"Gun violence"

....working people are not safer with a monopoly of firearms in the hands of cops and other armed bodies whose job is to protect property and prerogatives of the capitalist exploiters. Defending all workers' rights against stepped-up encroachments by the bosses and their government become more, not less important today, as the employing class mounts assaults on our wages and working conditions.

The Second Amendment is among the constitutional protections that working people wielded as part of the mass proletarian fight for Black rights in the 1960s. Groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice and Robert Williams' NAACP chapter in Monroe, N.C., maintained their right to bear arms and used them to stay the hand of racist thugs and cops, protect social protest actions and Black communities and prevent bloodshed.

At the same time, the working-class movement has nothing in common with the gun-rights politics of rightist militia outfits or with vigilante "justice" and so-called Stand Your Ground laws that promote them. But the working-class political battle against such reactionary movements and laws cannot be advanced by calls for government restrictions on any rights of working people.

Anti-social violence and senseless murder do not come from video games or legal rights to own guns. They are not a product of too many constitutional rights or too few armed cops at every corner. They are first and foremost a by-product of social relations under capitalism—buttressed by cop brutality, deaths and maimings on the job, and bloody wars of conquest abroad.

And violent crimes within the working class can be exacerbated by the myriad social pressures that mount under the grinding effects of the capitalist crisis.

At the same time, the rise of mass working-class struggles to come will replace capitalism's dog-eat-dog values with social solidarity, just as they always have in the past. It's this solidarity and the transformation of working people and their view of themselves that develops in the course of struggle against capitalist exploitation that is the most powerful weapon against anti-social behavior of all kinds.

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7701/770101.html

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........While radical rightists harangue about what they are against, working-class revolutionists are guided by what we are for. Communists are not primarily against the government or capitalists, but for the fight by working people to create a socialist society and to begin to transform themselves in the process.

Communists share no common ground with the rightists' hatred of the FBI, taxes, government wiretapping, gun control, or repressive legislation. The revolutionary movement doesn't form a bloc with fascists, as Meredith seems to advocate, in order to "focus our main fire on the government for now" until the moment when "the fascists openly attack the workers' organizations."

Instead, class-conscious workers and working farmers are distinguished completely from such right-wing groups and individuals by their everyday political activity. They are publicly known as proponents of equal rights for immigrants, affirmative action quotas, women's rights, and gay rights. They are identified as partisans of the Cuban revolution. They are known for their opposition to the death penalty, America First propaganda, and all kinds of prejudice. In other words, they are known as people whose views are incompatible with any right-wing formation. The communist movement can only be built in uncompromising opposition to the politics of right-wing groups like the one in which Meredith is active.

http://www.themilitant.com/1995/5935/5935_9.html