From Draft NOtices, July - September 2019
-- M. Matsemela-Ali Odom, Committee Against Police Brutality, San Diego
The United States of America has a serious gun problem. That gun problem is deeply embedded in the nation’s history of slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism. The deepening economic crises of the past five decades have hastened this problem. In the popular media, this is seen in the evidence of increased mass shootings.
There are multiple definitions of mass shootings. One definition defines them as events where four or more people are killed in an event not formally linked to a crime or terrorist organization. Another definition describes mass shootings as events where four or more people are shot. Using the former definition, there have been nearly 200 mass shootings in the last 50 years. Using the latter definition, there have been over 2,000 mass shootings in the last six years -- one per day. While devastating, those numbers pale in comparison to the overall numbers of people killed by gun violence. Since 1968, 1.3 million people have been shot to death in the U.S. That is twice the rate of other forms of death and 25 times the rate of gun deaths in all other Western nations.
Despite the prevalence of gun violence, the dominant discourse on it has been lacking from all angles because very few people have examined the U.S. gun problem in relationship to the global proliferation of weapons. The U.S. gun problem has been largely analyzed on the domestic and individual level opening even radical activists to parroting the discourse of reactionary gun rights activists.
The Importance of Michael Zinzun
Progressive activists would be better off taking the position of the late Michael Zinzun of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the Southern African Support Committee (SASC), in Los Angeles. Zinzun, a former Black Panther, knew very well the need for armed self-defense as he had fought many bouts with the police to the point of losing an eye in the struggle. Yet, he also closely analyzed the proliferation of arms by the local police agencies and the military. He understood that was the root of America’s gun problem. Every gun used in a massacre of U.S. civilians has also been used to kill people overseas by militaries and police. In the 1970s, this reality helped mobilize the internationalist activism of Zinzun and united the work he did in CAPA with the SASC.
For Zinzun, the Soweto Massacre of 1976, the murder of Steve Biko in 1977 and the routine violence from the white power regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia, and other Southern African settler colonial powers against African native populations were connected to deaths of Black and Brown people in the United States. In his studies and activism, Zinzun gave serious consideration to the proliferation of advanced military weapons, aircraft and tactics amongst the police forces in Southern California. Zinzun’s archival material shows that he directly linked the militarization of U.S. police forces to the colonial violence in Southern Africa -- as well as Central America and Palestine.
In the 1970s and 80s, the proliferation of guns in the U.S. was the direct result of U.S. corporations and conservative gun runners that flooded the streets, stores, and gun shows with weapons used by the Israeli, Rhodesian, and South African armies to kill Southern Africans and Palestinians in close combat or outright massacres. Zinzun was an opponent to gang violence and other forms of horizontal violence that plagued the working class. Still, that was not Zinzun's focus. Zinzun would have likely articulated that the only way to disarmament is to begin with the police and militaries. This is where liberal activists fall short and some radicals seem too afraid to articulate.
Police Violence from South Los Angeles to South Africa
One event that Zinzun protested was the 93rd Annual International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACOP) conference in Los Angeles. For Zinzun, this convention revealed the material connections between the militarization of policing from Southern California to Southern Africa and the corporate agenda propping it up.
On 6 October 1977, LAPD Chief Edward Davis hosted over 7,000 law enforcement executive officers. Promoted as the largest gathering of police officers in the world, Davis welcomed officers from U.S.-sponsored dictatorships like the Philippines, Pakistan, Chile and South Africa. “Clearly reveal[ing] the connections between police forces and multi-national corporations,” as Zinzun noted, over 400 U.S. and British firms, including Motorola and General Electric, displayed armored vehicles, new fingerprinting and surveillance materials, as well as new weapons and ammunition such as exploding bullets. In response to the conference, the SASC and CAPA organized a Third World coalition of over 800 protestors that included students from Southern Africa, Iran, and the Philippines. They held signs with slogans such as “End International Police Terrorism” and “Down with Imperialism.”
Radical historian Mike Davis, a friend of Zinzun, has shown that U.S. military tactics in Vietnam influenced domestic policing strategies. As well, another radical historian Gerald Horne has shown that the Vietnam efforts influenced the brutal counterinsurgency of Rhodesian and South African forces. More importantly, the United States provided military assistance to white regimes in Southern Africa and those regimes in return influenced the modernization of U.S. policing, including in Southern California. U.S. and Southern African gun-runners established international connections and smuggled weapons from the United States into Southern Africa. White Rhodesians and white South Africans created paramilitary units with names and tactics they learned from the United States.
To bypass the restrictions on weapons trade with South Africa and Rhodesia, U.S. corporations found a loophole by shipping deconstructed aircraft to nations such as Israel and Italy, then sold to Rhodesian and South African businesses. Moreover, U.S. aerospace disinvested from the development of U.S. urban centers while they increased their Southern African operations. The Burbank, California-based Lockheed was amongst the leading exporters to Southern Africa
Police Militarization Influences Gun Violence
Conversely, weapons and methods used by South African and Rhodesian forces influenced the militarization of Southern California police agencies. The Uzi and Armsel Striker riot shotgun were first used in Southern Africa by Rhodesian and South African forces, and such small arms were eventually adopted by U.S. patrol officers and SWAT teams. Rhodesian Mike Rousseau, while serving as a mercenary for the Portuguese forces in the Mozambican war for independence, developed what became known as the “Mozambique Drill” or the “Failure Drill.” This is a close-combat maneuver where the gunman delivers two bullets to the body and one to the head of an enemy. Forming a friendship with the U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Jeff Cooper, Rousseau taught Cooper the maneuver. In 1980, Cooper taught LAPD officers Larry Mudgett and John Helms the Mozambique Drill as a part of the 250 Pistol Course at the Gunsite Academy in Arizona. These new tactics and arms undoubtedly influenced the uptick in police violence since the 1980s.
As well, the residual effect of this small-arms race was that weapons once used by combat forces in Rhodesia, South Africa, Vietnam and South Los Angeles began to appear on the streets of major cities, at gun stores, and gun shows. While the U.S. shipped large-scale munitions abroad, small arms made their way to the U.S. in exchange. Uzis, riot shotguns, Tec-9s, and other weapons were among them. Zinzun and others like him understood that colonial violence led to the horizontal violence in South Los Angeles. So, to stop the flow of guns to the streets the solution was demilitarization.
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/index.php/draft-notices).
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