Guns and the Left
America has the most guns per capita in the world – and they have long had a powerful effect on national politics.
The country has been transfixed by the recent bloodshed in Portland, and, before that, by a litany of gun-related events, from armed anti-lockdown protests, to the horror of school shootings and subsequent anti-gun protests, to the drama of the Bundy ranch standoff. In the months to come, we’ll be looking at a range of gun-related groups in America across the political spectrum.
Today, we’re looking at an organization squarely in the camp of education and self-defense – the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), which is modeled after the National Rifle Association (NRA). It’s a nonprofit whose mission is to “uphold the right of the working class to keep and bear arms and maintain the skills necessary for self and community defense.” According to their site, the vast majority of states have at least one chapter. The SRA eschews the political theater of armed organizations whose purpose is armed demonstrations.
James Pogue is a member of the SRA who wrote a piece for Harper’s describing his lifelong relationship with guns and his affiliation with the group, which has upwards of 5,000 members. I reached Pogue while he was working at a plant nursery in California. He dusted off his hands to talk guns and the left.
Self-defense in a failed state?
The membership of SRA is “very much the Street Fight left – broke people, younger, not the graduate school leftist contingent. The people I know in it are screen door salespeople, work at Jimmy John’s, a lot of Uber drivers, a lot of lower middle class people … [many] people who don’t feel like they have any insulation from the scary landscape that America has become,” Pogue said. A year ago, a third of the membership identified as LGBTQ and almost 10% as trans. “I think a lot of people genuinely feel scared right now,” he told me.
The government’s pandemic response, followed by the federal intervention in Portland, just reinforced people’s feelings of vulnerability, he said. “There’s this feeling that the state is not going to help you, and you have to protect yourself in this country that’s basically descending into chaos.”
People tried electoral politics – and felt like they got slapped down
Particularly among the younger and poorer left, Pogue said, “people really [had] a lot of hope, saying we’re going to play ball with this system and elect Bernie Sanders and in exchange, we’re going to get power and this country is going to be answerable to us. And people saw the failure of those two Sanders campaigns and were like f*ck this, this government actually isn’t ever going to work for us ... I know a lot of people in the SRA who were really invested in the Bernie stuff and saw how Dems closed ranks against him,” Pogue said.
A focus on resilience
The SRA is largely focused on self-defense and resilience in a country where basic systems from health care to public housing have ceased to function. People might be inspired to join a group like this one because they feel like, “I don’t know how to camp, tie a bandage, shoot a gun, and all of this makes me feel adrift in our current world where right-wingers know all these things,” Pogue said. “Honestly, I’ve learned more about medical stuff than about guns … the west LA chapter does a lot of trainings and events – no one there is talking about topping the government, but [they are talking] about wildfire aid,” he told me. Most people come to the organization not owning any guns. “They’re building up to getting their first handgun, usually a 9 millimeter,” Pogue said.
Guns don’t make a militia
Pogue puts gun groups in two categories. On the one hand, you have militia culture and armed protest politics. In those cases, “you don’t need a lot of members in order to create a big stir ... [left-wing groups] John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt probably have limited memberships, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good at practicing armed politics.” On the other, you have big membership organizations like the National Rifle Association. This is the model for the SRA. “You would be instantly removed from the SRA if you brought a banner and a gun to the protest,” he said.
Two visions of the future
I asked Pogue how the politics of the SRA engage with the politics of, say, the Parkland kids, who have thrown all their energy behind banning guns in America after the horrific shooting at their school.
“I think you have these two versions of what our politics are going to look like in the next decade or so, where some people are like, hey, let’s try to get this back to being a normal country, make incremental reforms. And then there are other people maybe of a different class background saying, this is not going to work,” he said. “The honest truth is that the gun people are winning this argument. Gun politics are active in America today. The argument about whether armed politics work has been won, people use it constantly. The idea that there’s no space for guns on the left is just untenable.”