New Clear Vision

Time to Put Down the Gun

by Randall Amster

The top of the news queue a few weeks ago almost went unnoticed in its ordinariness: “Gunman shoots 4 officers inside Detroit precinct” and “Walmart shooting leaves 2 dead, 2 deputies hurt.” It was merely just another day in America, where the “right to bear arms” is bolstered by the tortuous logic that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” We’re still awaiting word of any sightings of a “well-regulated militia” being in the mix, but thus far the exercise appears to be mostly personal — and in fact, the Supreme Court in 2008 explicitly affirmed that the Second Amendment applies to individuals.

Let’s face it: America is obsessed with firearms, both domestically and in our exports and foreign policy directives alike. Guns are available on a legal or illegal basis nearly on a par with drugs in our society, which means pretty much everyone has access to them on demand. And some of the statistics are sobering, according to a 2007 Reuters article describing the U.S. as the “most armed country”: (more…)

Women Organizing Against Gender Violence

by Victoria Law

During the last decade, the growing movement toward prison abolition, coupled with mounting recognition of the need for community responses to gender violence, has led to increased interest in developing alternatives to government policing. Moving away from the notion of women as victims in need of police protection, grassroots groups and activists are organizing community alternatives to calling 911. Such initiatives, however, are not new. Throughout the twentieth century, women have organized alternative models of self-protection.

This piece will examine past and present models of women’s community self-defense practices against violence. By exploring the wide-ranging methods women across the globe have employed to protect themselves, their loved ones, and communities, this piece seeks to contribute to current conversations on promoting safety and accountability without resorting to state-based policing and prisons. (more…)

Nonviolence Rejects ‘Othering’ … and Topples Dictators

by Winslow Myers

Muhammar Khaddafy’s brutal reaction to the aspirations of his own people is becoming a textbook case in the futility of opposing the citizens from whose consent a leader’s political authority derives, however illegitimately. Instead, his stubborn egotism has led to absurd violence, even civil war. At moments like this, the world trembles with indignation and apprehensive hope.

The non-violent invincibility of people power, the argument of Jonathan Schell’s underrated masterpiece of political philosophy, The Unconquerable World, may be coming true before our eyes again as it did in the Philippines in 1986 and Czechoslovakia in 1989. We do not yet know which model will dominate in the short run in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the violence of state power, or the nonviolence of citizens seeking their rights as leaders abdicate peacefully. Citizen invincibility is not manifesting in all cases without additional tragic sacrifice to the callous will of dictators. But in the end it will prevail. (more…)

An Open Letter to Sarah, Michelle, and My American Sisters

by Mary Sojourner

I once shopped at a Safeway in my Tucson neighborhood. On January 8, 2011, a mentally ill young man — nearly a boy — opened fire on U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and a group of people outside that Safeway. Yellow police ribbons drape the parking lot I once parked in. Six people died there, including a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge, and one of Giffords’s staff. At least ten people were wounded.

Giffords has been able to respond to doctors even though she was shot in the head. As I write this on Valentines Day 2011, she is able to say a few words and sing simple songs. Much is not known about what inspired the killer. What is known is that he  left messages on internet sites in which he expressed violent fears and viewpoints that seem to indicate he is seriously ill. What I also know is that he developed his plan — and acted — in a growing atmosphere of viciousness in America. If you doubt that, go to the CNN, Yahoo, Fox, and other major news media and read the comments following the ongoing reports on this story … and almost any story. (more…)

Learning Peacefulness from the Zapotecas

by Devon G. Peña

Pundits and analysts have engaged in mostly thoughtful discussions of the social, cultural, and political contexts of the recent mass murder in Arizona. According to Michael Nagler, there is growing recognition of “an apparently forbidden truth: that we bring violence on ourselves when we promote it, glorify it, or legitimize it — as in this case by the extreme rhetoric associated with Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, among others.” Still, for every such in-depth analysis of the issue, there are others content to remain on the surface.

Was the Tucson massacre a form of political violence? Some have argued that it was, by virtue of the fact that the principal target was an elected official. Many on the right, including Palin, have objected to this characterization, arguing that “blaming the right” or any one else is intrinsically unfair and that the mindless crime occurred simply because the perpetrator was mentally ill and unhinged. Since the assassin was ‘sick,’ this cannot be seen as a ‘political act.’ The allegedly deranged mental state of the perpetrator becomes an opening to ‘de-politicize’ the crime. This is, simply put, a ruse. (more…)

Will It Be Force … or Discourse?

by Randall Amster

In that fateful supermarket parking lot in Tucson, two drastically different forms of politics were on display, and the contrast couldn’t have been more starkly evident. On the one hand there were ordinary people meeting with their congressional representative, ostensibly to get to know one another and share concerns about important issues. On the other there was an alienated and disturbed individual armed with a deadly weapon, seemingly bent on making a statement of his own while brutally silencing others in the process. The fact that this transpired in beleaguered Arizona, known widely for its invidious policies, lax gun laws, and blunt politics, has served to heighten the contrast and arouse the nation’s conscience in the process. (more…)

An ex-Weather Underground Radical on the Tucson Shootings

by Mark Rudd

In 1970, when I was 22 years old — the same age as Tucson gunman Jared Loughner — I was a founder of the Weather Underground, an offshoot of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. At that time, having fashioned myself “an agent of necessity,” I was willing to kill or be killed for some romantic notion of “the revolution.” So it’s not that difficult for me to imagine what might have been in the mind of someone like Loughner, who perhaps acted (as I did) in the misguided belief that it was up to him to do what needed to be done.

By the winter of 1970, the members of the Weather Underground had gone over the edge. A small group of us in New York City, charged with “taking the struggle to a higher level,” was planning a bombing at Fort Dix, New Jersey, which was then an army basic training center. Three pipe bombs filled with dynamite and larded with nails were to be left at a noncommissioned officers’ dance to remind our fellow Americans of the millions of tons of bombs our country had been dropping on the Vietnamese for five straight years. (more…)