Thread by @PatBlanchfield

Left: The New York Times, 1/19/1989
Right: CBS News, 7/29/2019

A chapter in my book is about the Stockton shooting in 1989. A young man named Patrick Purdy opened fire on an elementary school playground with a Chinese made Norinco AK-47 S. He killed six children and wounded 32 others.

Purdy was the son of a Vietnam veteran. He had previously been arrested on a gun charge, when he was also found in possession of White Power literature. On the day of the shooting, he wore military fatigues. The children he targeted were Vietnamese and Cambodian war refugees.

I will summarize my research on what happened next. Media systematically downplayed the political character of Purdy's act, and his choice of targets. Journalists even - no hyperbole - insisted he could not have been racist b/c resentment towards Asian immigrants was "typical."

Even as Purdy's xenophobia and racism was being variously pathologized and normalized into irrelevance, liberal gun control advocates appealed to American nationalism by focusing on the "Soviet" character of the gun itself. It was alien, invasive, and needed to be banned.

More importantly, and literally as early as the day after the shooting, they found common cause with many conservatives by invoking a perennial theme in the history of American #gunpower: the idea that such guns could be used by minorities against cops.

The killing of two black men by a police officer in Miami had triggered "race riots" that were ongoing; suddenly, there proliferated across media third-hand reports and anonymous quotes by Miami police that they were being targeted by rioters wielding AK-47-"like" guns.

Congress promptly held hearings, featuring, among others, Daryl F. Gates of the LAPD, a notorious racist, a brutal chief, and the inventor of the SWAT Team. He wanted gun control - and more support - always more support - for police.

The details of all this - and they are remarkable - and a full accounting for what happens next, are things I can't go into here. But the bottom line is that you can draw a direct line from that moment to the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, and the true disaster that represented.

The bill's bundled Assault Weapon Ban was a fundamental, vital part of how the Crime Bill was sold to white liberals. The ban has since expired, and its impacts in the US* are debatable. But the dramatic investment in mass incarceration and militarized policing has stuck around.

Thirty years later, another white supremacist is killing kids w/ some kind of AK in CA; Joe Biden, author of the crime bill, is running for POTUS; and broad-daylight political mass murder once again risks being laundered into fatuous chauvinism and empowering the carceral state.

*NOTE: Debates over the impact of the AWB in the US aside, there is strong evidence that it had an impact on lowering violence - in Mexico, where America assault weapons were (and are) regularly trafficked. See, for example: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 1/2

2/2 Meanwhile, today, in a story that @AlexYablon has done consistently superlative reporting on - more American guns of all sorts are flowing southward than ever before. And the state and criminal violence those guns amplify fuels migration north. foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/08/tru…