An Anarchist Anti-Gun Manifesto

Black and white photo of a worker in a remington factory

For Reuel and all those who fight. 

Before I begin in earnest, let me be clear: this is not a call for pacifism. This is not some plea for non-violence in the face of the near incomprehensible brutality of the police, the prisons, of the state and its vigilante accomplices. If anything, this text is intended as a call for more explicit attack on our enemies, more direct antagonism against the institutions of our suffering, a more intentional incorporation of resistance to these brutalities into our daily lives until such resistance is as second nature as breathing.

I believe in fighting back with anything and everything we can get our hands on, however, I have grown tired with the continued fetishization of guns in radical (specifically anarchist) spaces. I’ve grown tired of the borderline admission of defeat that leads to reactionary positionalities where we lose site on how our orientations reproduce the world around us. This text is an attempt to critique what I believe to be a culture of self-delusion as to what guns are, what they do, and how they impact our relation to the worlds and people around us. My goal is to articulate a broader position of antagonism so we might be better poised to draw blood and be this world’s undoing.

Surviving is not enough.

I still want to win.

I want it more than anything.

What the fuck do you want?

Illusions and Delusions

We exist in a world of incalculable, purposeful, brutality; most directed at the most marginalized. The institutions of our suffering are vast, near omnipresent in our lives, and ever expanding. The police are at our doors, their vigilante counterparts, ever eager for their chance to take part in the rituals that keep capital flowing, are waiting in the wings for their chance to crack skulls. Sometimes on a subway, sometimes outside of a Walgreens.

Our bodily autonomy is stripped as abortion access is pushed further and further towards impossibility and trans existence is criminalized to the point where what bathroom we use becomes a game of Russian roulette. With each law passed, each drag story hour threatened, each captured display of violence on film, I see many with whom I find affinity echo some version a similar refrain:

“This is why you need to buy a gun”

Every time I see this refrain, I pause and sit with the unease that rises from my guts into my throat and out my nose. I sit in the unease until a question formulates “What do you think a gun changes?”

I’ve been around guns my whole life. I learned how to shoot at a young age, first a shotgun, then a rifle, then a handgun. I learned how to clean and care for a gun. I learned to make eye contact and verbally confirm control when being handed a firearm. I am comfortable with a gun in my hand. I say all this, somewhat awkwardly in the middle of a thought, to assure the reader that no matter how outlandish you find my critiques, they are not coming from a place of irrational worry or fear of firearms. They are intentional and as precise as I can make them.

In no subtle words, believing that gun ownership is a meaningful answer to the violence enacted on marginalized peoples is to reify the illusion that to possess a gun is to increase one’s proximity to “safety”, and that to possess more guns is to become even “safer”. Owning a gun will never make you safe, because there is no such thing as safety in this world for the marginalized, for the Black, the targeted nonwhite, for the poor, the visibly queer, for the immigrant, for the disabled, for the unhoused, for the incarcerated (in prison or in the all too similar psych wards).

If you wish to continue breathing, there is no gun you can possess to prevent the sheriffs from carrying out an eviction. There is no gun you can possess to turn your heat back on. If someone really, truly, wants you dead, no gun will keep you alive, unless you turn yourself into a machine of pure vigilance, sacrificing living for the hope of survival that can never be guaranteed.

If there is to be a path towards anything resembling “safety” it will not come from individually arming ourselves, even in large numbers. It will come from a generalized culture of antagonism towards both formal and informal institutions of power. It will come from a culture of spontaneous resistance, from insurrectional potential. Guns may be a part of some explicit actions within that culture; however, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for bringing it about and may (as I will touch on later) hinder its continued existence. The only chance we have at protecting each other is gaining ground in the social war of our time.
But for the radical, for the anarchist especially, to recognize one’s position within a social war, to admit the stakes and the costs and begin to build that culture of antagonism, is to take on incredible risk. It is incredibly frightening to confront what we must be willing to lose if we are truly willing to win. So many don’t confront that risk at all. They look anywhere else, towards any other path. Rather than taking an offensive position of articulating worthwhile actions and carrying them out, many revert to a defensive (even reactionary) positioning of arming themselves and simply waiting for the coming genocide, for the coming collapse. They may have other projects that they take part in but they are mostly ways to kill time. They don’t attempt to gain ground and so they don’t risk losing ground. Still, they are convinced of their own radicality because they armed themselves, they have primed themselves to defend the marginalized (potentially including themselves), the most radical thing one can do.

But the genocide isn’t coming, it’s here. It is in the hospital billing departments and waiting rooms. It’s in the classrooms and the lunch lines. It’s in office of records and it’s in the church halls. It’s in the interrogation rooms and it’s in the prison cells. They are no better primed fight back now than they were prior to becoming armed. Nothing has changed about their positionality or orientation, only their means of expression.

We can’t shoot our way to liberation, not if liberation means the ability to determine for ourselves what a life worth living would be. A few shots may help, but they will never be the sufficient form of resistance against a world built upon the logic of concentrated power, of which guns are a primary mode of expression.

The Concentration of Power and the Reproduction of Daily Life

Here is where I get a bit pointed. I don’t think the illusion of safety is the primary reason people acquire guns, though I think they convince themselves otherwise. I think people acquire guns because of the fantasy of possessing hyper concentrated power. We live in a world of incredible alienation and disempowerment. We look outside and believe ourselves broadly incapable of affecting our surroundings. In this context, a machine that, with the push of a button, can irreparably alter our existence is easily fetishized.

For the radical who has grown disillusioned with the prospect of revolution or mass movement, guns become a way to ease the existential dread of that disillusionment. Through the possession of such a machine they are able to maintain the belief that whenever they so desire, they can, in fact, enact their will on the world.

These fantasies become so engrained that even when those beautiful moments of real revolt explode, the gun toting radical ends up emerging as a de facto police force rather than making use of the exposed vulnerabilities of our enemies. These power fantasies inevitably blind the radical from recognizing the experimental space opened before them, and so these radicals actively repress the experimentation and insurrectionary potential of others in those spaces. I saw far too many such “radical” policing forces in 2020 to ever trust a person who shows up to a riot carrying an AR.

It is because of such experiences witnessing self-described radicals and anarchists take on the role of policing within supposedly anti-police spaces that it feels imperative (especially in the context of a world of relations defined by colonialism, anti-Blackness, racism, etc) to question the role of machines that so deftly concentrate power in our spaces at all.

If we seek and end to police, we must seek and end to the relations that allow for policing as well.

Fetish as Smokescreen

Perhaps the consequence of the continued fetishizing and fantasizing that feels most pressing, is how it alters our relation to the arms manufacturers themselves. I rarely, if ever, see these manufacturers recognized as viable targets of direct action even at the height of anti-police mobilizations despite the fact that the only reason the police are able enact violence on the scale that they do is because these manufacturers supply them with near infinite arms.

I ask you to sit with this question for a time. Bring it up with friends at your next assembly or reading group. Is it because you don’t care? Is it because you think it too abstract a target? Too risky? How does the culture of gun ownership within radical spaces affect how we talk or don’t talk about gun manufacturers?

If you don’t care, fuck you.

If you find the target too abstract, I ask if you would say the same about the police, or the prisons, or capital, or any other indefinite system we decry on our dropped banners or in our communiques.

If such action is too risky, I ask if you’ve fully considered the risk of not acting. Is your risk assessment somehow tied to your current proximity to, and prioritization of, comfortability.

The very fact that it has been near radio silence from anarchists on these points in recent history, to me, signals a complete lack of willingness to engage with the actual terms of the social war in which we find ourselves. If we aren’t willing to consider finding ways to undermine the supply of arms to the police and military, then we assume the inevitability of their being as well armed as they currently are.

This is as good as admitting defeat, as we will never be able to match the police or military in the arena of arms procurement, and even if we could, the only way we’d be able to match them in an arms-focused conflict would be to turn ourselves into a military of our own with all the loss of autonomy and life that entails.

I refuse to admit defeat, and I refuse to fulfill some dutiful role within a misnamed revolutionary military. I desire life, I desire a life worth living.

Expropriate, Use, Destroy

As I said earlier, while neither necessary nor sufficient for bringing about a culture of antagonism towards the existent world and all its intersecting brutalities, guns may serve some purpose within specific actions and so it feels worthwhile to throw out a potential way of relating to them in the moments we deem them useful.

We expropriate (both individual armaments and the means by which to produce them) in order to break away from participating in the profiteering of the gun manufacturers while simultaneously dispossessing our enemies of their means to brutalize us.

We use what we have expropriated in the ways deemed worthwhile when we have deemed such actions necessary.

We destroy what we have expropriated to the best of our ability.

Most importantly, we destroy the means by which these arms are produced. So long as there exists a way to quickly mass produce arms, there will always be a timebomb waiting for the next police or military to emerge.

*****************************

At its most simplistic, a gun is a machine designed with the specific purpose of killing. The majority of handguns and rifles produced today are designed with the specific intention of killing people. I refuse to accept the normalization, and fetishization, of such a machine within anarchist spaces.

While I’m not so naive as to believe there will be some idyllic future in which no one harms anyone else, I am certainly idealistic enough to believe a world without these machines is possible. If you disagree, fine, you can stand in defense of the gun factories, maybe even point one at me as I light the match.

As I said at the onset, I want to win. I want it more than anything.

Winning, to me, looks like the ashes of every precinct and prison mixing with the ashes of every factory, the ones that make guns included.

Winning looks like concentrations of power being incessantly confronted, wherever they arise.

It looks like children playing, adults playing.

It looks like breathing, breathing free, whatever that means for each of us.

It cannot look like a gun in every hand, while we wait for the next police to show itself.

I will never be able to breathe in that world.

And I need to breathe.

So, get a gun if you feel you must. Learn how to use it, learn how to clean it and how to properly hand it off to another person. But never, ever let it become more than what it is, a machine for killing. It is not safety, it is not defense, and your desire for it cannot supersede the need to undermine their production writ large. There will come a time when it will need to go, like all other vestiges of the world of police and prisons. I only hope you understand by then.

“The most useful thing one can do with arms is to render them useless as quickly as possible”

~ At Daggers Drawn

There are 12 Comments

I actually came in expecting to disagree but I actually hold many of the sentiments. And I think while I disagree with the leftist sentiments of winning I agree with everything else. I think this is a pretty fantastic text bc I know a lot of people who would benefit from considering thus

Appreciate the provocation of this writing but I believe this part is where I can locate a theoretical misstep?

"If we aren’t willing to consider finding ways to undermine the supply of arms to the police and military, then we assume the inevitability of their being as well armed as they currently are."

^This may be mistaking a system for the choices of an individual, much like the old canard of recycling some cans to meaningfully address climate change, the writer appears to be wildly overestimating what a relatively tiny political margin of anarchists can realistically be expected to have any effect on?

They appear to be mixing up an ethical objection with an inference to some set of tactics that they don't define. The existence of the military capacity of the police state is already something anarchists are theoretically opposed to on ethical grounds, regardless of the fetishization of firearms in the US.

However, I agree with plenty of other points they make and I might reduce the critique to something like the cult of the gun is bad? not the gun itself? there's plenty of other social norms outside of the US context where we can see that it's just not the tool itself.

Same goes for the concept of power through violence btw. Power through violence isn't always necessarily negative and can in fact be essential to liberation and safety. Toxic power fantasies, on the other hand, definitely don't make anyone safer.

this say gun bad, killing machine bad.

me agree. all machine bad, chainsaw bad, gadget bad, industry bad, civ bad

this say play good, winning good, we good, must good

me say winning bad, we bad, must bad

me no have gun, no attack, no win

me play, rest, eat leaf

The State fully agrees with you. The more guns are monopolized by the cops the more effectively they can terrorize people, as well as "respond" to mass shooters.

Cars are the biggest cause of death in many countries with strict gun control laws. Even in the US it's been the top one for most years recorded. But nevermind, guns bad.

Lol, don't you realize that guns will ALWAYS exist until the last human stands, there is no solution to fear, self-defense and biopolitics. Even if it comes to firing a round pebble from a piece of bamboo loaded with a mixture of crude gunpowder ( sulphur, ground chzrcoal carbon and saltpeter (potasium nitrite).

"firing a round pebble from a piece of bamboo loaded with a mixture of crude gunpowder ( sulphur, ground chzrcoal carbon and saltpeter (potasium nitrite)."
Wow brah, that's what Capt Kirk did against a huge authoritarian alien twice his size in Star Trek! Transhumanists for the win!

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You have to remember that, even if small, there is a niche community of weapons designers and manufacturers that are entirely unaffiliated with mainstream industrial producers, myself being one of them. You can write-off Lockheed Martin and Raytheon just as well as Glock, Heckler & Koch, etc. but you'll be serving yourself short to write off organizations like mine that exist to arm non-governmental entities alone. If anything, niche weapons producers such as myself are your closest ally in preventing the over-centralization of arms. It is this neo-pacifist attitude of yours, original poster, that has sterilized even the Darknet of discussions about the sensible armament of the masses, and has attempted to drive producers like myself off of the Darknet entirely.

When we leave, your last hope for sophisticated defense leaves as well, so keep that in mind.

Apex Defense Distribution
apexdefense@dnmx.org

LINK - http://5jvqnl7cv5qu35hn5cwcpimi3zhpieawsdkc643z643vc4uyejgvbsyd.onion/pa...
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Apex Defense Group, LLC is a private defense and training group based out of Winston-Salem, NC. At ADG, we are dedicated to delivering the highest level of service and training to civilians, military, and law enforcement. We offer a myriad of services, ranging from advanced firearms classes all the way up to corporate security consulting. Our instructors provide the highest quality of service possible from their extensive training, operational background, and passion for the job.

cut off their arms and they will no longer punch
cut off their legs and they will no longer kick
cut off their heads and they will no longer think bad thoughts
all for the future utopia that we will never have
hide behind the leftisms and the anarchisms
but all you want is to make me harmless

10,000 years of failing to end slavery and you think it'll be different this time? Sorry hun but you're not going to win.

Partially agree with some of the points made in the article.
Guns as commodities are actually an extension of the power to govern. Failure to critique the industrial system and commerce to which guns themselves are subordinate can lead to unrealistic illusions.
The commodity nature of guns leads to the loss of much radical imagination.
But, again, this is not an excuse to reject arming.
What is an anarchist approach?
That is what needs to be practiced and explored.

I agree with many of the sentiments regarding fetishizing guns and treating them as totems of defense but.... This is clearly written by a privileged white person. Any prick with $250 can buy a printer and filament to make a firearm at this point. You don't even need that tho, there are so many ar15 manufacturers in the us your idea of somehow destroying them all is childish at best if not just a straight up fed posting this. I wish I lived in the happy little world this author(s) do, but I live in this reality and will arm myself and others until the last capitalist is six feet under

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