The gun! Go get the gun!” Hearing my mother yell this is one of my earliest memories.
I remember that it was nighttime. My mother desperately pressed her weight against the front door of our triplex, trying to keep intruders at bay. The belligerents were a woman and whoever she had with her. They were trying to attack my mother, most likely over something petty. That is often the cause of violence in poor communities. My mother was overwhelmed and outnumbered. She had four young children inside and but no man with her. This was a sign of weakness to the invaders outside. “Go get the gun!” is what she yelled to my older brother as hands were creeping in just beyond the door. Hearing her command, they quickly retreated.
It was a bluff on my mother’s part. We had no gun in the house. But the attacker’s didn’t know that and didn’t want to find out. The threat was enough to stop the assault. Being armed or the threat of being armed made the difference. This would not be the only time being armed made a difference in dealing with would be attackers in my life.
My Politics
I’m a registered Democrat and a Progressive. I was a delegate at the national democratic convention for Bernie Sanders in 2016. I’m also a gun owner and strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment. The debate regarding gun control in this nation has become politicized along party lines on a national level. As a Mexican and Chicano activist living in one of America’s most dangerous cities, Stockton, California, it’s not a matter of debate. It’s a necessity. In fact, from my perspective, the debate amongst hypocritical politicians and people who live securely is a luxury. It is one that I, and so many others, can’t afford.
There are many reasons I support the 2nd Amendment. The most pressing being where I live. Stockton is where the first mass shooting of school children occurred in 1989. A lone, white gunman armed with an AK-47 walked onto an elementary school campus and began shooting Southeast Asian children and then killed himself. The attack at Cleveland Elementary prompted a weapons ban of assault rifles in California. What it did not address was the racism that may have motivated the attack.
Despite passing additional taxes to hire more officers, the police department is overwhelmed and consistently requests help from outside agencies. They can’t even respond expeditiously to the attempted shootings because they’re so occupied with drive-by shooting that where people are shot, injured and killed.
The (civil) right to bare arms
Historically the 2nd Amendment was created for strategic reasons. One was to maintain readiness against the British from whom the American colonies declared independence. The other was to maintain military supremacy over the “merciless Indian Savages” and African slaves. As civil rights gains were made centuries later by those Native and African Americans, leaders such as Malcolm X, Reies Lopez Tijerina, and groups like The Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and the Young Lords advocated for self defense citing the 2nd Amendment as a civil right. This history is conveniently overlooked in mainstream narratives of the Civil Rights movement in favor of Dr. King’s non-violent approach.
Their idea of self defense developed not only as a means of protection from domestic terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan but to protect people from the state itself. Such was the case when the Black Panthers descended on the California State Capitol with rifles, exercising their 2nd Amendment rights to make a political statement. As a result the state responded by passing the Mulford Act which barred openly carrying rifles. That law was signed in 1967 by Republican Governor Ronald Reagan, the same politician who campaigned as a champion of the 2nd Amendment, and was backed by the National Rifle Association. The same NRA that today is against sensible reforms like universal background checks and who back the very politicians pushing for oppressive policies towards brown and black communities.
The threat at home
Today there are still groups terrorizing black and brown communities. Except now it’s not the KKK but street and prison gangs that control and influence street politics and violence. Years of failed government policy like the War on Drugs, Three Strikes Laws, and Minimum Sentencing Laws have fed mass incarceration creating these groups who prey on their own communities. They are heavily armed and do not respect the rule of law. They have weapons usually reserved for foreign battlefields.
Police departments are often stuck enforcing laws that do not stem the flow of illegal weapons criminals acquire or the violence they propagate. Laws passed by politicians who have armed security. Politicians who are silent about the billions of dollars our nation reaps from selling weapons around the world. Nor do they comment on the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice allowing high powered weapons to flow across the border to Mexican drug cartels in Operation Fast and Furious. Now that those chickens have come home to roost, the nation’s citizens are not allowed to defend themselves. Regardless of philosophy, this is the reality poor black and brown communities’ battle daily.
Police are not just ill equipped or ill trained can opt out. Even the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 in the case of Castle Rock v. Gonzales that police have no Constitutional obligation to protect anyone from harm. These same officers get to go home after their shift, more often than not, to a safer neighborhood in a safer city. Meanwhile, we live in these communities daily. Where do we go?
When my gun saved lives
The night when I was awakened by the screams of a woman and yells of a man physically pulling her out of her car across the street from my home, I flashed back to the night intruders tried to break into our home and attack my mother.
I calmly, but deliberately loaded my gun making my way towards the attack. I realized my yelling at the unknown man to leave the woman alone did nothing to deter him. It was almost as if I was just some nuisance, a fly buzzing around on a hot summer day–until I used my weapon. And just like that he came out of the tunnel vision. It–and he–stopped. Immediately.
As immediate as the day I stopped an apparent drug addict breaking into my neighbor’s home in the middle of the day. I remember confronting him while hiding the view of my 12 gauge behind bushes at the corner of my approach. When I asked what he was doing, he calmly looked at me and responded, “Trying to get in.” When I informed him that his plan wasn’t going to be happening, he squared up on me with a sharpened screwdriver, hatred in his eyes. Until I stepped forward and racked a cartridge in the chamber of my Mossberg. He stopped.
The history of the United States is one steeped in violence, especially towards brown and black communities. These are the same communities now being catered to or pandered to (depending on one’s perspective), from a party that has been, at best, a fair weather friend. How the 2nd Amendment became a partisan issue is for political science professors to ponder. The protection of me, my family, and my community should not be used as a political football by politicians that have no problem using similar weapons against innocent populations at home and abroad. What I know, from experience and history, is that gun ownership is not only one of our civil and Constitutional rights, it is essential for self defense against a historically hostile state.