Firearms Have A Vital Role To Play In Even Non-Violent Resistance To Authoritarian Regimes

As people in the Democratic coalition continue to debate how to best respond to Donald Trump, an interesting anti-gun argument has come up. In short, it could be summarized as “You don’t need guns to stop fascism, and you’re actually better off without them.”

To really explore why this idea is a bad one, we need to first avoid being distracted by debating whether Trump is a fascist. Instead, we need to try to get into the minds of the people making this argument so we can fully dissect it and explain what’s wrong with it. You don’t have to agree with them on anything, but it’s important to understand what they’re trying to say.

My position is that it’s not only an irresponsible position to take, but one that is actually harmful. Instead of protecting the marginalized groups — immigrants, homeless people, the LGBT community — the Democratic coalition says it wants to protect, it proves instead that they’re quite comfortable throwing them under the bus for the comfort of the most privileged and out-of-touch Democrats. To avoid this outcome, people fighting any kind of authoritarian regime should instead be asking themselves how to effectively use firearms when resisting authoritarian regimes (and, no, Red Dawn isn’t a good instructional video here).

Some Background

It may surprise some readers, but there are plenty of people on “the left” who are actually big on gun rights. I put “the left” in quotes because the term is heavily misused in conservative circles.

The reality is that most Democrats really aren’t leftists, as they espouse a weak form of liberalism that includes many social and democratic rights, but excludes lots of economic and property rights, including the right to keep and bear arms. That leaves enough room for a weak form of socialism that’s a remnant of the Progressive Era. I’m going to call this camp the “pseudo-liberals.”

Actual leftists are people who believe in more potent forms of socialism, including, but not limited to outright communism. While there certainly are morons who believe in establishing an anti-gun dictatorship of the proletariat that can serve as a “vanguard” that’s supposed to build a more anarchic communist society, many others do not subscribe to that.

Many leftists are intelligent enough to know that getting what they perceive to be the dictatorship to peacefully relinquish power for the next phase of communism is virtually impossible. That’s why there are many socialists and communists who take Marx seriously when he wrote, “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

As you can probably imagine, these differing stances on gun rights lead to friction within the Democrat/leftist coalition. While there are many things they agree on, this is one of the big issues they argue over.

The argument against the use of firearms is coming up a lot on social media these days as pseudo-liberals and leftists debate the right way to resist the actions of Donald Trump, who is broadly seen in that coalition as an aspiring fascist and would be dictator. Pseudo-liberals think fascist dictatorships are best toppled by what they think are MLK-style principled non-violent actions. But as you go further to the left, you find more and more people who think that the time is fast approaching to move from stage one (organization) to stage two (asymmetric warfare) on Mao’s model of insurgency.

The Research Behind The Argument Against Violence In Resistance

The pseudo-liberals have one big thing going for them in this debate: some peer-reviewed research indicating that non-violent resistance movements succeed twice as often as movements that include violence. But there’s a big problem: most people only have access to the headline and the abstract (summary) of the research. Those of us who aren’t affiliated with a university usually don’t want to cough up the dough to read the actual paper, so people get away with sharing a few facts from it that the rest of us can’t really analyze.

Some of us, however, have access to the full article, and when I looked at it, there’s a glaring problem for its applicability in the United States. Because the data was limited to campaigns for regime change, against a foreign invader, and for secession or self-determination from 1900 to 2006, it leaves out almost every resistance movement that’s happened here…like the Civil War and the successful insurgency against Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Movement, and events like the Oklahoma City Bombing aren’t really considered.

Another problem is that the dataset is put into very black-and-white categories: violent and non-violent movements. The paper itself (unlike those who quote its most interesting figures) acknowledges the difficulty in doing this, as some groups include both components or have loose associations with groups that differ from them on the use of violence. They had to make subjective calls about which groups were largely non-violent and which were primarily engaged in violence. This simplistic approach left a lot of room for some violence to be used by non-violent groups, or for non-violet approaches by violent groups.

It’s also worth noting that a movement that aims to restore the rule of law from a rogue political party isn’t something the paper would have even included in its dataset. That isn’t regime change or revolution.

Looking At America and Letting Some Nuance In

If we really want to apply historical analysis of what might happen with a resistance against an authoritarian regime in the United States, we need to look at resistance movements in America and acknowledge its messy realities. It’s also likely good to look at resistance movements that coexisted during the same era to avoid differences in public opinion and the facts on the ground that can change with time.

I’d personally look at the different approaches of the Black Panthers and those used by Martin Luther King, Jr. But unlike the pseudo-liberals, I’d include the presence of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in this analysis because they were associated with MLK’s group.

This article is already running long, so I’ll do some gross oversimplification in this comparison. In short, the “in your face” open carry approach of the Panthers didn’t work out in the long run because it invited repression. The public largely wasn’t bothered by the fact that leaders were assassinated or that Governor Ronald Reagan signed gun control into law in response. The MLK/Deacons group, on the other hand, focused on non-violence while using a minimal amount of purely defensive violence to counter their repression. By not frightening the public, that group was more influential in highlighting the violence of Jim Crow and gathering sympathy for change.

Instead of relying strictly on the research associated with the authors of one paper and generalizing it to something it never actually analyzed, it would be wise to look at other researchers, like Gene Sharp, who advocate for strategic non-violence (non-violence when it strategically works) instead of principled non-violence (non-violence no matter what the government does). Strategic non-violence is a lot closer to what this successful movement (the MLK/Deacons) actually did.

Measured Defensive Violence vs. Fantasy Non-Violence

I conclude from this that the population of the United States is very comfortable with the idea of armed self defense, and thus won’t condemn a movement that engages in that kind of violence. What the public isn’t cool with is going on the offensive. Terror attacks, armed ambushes, and other guerrilla tactics turn enough of the public against a movement to give an aspiring dictator more power to deal with the group, which can then be wielded against everyone.

So, the proven MLK/Deacons approach works, and should be emulated as need be in the future.

What won’t work is LARPing MLK while conveniently forgetting about the armed Deacons. That approach could work in the long run, but it would reqire that the government kill enough people to disgust the public and collapse its base of support. Because fascists engage in scapegoating, the brunt of this will fall on marginalized groups while the benefit from a slow decline of the regime’s power benefits privileged groups who were able to avoid engaging in defensive violence with little to no personal consequences.

When pseudo-liberals browbeat marginalized groups for wanting to arm themselves to defend against violence, they are, in effect, signaling that they are expendable. As Lord Farquaad would have said, that’s a sacrifice they’re more than willing to make.