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Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the mass shooting in Stockton, CA. A man with an AK-47 opened fire on a playground full of children, shooting 32 and killing 5. This is a pivotal moment in the history of US gun violence and gun control; what happened next is instructive. 1/3
Coverage of the shooter's ties to the White Power movement, and his targeting of Southeast Asian refugee children steadily gave way to focusing more narrowly on his use of an assault rifle. This inevitably merged with a perennial theme of gun politics: cops getting outgunned. 2/3
Only a month later, the US Senate held a hearing on Restricting Assault Weapons. The star witness - to bipartisan acclaim - was then-chief of the LAPD, Daryl Gates. Gates had founded the US's first SWAT team (which he had sold invoking the threat of black snipers in Watts). 3/x
Gates would become nationally infamous post the beating of Rodney King, but already had spent decades imposing stop and frisk policing and "sweeps" on minority Angelinos. He was an unreconstructed racist who believed "some blacks" were biologically resistant to chokeholds. 4/x
Essentially, he testified that the biggest lesson from Stockton was the risk his officers in LA faced getting shot by militarized gangbangers. "Do you want us to be like Colombia where everybody has automatic weapons?" he asked "Everybody gets shot down there." 5/x
Never mind that Colombia had been flooded with US arms in the 1980s - many politicians, activists, and voters found Gates's argument persuasive. Gun control needed to be imposed on criminals - and the state needed more cops, guns, and money to use against them to do it. 6/x
To make a long story short, this conviction and program led to new gun legislation in CA, and, in 1994, the Federal Assault Weapons ban. Bundled in, naturally, with the Bill Clinton-signed, Joe Biden-authored Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. 7/x
You may know this bill as "the one that mandated hiring 100K cops, built $9 billion of prisons, instituted a battery of mandatory minimums, and more." The one that affirmed US commitment to being the nation with the world's most incarcerated persons, per capita and in toto. 8/x
As for the impact of the AWB itself, to be blunt, its only inarguable impact was to generate lucrative secondary markets in pre-ban grandfathered weapons and canny legal workarounds. 9/x
TL;DR: Stockton shows how social outrage generated by high-profile massacres - massacres that, not coincidentally, invariably indict, among other things, white supremacy - have historically been channeled into providing political, material support for racist state violence. 10/x
This tendency defines mainstream US political debates about guns; it is a feature, not a bug. It's longstanding, older than policies denoted today by "gun control," older even the term itself. It's fundamental to the reproduction of a particular kind of social order. 11/x
A social order that is fundamentally defined and sustained by guns. But that's where I'll stop, since that social order - its history, what it entails, how it reproduces itself, and how it can be resisted - is the topic of my book, and I should not spoil any more of it. 12/12
Oh and yeah if you're in Rochester next Tuesday, I'm giving a talk at @UofR that will flesh out the above and more. Details here! facebook.com/events/1209944… 
