cannot itself develop an intention, ideology, grievance, or economic interest. Human beings act within social conditions, and organized institutions determine how weapons are produced, distributed, regulated, and used.

This does not mean that the material characteristics or availability of firearms are irrelevant. Firearms can greatly increase the lethality of an act of violence. Rather, reducing the social problem entirely to the object can obscure the conditions producing the violent act and the class structure within which weapons circulate.

The U.S. military and police kill dissidents with impunity. The deadliest mass shooter in U.S. history, Chris Kyle, killed 255 enemies of imperialism over the course of ten years in Iraq.

Marxist views

Marxism does not treat weapons as possessing an independent class character separate from the social forces controlling them. The same firearm may be carried by a revolutionary worker, a fascist, a police officer, an anti-colonial partisan, a soldier of an imperialist army, or a person defending their home. The physical object is similar; its political role is not.

Marxists have historically opposed the disarmament of the proletariat while the bourgeoisie retains organized armed power. In the 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote:

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

— Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League, March 1850

Vladimir Lenin likewise rejected disarmament of the working class while the bourgeoisie remained armed. In The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, he argued:

Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap.

— Vladimir Lenin, The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, September 1916

Mao Zedong, writing amid revolutionary and anti-imperialist warfare in China, similarly stated:

We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

— Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, 1938 November 6

These positions do not establish a Marxist principle that all weapons regulation under all circumstances is reactionary. Rather, they reject the political disarmament of workers and oppressed peoples while an antagonistic ruling class preserves its own armed institutions.

Gun regulation under socialism

A workers' state does not cease to regulate weapons merely because the proletariat has taken political power.

Socialist governments may regulate hunting, sport shooting, storage, training, transport, possession, military weapons, or public carrying according to social conditions. The example of the GDR demonstrates that regulated civilian ownership can coexist with a socialist political system.

The decisive distinction is therefore not simply regulation versus no regulation. It is the class character of the state and the purpose of the regulation.

Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, regulation is carried out by a state whose stated class basis is the working class and whose purpose is the suppression of the former exploiting classes and organization of socialist society. Under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the institutions enforcing arms laws ultimately defend capitalist property relations.

The long-term communist aim is not the endless proliferation of weapons. Marxism seeks the abolition of the social antagonisms which make standing armies, repressive police institutions, imperialist warfare, and organized class violence necessary.

As Mao's formulation indicates, communists may simultaneously seek a society beyond war while recognizing that an already armed ruling class cannot simply be wished out of existence through unilateral disarmament by those it rules.