By the New Orleans Workers Group
Dear fellow students and workers,
We congratulate the youth movement for taking the first steps to fight gun violence. We are all grieving and outraged by the school shootings in Parkland and throughout the United States.
But more than thoughts and prayers, what we extend is Solidarity. As much as we grieve, we work for a solution.
This work begins with the question: Why? Why do we have a culture of gun violence?
Our answer: Because arms dealers make a killing off it.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting in Newton, while families were burying their children, gun corporations were laughing their way to the bank. During that year following the shooting, the three largest gun manufacturers (Sturm Ruger, Remington Outdoor, and Smith & Wesson) saw their profits skyrocket 70%. As a whole, the gun industry adds up to $8 billion.
Where do these profits go?
Arms dealers live in luxury. Firearms tycoon Ugo Beretta lives in a mansion, walls decorated with elephant tusks and buffalo heads, Venetian chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. He drives a Maserati, has a private butler and cook, and his wife had a teddy bear made for her out of cash—and his gun company is only the 9th largest.
Everything that doesn’t fund the arms dealers’ blood mansions floods the NRA’s multi-million-dollar bank vaults.
Then the money-making cycle restarts as the NRA funds America’s profitable gun cult. Gun lobbyists have politicians at every level of government in the palm of their hand, all the way up to Donald Trump, who received $30 million from them. In some states, like Florida, lobbyists skip the politicians and just write the gun laws themselves. It’s there that the NRA pushed through the “Stand Your Ground” law, which justified the murder of Trayvon Martin and basically legalized hate crime. It’s not just political: the NRA wants to make violence a part of everyday culture. Their ads are just propaganda putting the mask of “freedom” on gun violence. Their million-dollar donors get the NRA’s “Golden Ring of Freedom”— which comes with a fancy blazer and a lifetime of lavish receptions and parties. This is nothing short of a glorification of America’s violence.
What do we think is the fix?
The New Orleans Workers Group believes gun control misses the main point. It treats the symptom, not the disease: profit, and the culture of violence it creates. Even if we have gun control, the (rich white) people who can afford guns will still find ways to get them because they’re in such a profitable market. Meanwhile the poor will be left defenseless. Everything from background checks to buyback programs will hit working class communities the hardest. Black communities will have nothing to protect themselves against hate crime and police violence.
At the end of the day, we can’t solve the gun problem as long as arms dealers can turn a profit.
We also believe that this point is for the entire culture of violence and can’t be separated from police brutality or war profiteering. No kind of arms dealer should make profits– whether they sell to shooters, racist cops, or the US military empire.
No massacre is too big or too small for them: if militarizing a racist police force or launching a war will make money, they’ll make it happen.
Racist cops and war are just as much of cash cows as school shootings. Glock, a top 10 gun corporation, sells 2/3 of all police handguns, the same handguns that the police uses to murder 1,000 people per year (hundreds of them black and indigenous). General Dynamics, Raytheon, BAE Sytems, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin (the top 5 military arms dealers) make a grand total of $133.9 billion yearly. They’re the biggest money-makers, responsible for the biggest bloodbath: the “War on Terror” that’s so far killed 4 million Muslims, mostly innocent civilians. But that’s 4 million lives they’re ready to spare if it lines their pockets.
There’s no way around it: The solution to the capitalist culture of violence involves eliminating guns for profit and wars for profit.
If the government can regulate profits made off things like medicine, it can make it a crime for arms tycoons to exploit violence to line their pockets. It’ll be up to the students and workers to build a movement to make that happen.
Love and Solidarity,
The Students and Workers of the New Orleans Workers Group
Excellent analysis.