After the one-two punch of gun violence of the past couple weeks — the Buffalo domestic terrorist attack against African-Americans and the Uvalde slaughter of children, these awful events accompanied by a cluster of smaller mass shootings around the nation — we have subsequently experienced a reprise of the political pathologies that have enabled such frequent mass violence in the first place. The GOP closed ranks in defense of unrestricted gun ownership, while tossing out bad faith chaff to distract from the fundamental horror of their absolutist position, with Mitch McConnell repeating his obfuscatory playbook of years past and other elected officials blaming everything but guns for the massacres. Meanwhile, the Democrats have found themselves hamstrung by the lack of a working Senate majority, the absurdity of the filibuster, and a continued refusal to escalate the crisis of gun violence to the top of the national agenda.
In the face of such immobility against continuing terror and bloodshed, there’s been much commentary about the high unlikelihood of progress on gun control in the near-, medium-, and even long-term future. But it would be a mistake to confuse the gridlock on meaningful measures to reduce gun violence with the idea that the overall situation has been static since, say, the massacre at Sandy Hook — that “nothing has changed.”
The fact of the matter is, with gun violence, things have gone from bad to worse. First, it seems undeniable that over the last decade, the Republican Party has grown ever more opposed to any restrictions on gun ownership. As others have pointed out, guns are more intertwined than ever with Republican partisan identity — just look at the “family with guns” photos that increasingly seem to be a requirement for any self-respecting GOP candidate (“the family that shoots together wins elections together”). It should be obvious to any objective observer that guns have continued to proliferate across the land because this is what the GOP believes in: the second amendment means that every American is entitled to as much military-grade weaponry as they can afford.
But the GOP’s increasing radicalism on gun ownership and gun violence isn’t happening in a vacuum, but is deeply tied to the party’s broader turn to authoritarianism and white nationalism. As January 6 and its aftermath have made clear, a significant faction in the Republican Party views violence as a useful and even necessary instrument of the party’s anti-democratic path to power. The idea that every good American needs to be armed and ready to pull the trigger is inseparable from the GOP and far-right’s broad claims that the United States is under assault by a ragtag army of immigrants, Black Lives Matter protestors, LGBTQ activists, feminists, and plain old Democrats who simply hate America out of spite and possible devil worship. The love of guns can’t be separated from fear of, and a wish to dominate, the non-male, non-white America majority.
We are now living in an America that is armed to the teeth in no small part due to the racism, paranoia, and insurrectionary longings of a minority of far-right Americans. Not surprisingly, the official arguments they put forth to defend their absolutist position on gun rights have been shredded by contact with reality, as we’ve effectively run a decades-long experiment in which data comes in the number of lives snuffed short by bullets. Only an ideologue would try to argue that we’re somehow safer with increasing numbers of guns in homes and on the streets. Yet the right views all these deaths of innocent victims, not to mention the vast numbers of suicides enabled by easy access to guns, as so much acceptable collateral damage in the name of sustaining a paranoid belief that white Americans are under assault and must be able to use force to defend themselves.
In light of a dynamic where more guns are making us less safe, the continued right-wing insistence that still more guns must be the solution feels deeply disingenuous. It seems as likely that they view the ensuing societal fraying due to gun violence as a useful tool in their authoritarian project — mutual distrust and existential fear being fertile soil for strongman politics, as political scientists like Ruth Ben-Ghiat have persuasively argued.
So my (admittedly) counter-intuitive argument is that it should actually be easier than ever for supporters of gun control to make a powerful case that the GOP, for a variety of reasons, is the prime force behind our epidemic of gun violence, and is the singular obstacle to preserving the lives of ourselves and our loved ones. The party’s motivations for supporting unrestricted gun ownership have become more openly noxious and anti-American by the year, wedded as they are to white supremacism and authoritarianism, while the heinous real-world consequences of their gun worship are witnessed daily. At the same time, it should be equally clear that there will be no progress against gun violence without rolling back the broader threat of GOP authoritarianism and the party’s ongoing project to unravel American democracy. It simply makes no sense at this point to treat gun violence as an issue separate from this larger conflict in American politics (which also involves, at a minimum, eliminating the filibuster in order to bring a bit more balance to the structurally undemocratic Senate), even as it is an important and illuminating front in the fight against the right-wing uprising.