Say Their Names
Put gun shop owners, not school children, in the cross hairs.
In my last article, I introduced the topic of where I think the Green Party should put its energies if we want to pioneer a new strategy to bring sanity to America’s broken and intolerable gun control regime, the failure of which is leading to our ongoing nightmare of mass shootings. I began with the idea that we must break the weak link in the chain of culprits who are responsible for this crisis: gun retailers, the people recklessly arming our domestic terrorists.
I will conclude this series of articles (which began here) by laying out the steps for this new approach to ending the holocaust of mass shootings in the United States, and explain why the Green Party should embrace this method.
We are now two months removed from the back-to-back massacres in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX. The flowers laid at curbside memorials have all wilted, the stuffed animals and homemade crosses are now weather beaten or else have been shoveled into the trash. In Buffalo, the sports figures have made their donations to the victims’ distressed neighborhoods, while in Uvalde, the children now rest in the earth, sealed in donated caskets of Superman blue and Pikachu yellow. Time to move on.
Well, not quite yet. In an odd turn of events, the citizens of Uvalde are treating the butchering of their children with unexpected hostility, amplified by copious footage of the local police pulling their puds while a horror movie unfolded around them. Now the parents are looking to string up just about anyone they hold responsible, from the befuddled police chief who lead the response to the shooting at Robb Elementary to the school’s principle, who is being blamed for leaving a lock on classroom door un-repaired in time to thwart the arrival of the Angel of Death.
Everyone is under the microscope — everyone except the owner of Uvalde’s Oasis Outback, a ridiculous weapons-and-burgers joint straight out of Robocop that sells AR-15s and cartel-quantities of ammunition alongside hand-battered “cactus sticks”. Incredibly, the very gun dealer that armed Salvador Ramos with enough firepower to annihilate a neighborhood has been exempted from scrutiny, even though Oasis Outback is perhaps the only place that the massacre could have been nipped in the bud. And as with Oasis Outback, so to with Vintage Firearms (the gun shop that supplied Buffalo’s shooter Payton Gendron), and also Red Dot Arms (the store that armed Robert Crimo III, the July 4th Highland Park shooter). None of these outlets has been held accountable for the respective bloodbaths they helped cause, a blind spot of civic responsibility if ever there was one, and an opportunity that the Green Party must open its eyes to.
The Green Party, despite its reputation for being folks who would rather stuff daisies into rifles than own one, actually has a fairly positive attitude towards the 2nd Amendment. Whether we frame our commitment as the right of citizens to be armed for revolution, or as sympathy for people living in blighted neighborhoods who need to defend themselves, the Greens by and large defend the right of citizens to own guns. But Greens, whether they are gun owners or not, must still reckon with the fact that no reasonable interpretation of these words —
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.
— can lead anyone to believe that the Founders anticipated the destructive power that everyday weapons would come to have (the guns of the Founders time preceded even the invention of bullets), nor how effortless it would become for a single person to use one gun to commit the level of carnage that only canon fire could have achieved in their day, nor how callously indifferent the builders and sellers of guns would be to the abuses committed with their merchandise, manufactured in gigantic quantities to feed not only the gun fetishes of the common man but also the demands of a preposterously large standing army (also unprecedented in America during the Founders’ time.)
The unintended consequences of that law written nearly two and a half centuries ago cannot be excused by appealing to the heroic myth of the citizen soldier in an era where “well regulated militias” of Minute Men is an obsolete concept. The very real and present tyranny of citizen against citizen is no less an affront to our liberty than the hypothetical tyranny of the state against its people, and the carnage speaks for itself. Every year: 15,000 or more direct gun murders are committed, tens of thousands more people are wounded or crippled by guns, and nearly 24,000 die from suicides. And all of this violence is committed by people who are just as much average “gun owners” as Joe Sagebrush pinging gophers on his ranch in Utah.
This epidemic of civil violence is not the gun culture that the 2nd Amendment was meant to create, but it is what has evolved under its aegis. Nearly every American recognizes that the prime mover of gun crime in our country is the way guns are thoughtlessly marketed and sold to satisfy the appetite of a mass consumption economy (whether the commodity is corn syrup or Bushmasters, someone has to eat the overflow), but if the cynical exploitation of the 2nd Amendment — the naked sacrifice of thousands of Americans every year to the capitalist gun cult — is a known problem, then we cannot fail to hold the private sector accountable for its enormities. This must be done in order to pave the way for the inevitable legislative solutions.
Therefor, a strategy to bring the Green Party into direct confrontation with the gun industry should take this form:
1) Gun retailers associated with mass shootings must be turned unto Public Enemy №1
It ought to be clear to everyone by now that the overwhelming power of the gun lobby cannot be brought to heel through marches or memorials or appeals to their humanity. The massacres at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Robb Elementary, and dozens more schools has only moved the gun industry to propose ever more ridiculous gun-themed solutions, from arming teachers to turning public spaces into fortresses. Therefor, we must personalize our tactics until the most vulnerable cohorts in the gun industry’s operation — retailers — are forced to bend, eroding their power at the community level — its weakest point.
The Greens, after each and every mass shooting that shocks the public’s conscience, must take vigorous steps to tie the name of the murderer with the name of the retailer who armed him, promoting this connection through headline-grabbing tactics, from co-ordinated sit-ins to online infamy and beyond. Those retailers must be transformed in the public’s mind from the innocent victims of everyday commerce into the unindicted co-conspirators in the massacres: the pieces of shit who chose to hand over a military grade death machine to a crazy person.
The public must come to equate the stores that sell the weapons as the true origin of the massacres, not 4Chan or Tucker Carlson. Done effectively, with assistance from victims families and existing gun control organizations such as March for Our Lives and the Brady Campaign, an uncomfortably hot spotlight can be placed on the gun industry at the point where embarrassment and community disgrace can force small but meaningful concessions from retailers, which can then become a crack in the industry’s armor. Right now the country is left in frustrated agony after every horrific mass killing. Can you imagine the sea change in our progress towards a real solution if we could simply extract an apology from a retailer who ought to have halted a massacre before it occurred?
Those apologies are what the gun lobby fears more than 10,000 placard-wielding protestors, and that is what we must obtain.
2) Public Attention
After any major mass shooting, the community in which it occurred becomes the subject of intense media focus. The Green Party must be prepared to hit the ground running at that point so that the condemnation and protest of the gun retailer is only moments behind the tragedy. Before numbness over yet another massacre sets in, the Greens and our affiliates must seize the opportunity to prove that the public has woken up to the insufferable status quo exactly when media coverage will be easiest to obtain.
Action against gun merchants will occur simultaneously with actions against the congressmen of the districts where the violence occurred. Sit-ins at local headquarters and disruption of campaign and fundraising events will be the bare minimum requirements.“Thoughts and Prayers” bromides will be the cudgel we brain our feckless politicians with, and we will organize our efforts to make sure that any congressional campaign that takes place in the wake of these acts of terrorism will feature the massacre as a top campaign issue.
While not every tactic we deploy is guaranteed to yield a measurable result, it is all but certain that the public will respond to almost anything original that points them towards a proactive answer to these heinous crimes, and this will help liberate everyone from the morass our nation has sunken into, as well as quicken the arrival of new allies.
3.) Money
The irony of the Green Party is, of course, that we have less green than almost any organization on the planet. However, no effort of any strength against the gun lobby will get very far without cash for bus fare, literature, T-shirts and bail. (Oh yes… we will need that level of sacrifice as well.)
Despite daring to vie for public office in the most avaricious country in history, the Green Party is almost preternaturally averse to raising money, and I do not think it is any surprise that our fortunes have followed our fortune. The “Strategic Plan” drafted by the Green’s National Committee makes it perfectly clear that lack of funds is an endemic problem at every level in the Party.
Of course the Greens, correctly, do not raise money from corporate donors, but this puts the onus on us to be exceptionally inventive when it comes to raising the cash we need merely for coffee filters, to say nothing of recruiting talent for political campaigns. As the Green plan states:
As a people’s party, we must instead become abundant in people – the human capital to get things done, whether it’s getting people to vote Green, running candidates, promoting our policies and issues, or simply managing day-to-day party tasks.
However well-intentioned the “human capital” spirit may be, it is a bit of a fairy tale when it comes to politics, and especially party politics that encompasses dozens of barely-integrated goals. “Human capital” is really mere volunteerism, and it makes sense as a strategy within, say, religious sects, where a communitarian ethic requires that adherents to the faith sacrifice for their benighted supernatural fantasies. But a political party is not a commune, and no quantity of volunteers can will a lawn sign into existence.
The Green’s plan does recognize this when it goes on to mention that:
…the Green Party of Pennsylvania (GPPA) has 17,000 “members” (registered Greens), but an annual operating budget of less than $5,000. The Green Party of the UK has fewer members (about 16,000). Yet their budget is much larger, enabling them to raise enough funds for four full-time staff people. They do this by collecting dues of about $5 per month (£44 per year) per member.
And also:
Running campaigns puts a tremendous strain on our financial and human
resources. We need to develop and execute stronger fundraising [emphasis mine] at all levels to support our electoral efforts…We need a coherent plan of action and better communication at all levels of the party, in order to recruit, develop and support more and stronger candidates and campaign workers, and learn from our experiences.
All of this is to say that we Greens seem well aware that we are fighting with one hand tied behind our back because of our lack of ambition when it comes to the sticky business of raising money. Volunteerism is not the same as dedication. Devotion which is offered for no compensation is just as quickly withdrawn. We do not have the promise of Heaven to inspire our followers.
Therefor, let us put fundraising right at the top of our agenda for any gun control endeavor, and let the “human capital” come in the form of Greens donating cash to the project as well as innovating new ways to raise even more. Let us allow ourselves to become just a bit sordid and remember the words of Tony Montana who understood that: “In America, first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.” But we are not perusing women: We are trying to save grandparents from being sniped from rooftops. That is worth getting our hands a little dirty.
Fellow Greens, we must stare reality in its blazing, Sauron-like eye. As the smoldering summer that has enveloped the world and hastened the evaporation of fresh water from Colorado to Germany reminds us: Time is running out. Time is running out for the life of comfort that we as Americans have long enjoyed, time is running out for gentlemanly politics and “peaceful transitions of power”, and time is definitely running out for the Green Party. We will rise now, or dry up like Lake Mead. Gun control is an area where the Greens can make a real difference and plant our flag, if we choose to.
With legislative avenues for ending mass shootings now foreclosed, the only people who can make the needed changes in policy are gun manufacturers, and they will not concede to an iota of change until forced to do so. I have talked to many Greens on this subject, and not one of them has proposed an approach to ending mass shootings that isn’t abstract and incrementalist to the point of being worthless. The approach I am laying out may seem too open-ended, or even quixotic, but at least it is a genuine step in the right direction, and it will force Greens to put themselves in the center of a national issue for once instead of allowing themselves to be sidelined.
So to any Green reading these words, I ask you this: What is your threshold? How many more decades of massacres, how many more children having their brains splattered against their homeroom walls like bowls of Spaghetti-Os is it going to take for you to see this situation for what it is? There is a solution, and it must come from us. Because we can be perfectly goddamn certain that it won’t be coming from anyone else.
Jason Yungbluth writes comic books, including one called Weapon Brown.
Previously: Guns, Greens and Gall
Next: Only the Greens Can Turn the Tide on Mass Shootings
