Magazine
OPINION |
LAW AND ORDER
Why Gun Control Is Now a Matter of National
Security
Biden should seize on the rise of far-right militias
to make an urgent new case for action.
By STEVEN
SIMON and JONATHAN STEVENSON
04/22/2021
06:30 PM EDT
Steven
Simon, an international relations professor at Colby College, served on the
National Security Council during the Clinton and Obama administrations,
including as senior director for counterterrorism.
Jonathan
Stevenson, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies
and managing editor of Survival, served on the NSC as director for
political-military affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.
For all the
tragic mass shooting headlines this year, the American gun control debate seems
permanently stuck. Last week, nine people were killed by AR-15 fire in
Indianapolis; before that, 10 died in Boulder, and eight in Atlanta. Despite
the anguish over the past month — and despite a push by President Joe Biden —
Congress looks unlikely to take any immediate action.
We share
Biden’s view that the level of U.S. gun violence is a “national embarrassment.”
But as National Security Council veterans who have specialized in
counterterrorism—with direct experience involving far-right American terrorism,
burgeoning jihadism, and Northern Irish extremism in the 1990s—we also see a
new threat rising, one that has the potential to change the urgency of the
debate: the growing, and heavily armed, American militia movement, which made a
show of force on January 6.
Increasingly,
as militias acquire and stockpile weapons, they’re turning guns from a
public-health concern into a threat to national security. And it’s possible
that if proponents of reform—including advocacy groups, congressional leaders
and Biden—began addressing it that way, they’d have a chance of energizing the
debate against the National Rifle Association and its allies. Indeed, the shock
of the insurrection has increased the political burdens of an NRA in internal
disarray and offered a new perspective on the need for significant gun control
legislation.
As America
learned on January 6, anti-government militia groups are more than willing to
jump walls, break doors and disrupt the underpinnings of our democracy. These
groups, with transnational ties, also enjoy easy access to high-power,
high-capacity, small-caliber semiautomatic weapons—many of which can be
converted to fully automatic. The concern isn’t that these weapons will somehow
enable militias to challenge the U.S. military on the battlefield, which they
certainly will not. It is that they make mass casualty attacks against
political or cultural adversaries both easy to carry out, and easy to frame as
inspirational events of the kind that mobilize insurrection.
The
executive orders Biden issued earlier this month imposing restrictions on gun
kits and devices that turn pistols into rifles are marginal safeguards and
rather thin gruel overall. But his call for reviving the federal ban on assault
weapons is more promising and an acknowledgment that serious action is
required. An important additional measure would be more rigorous required
background checks. At least one key Republican senator, Pat Toomey of
Pennsylvania, has expressed openness to working with Biden on a gun bill.
Generating
bipartisan consensus for an effective crackdown on firearms will always be
difficult. While gun control is now unlikely to lose existing supporters, it is
also unlikely to win many new ones. But reframing the issue as a national
security imperative could galvanize passive backers now focused by the assault
on the Capitol on maintaining political stability in the United States. A
plausible objective would be to impel the U.S. government to take further
substantial regulatory steps and to lay the groundwork for effective
legislation should the Democrats consolidate their Senate majority in 2022.
The
administration, however, will have to tread carefully to avoid provoking the
very behavior it means to deter. Extremists will interpret increased firearms
regulation as validating their narrative of government-imposed social
engineering and personal disempowerment. The showdowns at Ruby Ridge and Waco,
which fueled the militia movement, demonstrate the risks. Law enforcement at
the federal, state and local levels need to prepare better than they have in
the past for non-violent enforcement. But the increased magnitude of those very
risks is exactly why we need to recast gun control as a national security
challenge.
As delicate
an issue as gun rights is, without action the prospect of cycles of escalating
civil violence is particularly worrisome. Even assuming law enforcement
agencies adjust their threat perceptions to accord domestic terrorism due
attention—as they should—the wide distribution of automatic weapons and
abundant ammunition to individuals hostile to the state is likely to be seen as
justification for the further militarization of law enforcement in the
post-9/11 era.
Heavier
police firepower, combined with the martial mindset it tends to engender,
stands to increase tensions between law enforcement and political protesters,
which started in June 2020 with the death of George Floyd and culminated in the
riot at and breach of the Capitol on January 6. While Trump’s nod to white
supremacism and incitement of far-right insurrection have already prompted some
Black citizens to arm themselves in self-defense, continuing police antagonism
on top of that could increase the likelihood that Black militias will emerge.
Armed conflict between nonstate groups would be even harder to subdue than
one-sided, far-right aggression.
Meanwhile,
the broad dispersal of mass casualty small arms makes every individual willing
to use one a potentially catalytic lone-wolf terrorist on the order of Brenton
Tarrant, the Islamaphobic white supremacist who killed 51 people with a
semiautomatic shotgun and an AR-15-style rifle at a mosque in Christchurch, New
Zealand, in March 2019. Many far-right American militias, including the
anti-authoritarian Boogaloo Bois, explicitly encourage their followers to act
on their own initiative, as Tarrant did, in “leaderless resistance” against the
state, and several, starting with Timothy McVeigh, have done so.
The symbol
of militia volunteers carrying assault weapons and the reality of their using
them lethally have historically been enormously powerful social forces.
In 1981,
emboldened by the political impact of the prison hunger strikes, Danny
Morrison—a senior official of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army’s political
alter-ego—asked rhetorically, “Who here really believes we can win the war
through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in
this hand and an ArmaLite in the other, we take power in Ireland?” He was
referring to Colt’s commercially marketed version of the M-16, and expressing
the IRA’s strategy of combining violence and electoral politics to change the
political system. The “ArmaLite and ballot box” imagery inspired a new
generation of IRA volunteers, and took the group—by way of over 1,000 more dead
and Sinn Fein’s political rise — to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Unlike
contemporary American militias, of course, Irish republicans had at least
partially legitimate, historically based grievances.
One
skeptical response would be that late twentieth-century Northern Ireland
differed from the early twenty-first century United States in that its factions
were engaged in what amounted to civil war. But the extreme political
polarization in the contemporary U.S. is not terribly far from what existed
during and immediately after our own Civil War. That toxic and potentially
explosive intramural animosity has remained latent and is now resurfacing in
the form of the white supremacism preached by most of the armed militias,
convinced that the country is run by a malign and treacherous liberal “deep
state” and destined to be ethnically compromised unless they take drastic,
violent action.
To many
Americans, and especially these Americans, firearms are exalted as symbols of
liberty and patriotism; it is merely inconvenient that using them to impose
political change is starkly inconsistent with American democracy, a subject to
be elided rather than confronted and resolved.
The high
level of gun ownership, the ease of purchasing more weapons, and Second
Amendment absolutism only amplify the risks such attitudes pose to the
stability of the republic. Any legislative effort targeting guns, even if it
survives the likely Supreme Court challenges, is sure to be greeted explosively
on the right. Indeed, the election of a Democratic president had already caused
gun purchases to surge, a trend that has followed such elections over the past
several decades.
Right-wing
extremists hold guns in vastly disproportionate numbers. Law enforcement
appears constrained to tolerate their training in military-style camps, more or
less openly, and their incendiary, often seditious rhetoric, turbocharged by
the internet, as the lawful exercise of free speech. The possibility of
muscular legislation, like “red flag” laws permitting law enforcement officers
to seize firearms from those judged to be public-safety risks — has only fueled
their anti-government fervor.
Large-scale
confiscation and deradicalization and are not realistic prospects in the near
future. But an assault weapons ban does seem within the Biden administration’s
political grasp. If the president wants to follow through on his desire to
rebuild American democracy, a push to curb gun violence offers an invaluable
opportunity and a potentially persuasive argument.
Just as in
dealing with mature insurgencies or ongoing civil conflict, wise policy in
contemporary America would seek to separate destabilizing extremists from
ordinary people with remediable grievances. This is common sense. The
administration’s message to garden-variety firearms enthusiasts should be:
Don’t let seditious radicals imperil your access to the guns you cherish.
Protect your hobby by backing enforcement. Hunting, recreational shooting and
personal defense against criminal threats are all fine; anti-government, white
supremacist militia activity is not.
In a deeply
divided society and a political sphere in which threats of violence have become
part and parcel of political discourse, combat rifles can do tremendous damage
to social cohesion. As is the case with terrorist movements worldwide, attacks
can be expressive but also strategic, designed to force adversaries to take
actions that deepen divisions, complicate governance and win converts to the
terrorists’ cause.
Durably
reducing the threat to political stability clearly hinges on the resolution of
big issues, including income inequality, cultural anxieties and an overheated
media environment. But we will buy ourselves room to maneuver and time to deal
with these challenges by reducing the firepower of militias and the lone wolves
they inspire.
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