Anarchists for Gun Control: Methodology and Ideology within a Monopolistic Legal Order

I had a somewhat frustrating debating experience the other day. A co-anarchist of mine here in Tempe, Arizona posted on Facebook about how glad she was that SB1467, the bill which would allow some civilian carrying of firearms on campus, had been vetoed by Governor Jan Brewer. While I would ideally like to allow her preferences their full civic expression, I can only do so on an ideological level if she shares my methodology.  Otherwise our shared anti-authoritarian leanings pull apart from each other rather than aid in our mutual struggle.  (For more on this framework please read the article I wrote on the subject at The Social Rationalist.)

On the macro level all anarchists should have a methodological preference for decentralized communities organizing themselves in ways that fit their values. Some communities will operate within the gender binary, be strictly vegan, be members of a certain religion, be different or no degrees of collectivized, allow or disallow firearm possession amongst countless other value decisions. This is the beauty of the voluntary association principle enacted: no one person or group of people has all the information necessary to coordinate everyone else. We’re still growing, learning and developing.  Systems which allow innovators to prove to us their ideas in practice without forcing it on everyone else is a fundamental concept of liberal inquiry and an open society.

I have grown into a position where I see libertarianism and anarchism without adjectives as being primarily about facilitating the accumulation of this process knowledge in the most rapid and productive manner possible without the negative influence of power. In a decentralized society moral and economic entrepreneurs are free to show us new ways of living and organizing which may in fact be better than what we’re currently doing. If it is, lets emulate, improve upon it ourselves or just join them!

And beyond the amoral goal of ‘accumulating process knowledge,’ having such choices renders exploitation virtually impossible, as exploitation depends on having people’s best opportunities minimized by the state.  In true competition for societal participants and the best models of organization, the sort of asymmetric systems we live under now could never survive.  They depend on anti-competitive protection for their continued existence.

So for my micro ideological preferences I believe that egalitarianism with regards to authority demands a republican gun culture, and that the marginalized are best served by such a culture as it best allows them to protect themselves. [Insert archetypal firearm defense here.  "Only the state (elite) and criminals get to arm themselves," etc. etc.]

On this same micro level the anarcha-feminist I spoke to has a secondary ideological preference for a community more oriented toward pacificism and the abolition of interpersonal power relations as partially represented by the abridgment of gun ownership.  Mixing education and power by having guns on campus could reasonably distract from my beloved open inquiry; a point which I could even concede as being true.  She worries that it creates a culture of fear and hypermasculinity, which I could also accept as having validity, but even if it is accurate, I don’t think deriving policy within our current system can be done without harming someone.

How do we mitigate this irreconcilable difference? It seems pretty much impossible under the current centralized framework, as she either disarms me and makes me vulnerable or I initiate an unwanted power relationship with her because I’m strapped (or have the ability to become strapped).

We’re at odds competing with each other’s perfectly valid values due to the inorganic model of state democracy crowding out more emergent and decentralized forms of order where we could both be satisfied.  As it is now, such political loggerheads seem irreconcilable.

I want to see her (ze’s?) and my values lived out. I want to see what societies which have never internalized the gender binary or violent cultural values looks like.  I want post-leftists to prove me wrong about civilization. I want to see anarcho-capitalists function with dispute resolution organizations (DRO’s).  I want to see worker’s self-management. I want to see how low-overhead production works now that we have the ability to have localized human scale production, and I want to facilitate the accumulation of all of this dispersed knowledge in as quick and humane a way as possible.

However, when anti-authoritarians place their secondary ideological preferences (left vs. right societies) above their primary methodology (natural decentralization) it leads us to struggle against each other rather than with each other.

I want my queer anarcha-feminist colleague to have the full freedom necessary to achieve her goals and prove to all of us that she has a better idea of how to organize a society. Until we get there, we need to work toward undermining the fundamental anti-decentralist actions at the base of the state political economy. Then, godspeed fair innovator! Teach us!