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The ACLU Acknowledges That Harsh Laws Only Make Hell for the Lives of Marginalized People [1]
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Date: 2023-09-19
A well-worn fact of progressivism is that law enforcement and prisons, under the current system, the operate with utter brutality and huge disparities for who is arrested. There is no way to support law enforcement or incarceration in its current incarnation without implicitly approving of the deep racial bias that permeates the entire system. Putting more laws that supposedly motivate positive behavior with harsh and punitive punishments is proven to not stop the crimes it intends to and creates a lot of arrests with no real results. At this point, a lot of you are probably saying “Yeah, water is wet, what is your point?”
The point I am getting at is that people forget this very clear lesson we have study after study proving when it comes to things they view as dangerous. Despite that proven fact, I so often see people say the method to stop gun violence in this country is to tax or punish every person that owns a gun. People will say, “If they want a gun they deserve enhanced scrutiny, they took on that responsibility.” That is true in that we should have much better gun safety laws, but when people look at Hunter Biden getting charged and say “We need to focus on throwing the book at every gun owner who breaks even the tiniest of codes. The more they get away with things the more they will act dangerously,” or “we should require 20 hours of training a month, we’ll see how important their gun is when they need to prove their safety and dedication,” when we have proof that this does nothing to improve society. We already have reporting out of Chicago that investigates the effects of adding a bunch of licensing requirements for firearms, I did a diary on that before as well. The result is a lot of police stops, a lot of Black men getting arrested, and a lot of gun owners in jail but not a reduction in violence.
So where does the ACLU enter this conversation? About a week ago New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an emergency order banning firearm possession in public spaces for 30 days after some high profile shootings, including the death of an 11-year-old boy outside a baseball a baseball game. The governor even mentioned that, “No constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute.” That is a whole other can of worms because if executives can suspend the constitution due to emergency orders than the next time a Republican executive is elected they are going to make an emergency order about “transgender ideology” and suspend the first amendment right to call them on their bullshit to “stop the social contagion because the idea is dangerous for youth to hear,” or something along those lines. It could be a governor or it could be even the president but that is an insanely dangerous precedent to set which is probably why even plenty of Democrats from the Sheriff of Albuquerque to Ted Lieu of California, who is on the Congressional Task Force on Gun Violence Prevention, have said that this is neither legal nor effective. Even David Hogg, a school shooting survivor and co-founder of March for Our Lives said “I support gun safety, but there is no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S. Constitution.”
In this sort if complex situation, the ACLU of New Mexico decided to wade in with a press release on their thoughts on the order. I think it reads best in full, but here is the full text of the part relevant to this conversation as said by New Mexico Litigation Manager Lalita Moskowitz:
“The ACLU of New Mexico is heartbroken over the recent death of a child and shares the governor’s concern for the well-being of our community. However, we are equally concerned that her solution to the complicated problems of substance abuse, addiction, and gun violence is to pour more resources into law enforcement. Historically, this kind of approach leads to the over policing of our communities, racial profiling, and increased misery in the lives of already marginalized people. Instead, the governor should be following evidence-based solutions such as meaningful diversion and violence intervention programs and addressing the root causes of violence. The order also raises legitimate and pressing concerns about New Mexicans' privacy.
After that they go on to say there is great public interest in the part regarding gun violence but they also have concerns about the other emergency order setting aside $750M for coordinating with police on the drug problem.
The reason this really matters is that often people view guns as a special danger worthy of special consideration, to the point where people are much more comfortable pushing for mass incarceration as a solution to the issue when we tried this before and it didn’t work. The Daily Kos community has had spirited conversation about the need to not dehumanize political opponents through insulting language, but apparently see nothing dehumanizing about making extremely harsh laws and using carceral punishment as a threat to “send a message” to people who may want to own guns. We know that prison is barbaric and really doesn’t rehabilitate people so what is the difference between this and the drug war?
The only difference I see between this and the drug war is that is that addicts have become humanized and gun owners have not. That is partially due to the immature and aggressive behavior of some gun owners online being the people that come to mind when we think of a gun owner. The people who frequent gun ownership spaces online can be cantankerous contrarians who don’t take these issues seriously. When you think of a man that says nothing can be done besides blaming the mentally ill and then says “Try to come and take it,” it makes you think that this person is extremely adversarial and that a combative approach may be most effective. You may even go to a gun store and find a lot of conservative white people who you feel would never be open to reasonable measures. The idea these people are the only gun owners is an illusion of the digital age and the fact that these in-person social groups can be quite insular. People who own guns and talk about it online in a destructive way are a small subset of the most invested gun owners and the fact is implementing harsh laws will not target these people.
They will target poor people who honestly fear for their safety and think a gun will help and they are going to criminalize someone who is buys weed legally from their state and carries a gun legally, even if neither was happening at the same time. If people put huge training and ownership costs on guns then it does not keep people from carrying them, it keeps them from training in the legal system. I know many of you would tell these people guns are a net negative no matter the scenario and a huge danger to us all. I know some of you might say “the prison system is wrong, but that gun is a danger and a gun off the streets is a good thing.” That works in theory, but in practice arresting more people for guns and repossessing their guns did not reduce gun violence where stricter laws were implemented. If those people shouldn’t have guns and haven’t broken a law it should be our job to convince them of that so they give up their guns, not make cops pat down every person who looks like they could possibly have a gun. These aren’t wealthy people in the suburbs with a bunch of guns for fun experiencing no real threat, this is a person who walk home alone late at night from a job. The gun nuts are never the people the cops are searching, cops are often friends with people in the local gun community and that gives them another layer of bias to look for crimes in some places and ignore them in others.
If we go down this path, then we are going to end up with exactly what we asked for, the police making a lot of arrests (of the same marginalized people they always arrest) while the gun nuts that are shouting about a civil war lately continue undeterred and gun violence keeps growing. I think as people who hold leftist values, we should know that carceral punishment doesn’t work. We view guns as different because the threat is new and unique and violent and cops are seen as the appropriate channel to deal with violent criminals, but the fact of the matter is that drugs were a huge threat when the drug war was ramping up. People felt very scared and not in control that drugs could be in their community, drug users could offer their kids drugs, threaten them or rob them, all sorts of dangers that they perceived as ever present and lurking around the bend.
These people under threat responded to that by supporting locking people up with mandatory minimums. They thought that if we don’t treat these people as the threats they are then safety will never improve. That may have been a reasonable assumption at some point in our history but at this point we have so much data against it that is has become a “Fool Me Once” scenario. We look back on that period with great shame for criminalizing addicts and yet we still didn’t learn our lesson. This is the same tack many on the left are taking today against guns. That even though locking people up is bad in general this is a special threat so we should harshly police this group of people. If we end up completely targeting minorities for incarceration because we blindly believe, as Miranda Viscoli who is co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence said, “If it saves one life, then it’s worth doing,” then we are on a fast track to keep locking up a lot of people without fixing anything. Personally, I prefer the conclusion of the New Mexico ACLU:
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/19/2194183/-The-ACLU-Acknowledges-That-Harsh-Laws-Only-Make-Hell-for-the-Lives-of-Marginalized-People
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