Mihail Pojarsky/Rights are not for everyone

An interesting spectacle is unfolding in the United States. The country has just seen its umpteenth mass shooting, only this time the shooter was trans (F to M). For a week now, US right-wing conservatives have been grumbling that the “mentally ill” should be banned from owning guns. Trans people and their supporters respond by posing with guns and wearing Protect trans kids T-shirts. Conservative mouthpiece Andy Ngo rounds up these photos every other day on his Twitter feed, with captions like “Look how awful this is! They’re threatening us!”

The joke is that the roles have reversed. Previously, it was usually the other way round. Some far-right idiot would commit a mass shooting — someone like Patrick Crusius, who first spelled out the word “Trump” with his guns on Twitter, then went out and shot 20+ people. After such cases, US liberals would trot out the same old refrain: the Second Amendment lets people with an “ideology of hatred” arm themselves; everything must be banned and restricted. Right-wingers would respond by gleefully posting photos with guns and slogans like “Disarm me? Over my dead body.” Liberals would collect these photos, shouting “Exactly! They’re threatening us! Take it away and ban it!”

Now trans people find themselves in the right’s old role, while conservatives play the liberals. It should be said, however, that trans people probably still make up a smaller share of mass shooters than neo-Nazis. After all, the biggest terrorist attack in the United States, apart from 9/11, was not carried out by a trans person. And if we apply such generalizations, Timothy McVeigh alone should be enough to disarm all those “people’s militias” and other “free white citizens.” But the truth is that mass shooters defy profiling of any kind, including ideological profiling. A mass shooter can be right-wing or left-wing, but more often is neither. They may have a mental disorder (in 5% of cases), but usually they do not. They may be depressed, or they may not be. There is no way to single out a risk group that could be denied guns just to be on the safe side. The one thing we can say with certainty is that mass shooters are mostly men, but even here women account for 17% — a significant share.

Above all, this illustrates that people can advocate universal rights all they want, but when it matters they still lapse into tribalism and seek privileges for their own side. For decades, the American right has insisted that the Second Amendment is a universal constitutional right that admits no restrictions. Now, however, they are quite prepared to impose restrictions on the highly arbitrary grounds of “mental disorder” (which transsexuality is officially not, since it appears in another section of the ICD — “disorders of sexuality”). But if trans people can be banned from owning guns on assumptions of mental instability, why not require all gun owners to produce certificates showing that they do not have depression, OCD or bipolar disorder? Preferably once a quarter — you never know. And it is completely unclear how this squares with the NRA’s long-running campaign against universal background checks and shared federal databases. Otherwise, how do you keep guns away from the “crazy” if a “crazy” person can simply go to a neighboring state and buy them there?

All this recalls the old story from 1967, when the Black Panthers in California made a habit of attending rallies with guns. Republicans promptly pushed through a law banning open carry, suddenly remembering that “guns do not solve problems.” Constitutional rights are for your own side.

Mihail Pojarsky 2023-04-06