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 policies that limit access to firearms. These policies can serve different purposes depending on which class they are applied against.

By country

Chile

In 1972, Chile passed a law putting civilian guns under military supervision, leaving them under Pinochet's control during the Western-funded coup the next year.

Germany

GDR

The German Democratic Republic allowed individual ownership of guns, but they had to be kept at hunting clubs or shooting clubs while not in use. Hunters had to take classes to identify wildlife and shoot accurately to get a gun license. People who used guns for non-hunting purposes also had to take similar classes.

United States

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, as ratified in 1791, declares that "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." However, the right to bear arms has historically been denied to Black, Indigenous, and other oppressed peoples in the US. This is because the Second Amendment is for white settler militias to attack colonized peoples.

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.

During the Civil War, Africans armed themselves to overthrow the Southern slavocracy. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, gave Africans formal equality under the law. However, when Reconstruction ended in 1877, white supremacist governments took control of the South and disarmed the Black population, forcing them back onto plantations as sharecroppers.

California banned open carry in 1967 in order to weaken the Black Panthers. Martin Luther King Jr. was denied a gun permit after his house was firebombed.

Gun violence

Capitalism, not guns themselves, is the root of gun violence. Gun control has no correlation with preventing gun deaths when you include deaths by United States imperialism. 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 generally supports the workers' right to bear arms:

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

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

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