We’ve good reason to feel numb. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which twenty small children were murdered, a couple of pathetically limited gun control proposals went nowhere in Congress and ten states passed 17 laws weakening gun restrictions. The gun control movement in this country is a pathetic failure. There is, I think, only one realistic way forward for advocates of stricter gun control, and it involves adopting the tactics of one of the most despicable groups in contemporary American politics: the anti-abortion movement.
Sometimes, in order to win a battle one must be willing to step back, set emotion aside, and look at what your enemy is doing that makes them successful. If your side holds the moral high ground but is still losing ground and fighting a seemingly never-ending rearguard action, there’s nothing wrong with evaluting the opposition’s tactics and strategy with an eye toward stealing a few good ideas. If you know you’re smarter and better equipped than they are and yet you’re still losing, it’s time to swallow your pride and adapt or die.
In the case of the vast majority of Americans who favor common sense gun control, there are lessons to be learned from the zealots in the anti-choice crowd. Only when we learn those lessons, take what we can, and adapt our strategy accordingly, are we going to have any hope of ultimately prevailing.
These victories were not easy. Americans are broadly pro-choice, with a comfortable majority supporting legal abortion. But the few who ardently oppose abortion have been able to skillfully exploit a certain squeamishness most Americans feel about the procedure that leads them to tell pollsters that abortion should only be legal “in certain circumstances.” Stuck with the fact that abortions are, for the foreseeable future, a Constitutionally-protected right, the conservative movement has decided to make it as difficult as possible for as many women as possible to exercise that right.
They have succeeded, politically, in making incoherent compromises (abortion is murder but we shouldn’t jail women for it, abortion is murder but we should allow women who’ve been raped to receive abortions) sound like the “moderate” positions in the public debate. They have taken over state legislatures and the entire Republican party. They have passed broadly unconstitutional laws to force legal challenges. They have passed narrowly constitutional laws designed to make getting abortions difficult and expensive. They have intimidated and terrorized abortion providers and pregnant women. They have shut down every single clinic in Mississippi but one, and they have passed a law designed to shut that one down, too. The Supreme Court might, in its upcoming term, allow Republicans to end abortion in every state in which they hold power. If the court doesn’t do that, Republicans will just try again in a few years.
Keep in mind that the radical anti-choice movement is a very, very tiny movement that can’t come close to claiming it has public opinion on their side. They’ve won by taking the long approach. Convinced that God is on their side, they figured that if they played a long game they’d eventually wear down the opposition and win. They didn’t win by wielding a sledgehammer and taking large pieces of rock out at one time. They won by the force of a thousand blows from a rubber mallet. They won because they were patient and they had the force of conviction to see them through what was a long conflict that never had a guaranteed victory as the endgame. We lost because we failed to recognize we were being nibbled to death by ducks.
Meanwhile, a first-grader is self-evidently a human being. Yet when it comes to the slaughter of walking, talking persons, cut down helplessly by weapons specifically designed for killing, we behave as if nothing can really be done. When it comes to protecting the lives of actual children from gun violence, fanaticism seems to be in order.
This doesn’t just mean marches and protests. It means constant marches and protests, and open and blatant harassment of your political opponents. It means protesting at the homes of gun manufacturing company executives and trying to shut down gun stores. It means very publicly making a scene at as many gun shops as possible, and personally attacking—verbally, but bordering on physically—people trying to enter those stores to legally purchase guns.
Remember, when it comes to anti-choicers screaming at and harassing women whose only “crime” is wanting to get an abortion, the idea isn’t to win the war. It’s to keep THAT woman from getting an abortion. From the point of view of an anti-choice zealot, any tactic is fair game if it prevents an abortion. When all you see is the black and white equation of “abortion equals murder,” you’re probably not inclined to spend a lot of time considering moral grey areas…because for you there ARE no moral grey areas.
Surely, there are activists on the side of a woman’s right to control her body willing to fight zealotry on its own terms. Call it guerilla warfare if it helps you feel any better, but the end result is that if we’re to have any hope of achieving common sense gun control, the future probably holds some pretty grotesque things in the service of our goal.
It also means going all-in on gore. It means waving gruesome photos of dead children in the faces of Republican legislators, gun store owners, and gun manufacturers. This is where the conservatives shine. Good liberals are too squeamish to look past the police tape. They worry that if they focus, up close and without flinching, on the goriest details of the carnage, it’ll glorify violence, or worse, inspire future killers. Maybe, but it’ll also scare the shit out of future killers’ mothers before they fill their houses with guns, to feel safe.
It means putting up billboards with photos of the bodies of children murdered in mass shootings. They should be erected over freeways so that commuters can see them on their way to work and/or their way home. Grotesque photos of those who lives were destroyed in a moment of madness should be in magazine and newspaper advertisements. They should be on the big screen in Times Square and shown on the sides of buildings in major cities in red states.
We should be parked on sidewalks outside gun stores, harassing and screaming at those headed inside looking to buy guns. We should post the addresses of those who buy assault weapons on the Internet with the hope of shaming into renouncing and returning their purchase.
There will need to be more lawsuits like this:
Our lawsuit was not frivolous. Our Jessi was shot multiple times with high-velocity, armor-piercing bullets that were designed by our military to inflict maximum damage on enemy combatants.
One of the six, steel-jacketed bullets that killed her slammed through a theater seat, entered her left eye and left a five-inch hole in her face as it blew her brains out onto the theater floor. The other five specially designed bullets tumbled when they tore through her flesh and did devastating damage to both legs, arms and intestines.
We need to shine a spotlight on parents who due to their own negligence and inattention lose children to “accidents.” We need to vilify these irresponsible parents and make it clear that we will demand accountability for the wasted lives of their children. Parents who keep loaded guns in places accessible to children should be publicly shamed at the very least and prosecuted for negligent homicide…because that’s exactly what we’re talking about.
Some might find these tactics distasteful, and I’ll offer no argument. My concern is no longer with fighting gun violence “tastefully.” We’ve been playing by the rules laid out by Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © for far too long. We’ve allowed them to control how and what we say, as well as when we say it. It’s long past time for us to take the battle to them, and if it means being “distasteful,” so be it. Victory rarely goes to those who play a dirty game under rules laid out by those determined to set the agenda. It’s time for those of us who believe it’s long past time to take America back from the monsters that are Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © to stand up and take the fight to them. Some may object, but if we believe we occupy the moral high ground, why do we let Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © set the rules?
WE DESERVE BETTER.
