Intervening in the Economy for Gun Reform

Donald Trump has been in office for just north of a year now, and a broad left-wing coalition has yet to emerge. That’s not altogether surprising, given the lack of a political infrastructure that could really foster that sort of activity. On top of that, there is no clear indication that the Democratic Party is ready to take part in mobilizing for a social democratic agenda. Still, it’s prudent to take stock of emerging progressive forces - such as the groundswell of youth-led pushes for gun reform - and investigate how we might stitch together their different causes.

But as policy proposals under the banner of gun reform are brought forward, progressives must remain committed to a structural analysis of guns in the economy. Without doing so, policy outcomes may not only impede reducing gun violence, but also function to buttress an explanatory logic that blames certain populations for the problem itself.

If you rewind to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, you’ll notice an important cautionary lesson: policy solutions that forsake the need to substantively regulate the economy implicitly rubber-stamp the moment’s economic arrangements.

Consider Judith Stein’s Running Steel, Running America which traces the historical development of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Her work, broadly, demonstrates how collaborative decisions within movement-building to push inequality out of conversations on the economy shape both the policies advocated for and the explains why the issue exists. Title VII, which established the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in a move to forbid employment discrimination, was negotiated through political means deemed necessary to pass a federal civil rights package. In consequence, what resulted was the Fair Employment Commission, a watered-down version of the commission. Additionally, workers had to file cases under a rubric of individual prejudice. As the structure of the economy changed in the following years, this rubric proved to be ill-equipped to address the fundamental employment concerns of Black workers.

And that’s a shame, because a more robust fair employment law was on the table: Senator Humphrey’s S. 1937 bill. The bill not only recognized structural changes taking place in the American economy—automation in the North, mechanization in the South—but it also grappled with the fact that labor policies would ultimately perpetuate old inequalities without robust intervention. Instead of relying on individual complaints and remedying them through litigation, S. 1937 had the power, on administrative review, to deploy federal job-training programs and other micro-economic government interventions within industries. As Stein writes: “S. 1937 sent an intellectual message that Black unemployment was not simply a problem of human relations, where morality and democracy demanded the abolition of actions based upon prejudice, but was a function of the changing labor market.”

Yet support for the bill became less of a priority as mobilization for a national civil rights law reached its climax. Despite an overwhelming presence of demonstrators offering support for a minimum wage and voicing economic concerns at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, attempts to insert economic issues into the civil rights agenda undercut the perceived need to create greater public support for a civil rights bill.

Empowered through the courts to take on the issue of employment discrimination, Title VII ultimately failed to articulate Black employment as an issue integral to the changing nature of the labor market. As Stein states, Title VII “could not produce jobs, only distribute them.” The lives of Black workers and others also marginalized within the American labor market system needed an employment discrimination bill that could alter basic components of the American economy. As the 20th century wore on, the changing economic structure would disproportionately impact Black workers. Today, Black-white wage gaps are larger than they were in 1979.

In the years since Title VII, the omission of a structural-economic analysis of Black unemployment continued to work against the struggle for racial equality. Mainstream political discourse increasingly relied upon racist explanations for racial disparities. These explanations hinged on a framing of Black culture, tradition, and family structure as fundamentally dysfunctional and pathological. Additionally, without an explanation of racial disparities that directly implicated the U.S. economy, broad swatches of the liberal establishment easily and tacitly accepted this logic, with welfare reform arriving through the office of a democratic president.

This isn’t to suggest, of course, that civil rights groups intended for any of these consequences to unfold. Rather, the lack of a structural analysis of unemployment impaired both their effectiveness and analytical approaches.

The historical analysis Stein provides in Running Steel, Running America acts as an aid for understanding the mutually constituted and historically contextual relationship between race and class in the United States. Stein’s analysis also offers an important lesson for our current gun control push: Market failure must be included in gun control conversations because guns are allowed to be bought and sold to civilians on the private market. A policy intervention that uses the lesson provided by Stein prioritizes disarmament by implementing gun buyback programs and tightly regulating the production of firearms, in addition to investing in harm reduction for violent crimes.

Few of those who advocate for “gun safety” take this stance. Rather, standard initiatives include background checks and, more recently, access to school mental health resources. These initiatives locate the problem within a certain class or race of people, where violence is an implied group quality. And similar to the idea of arming teachers, these policies take shootings for granted while narrowing the problem to high-profile shootings, a small fraction of total firearm deaths. They fit alongside a formula to punish, police, and surveil those who are deemed predisposed for shootings, and look to hold them personally responsible. The dynamics of race, gender, class, and law enforcement dictate who gets labeled a “shooter.” In effect, these policies work in tandem with broader inequalities already at play in society.

These piecemeal reforms may alter the process of gun-ownership, but their effectiveness for reducing gun violence pales in comparison to intervening in the production and distribution of firearms themselves. Similar to how Black employment has been framed and fought over, failing to recognize the need to alter current economic arrangements opens the door to causal explanations that only deepen inequality.