Guns are tools — not gods.3
They should be kept close, used rarely, and never pointed in the name of profit, order, or pride.4
A gun in the hands of a scared woman is different than a gun in the hands of a scared state.5
We are not building armies.6
We are not interested in uniforms, badges, or codes that make you pull the trigger faster.
A person can be trusted.7
A system cannot.
We reject the idea that safety comes from force.
We reject the idea that violence can be outsourced to a few while the rest of us pretend we’re clean.8
We want fewer guns in the world.
But if they exist, they must belong to people — not power.9
No one should be forced to fight.
But no one should be punished for surviving.10
The people can carry.
The police cannot.
The difference is not the weapon — it’s the reason.11
When power has guns, it grows.
When people have guns, it endures.12
📚 Footnotes — The Long Line Behind These Ideas
- “people have a right to protect themselves”
Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth; Angela Davis – “Are Prisons Obsolete?”; Mariame Kaba – Abolitionist essays on community protection. - “systems or institutions do not”
Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish; David Graeber – The Utopia of Rules; James C. Scott – Seeing Like a State. - “guns are tools — not gods”
Wendell Berry – on tools as morally neutral; Robert Farrar Capon – The Supper of the Lamb; Simone Weil – on force as false transcendence. - “never pointed in the name of profit, order, or pride”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore – Golden Gulag; bell hooks – Killing Rage; Chris Hedges – War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. - “scared woman vs. scared state”
Audre Lorde – Sister Outsider; Zora Neale Hurston; Saidiya Hartman – Scenes of Subjection. - “we are not building armies”
Leo Tolstoy – Christian anarchism; Dorothy Day – Catholic Worker Movement; Howard Zinn – A People’s History of the United States. - “a person can be trusted. a system cannot.”
Max Stirner – The Ego and Its Own; Elinor Ostrom – Governing the Commons; Ivan Illich – Deschooling Society. - “violence can’t be outsourced”
Hannah Arendt – On Violence; James Baldwin – “A Letter to My Nephew”; Fred Moten – The Undercommons. - “fewer guns in the world…must belong to people”
Black Panther Party – Ten-Point Program; Huey Newton – Revolutionary Suicide; Peter Kropotkin – Mutual Aid. - “no one should be punished for surviving”
Angela Davis – on criminalization of self-defense; Dean Spade – Mutual Aid; Adrienne Maree Brown – Emergent Strategy. - “difference is not the weapon — it’s the reason”
Simone Weil – The Iliad or The Poem of Force; Malcolm X – on the morality of self-defense; MLK – “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. - “when power has guns, it grows. when people have guns, it endures.”
Noam Chomsky – On Power and Ideology; Colin Ward – Anarchy in Action; Rebecca Solnit – A Paradise Built in Hell.
