Gun Control Equals Police Control: A Queer Argument for Bearing Arms

 "An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment."

-Huey P. Newton

"This is a beautiful country"

-John Brown

We all saw what happened in Uvalde, Texas and we all saw what didn't. We saw a horrific massacre, a deranged gunman mowing down a classroom full of children in a totally senseless fit of nihilism and rage. We also saw a well-armed, well-trained and very well-funded police force do absolutely nothing to stop it. The Uvalde Police received the first 911 call about the shooting at 11:30 am, three minutes before the shooter even entered Robb Elementary. One minute later the campus police officer for the school drove right by the motherfucker to tail a teacher. The first three cops entered the building at 11:35 and preceded to stand around with their hands in their fucking pockets for another 85 minutes. The 85 longest minutes in that dusty little border towns history. The last 85 minutes in the tragically short lives of one fourth grade class. For those 85 minutes that thin blue line stood still.

By noon the hallways of that school were packed with no fewer than 19 police officers with hundreds more waiting outside. A fucking army trained for this specific crisis and armed to the teeth with nearly 40% of that small town's budget stood by like Terracotta Soldiers while 19 children and 2 adults were executed one by one. Calls from inside the classroom flooded local emergency centers with nine-year old's begging for salvation in their slain classmate's blood and an army of our heroes in blue did nothing.

Well, that's not fair, to correct my previous statement, the Uvalde Police did do something. In the face of an unprecedented tragedy, they fell back on their instincts and did what pigs do best, they beat the shit out of unarmed brown people. While these heavily armed gestapo in ten-gallon hats were too timid to take on a single teenage novice on a suicide mission with a semi-automatic rifle, they were more than macho enough to mace and flog the parents of the children he killed for interfering with their official police business of being dickless fucking cowards. Apparently, the act of civilians demanding that the police do the job their taxes paid them to do and save their children or at the very least get the hell out of the way is a curb stomping offence.

While children were executed behind their backs, the Uvalde Police tackled their parents to the pavement of the Robb Elementary School parking lot, shackled and pepper sprayed them like common hoodlums, and threatened to tase anyone who interfered.  At around one o'clock, an hour and a half into one of the worst school shootings in American history, a squad of Border Patrol agents defied local police orders and finally stormed the classroom to kill the shooter who all but begged for anyone with a gun to do so.

The police response to the national anguish over their total failure to do even the bare minimum was to sputter and stonewall like a teenager caught shoplifting, changing their official story no less than twelve times and refusing to comply with state investigations into their appalling misconduct. The White House, for their part of the chicanery, initially refused to even join these investigations with Joe Biden robotically reiterating his "utmost respect for the men and women in law enforcement." The Department of Justice only announced an investigation after being rocked by a tidal wave of public outrage. Meanwhile, Uvalde's brave men and women in law enforcement have called in even more brave men and women in law enforcement from across the state to protect them from the fury of their own grieving citizenry. 

This is what a police state does. This is how fascism functions. These people are not here to protect us. They are here to control us, collect their protection money from our wallets, and protect their own ass. And these are the people who will be in charge of the Democrat's solution to this tragedy. This is the system that will be in charge of regulating the Second Amendment to Joe Biden's preferred specifications. That's right America, take a good hard look at Uvalde, Texas and drink it in because this is your gun control future. A future in which the only people available to stop a bad guy with a gun is a systemically racist mob of even worse guys with guns.   

This is precisely why I support defunding the police and defunding the police is precisely why I am against any form of gun control, because gun control always equals police control. It is impossible to disarm a citizenry without an armed regiment of government thugs to maintain that monopoly on the uses of force and it is impossible to maintain said monopoly without violating the natural rights of communities to defend themselves from all enemies, both foreign and especially domestic.

When you tell poor Black and brown people to hand over their guns you are essentially telling them to trust the exact same racist police state that lynched George Floyd and stood by while 19 children died in Uvalde. Regardless of whatever lofty intentions liberals may have, gun control is affectively a gift to white supremacy. The practice of disarming a nation as heavily armed as this one with a law enforcement apparatus that has always been a mechanism for internal colonialism is an invitation to a racist fucking bloodbath that has no peaceful resolution. 

As a genderqueer person in a conservative rural community, I am quite frankly terrified of gun control because that form of government control means that my small community of Queer hillbillies will be completely exposed. You will probably have little trouble disarming an already poorly armed and sadly docile community like mine, but you will never disarm the right-wing lunatics who stalk us like wolves at the edge of the forest. 

That's because your average hayseed fag-basher is a walking arsenal with a Blue Lives Matter flag in the back window of their pickup truck. Whose side do you think Biden's beloved brave men and women in law enforcement are going to be on, the subhuman outcasts who they only interact with when they're taxing us for engaging in survival sex, or the ass kissing badge bunnies who lick their boots at the local honky-tonk every Friday night? I'll give you ten seconds to get back to me on that... 

2021 was the deadliest year on record to be a gender outlaw with 57 fatalities tracked in my tiny community and there have already been another 14 in 2022. People like me don't call the police and we have little faith in a government that attacks our children with hate crimes that they call laws. Laws that threaten to take our children away screaming from our arms so they can deprive them of basic healthcare in Evangelical foster homes. I'm sorry, but when I hear some cis-hetero white liberal suggest that I should trust these same people with my safety during a month that commemorates our epic battle against the police state at Stonewall, my only reaction is this. Fuck. You. Breeder.

Guns are tools and the notion of prohibiting these tools, especially in a nation as vast and heavily populated as America is childish at best. It makes about as much sense as banning other potentially deadly concoctions like crystal meth or fentanyl. The problem with guns in America is that all the wrong people have them and that's not a coincidence. All of this nation's gun laws going back to the Second Amendment have been disproportionately used to disarm minorities. We weren't allowed to join the Founding Fathers' militias because these were boy's clubs designed to kill Indians and subdue slave revolts.

Gun control only became hip in this country when the slaves started packing heat and setting up militias of their own. One of the first legislation to police open carry was signed into law by Ronald Reagen in 1967 with the full-throated endorsement of the NRA after the Black Panther Party took up arms to defend their communities from the police. I find it fascinating, though hardly shocking, that even today, the one solution to our current onslaught of gun violence that both Joe Biden and Wayne LaPierre are in perfect harmony on is the need to beef up the presence of heavily armed chickenhawks like the Uvalde Police in our schools.

Whether you like it or not, guns aren't going away in this country. You could ban them all tomorrow and all you would really achieve is creating the world's biggest black market with more guns than people. As far as I'm concerned, as long as standing armies like the Uvalde Police and the federal government have access to firearms then my people in the Queer community and our Black and brown allies need them too to defend ourselves from their reign of brutality and the monsters they quite simply refuse to stop. 

What the swelling ranks of deeply disenfranchised people of every color in this country need isn't to be policed by more laws which will inevitably be used to fill the plantations and bottomless coffers of the Prison Industrial Complex, it's to arm and organize ourselves against these forces as well as to educate our children from a young age to respect firearms, not just as tools for liberation and autonomy, but as deadly weapons to be revered and reserved for the function of preserving these rights against all those who seek to trample them.

You can defund police with civilian militias like the Black Panthers or you can refund them with the totalitarian steroids of gun control. You can't have it both ways. The choice is yours, dearest motherfuckers, in the month of Juneteenth and Stonewall, I've already made mine. I walk with John Brown because a right only ceases to be a privilege when it comes from the barrel of a gun.

Fuck the Uvalde Police and all declared enemies of the poor. This is a call to arms. Only together can we say never again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  911 is a Joke by Public Enemy

*  Life on Mars by David Bowie

*  Criminal by Fiona Apple

*  Coming Down by the Dum Dum Girls

*  Hey Joe by Jimmi Hendrix

*  Don't Forget by Sky Fereira

*  Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Yeah Yeah Yeahs & Perfume Genius

*  Lockdown by Fugazi