Controlling guns, controlling people: a new history shows how gun control goes hand in hand with fear of black people--and the people.

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus
• Position: Book review

Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, by Adam Winkler, W.W. Norton, 361 pages, $27.95

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I FIRST LEARNED about the contradictions of gun politics when I was about 10 years old, growing up in the radical milieu of 1970S Berkeley. My mother and stepfather were members of a revolutionary organization called the International Socialists. Although the group's members were mostly bookish nerds with little taste for violence, their inspiration was Leon Trotsky, who led the Bolsheviks' armed insurrection in 1917 and then headed up the Red Army, which killed hundreds of thousands of the Soviet regime's opponents in the ensuing civil war. Because my parents' politics were primarily an exercise in middle-class intellectual fantasy, I was never exposed to real violence or even violent rhetoric, and they never owned a gun.

My stepfather's best friend, Jeff, who lived in a cottage behind ours, was a member of the Spartacist League, a rival Trotskyist organization that was less shy about the violent implications of its rhetoric. The Spartacists were known for physically attacking strikebreakers and Klansmen and for rumbling with Maoists over the imagined turf of the Bay Area's revolutionary working class. One day I happened upon Jeff cleaning a pistol at his kitchen table. Despite the fact that his and my parents' hero was one of the greatest perpetrators of gun violence in the 20th century, I somehow saw guns as not only scary but also right-wing and politically "bad" I told Jeff I hated guns and wished they all would be rounded up and melted down. "But we can't have a revolution without them;' he said with a sanguine smile.

As an adult I continued to fear and hate guns and to generally align myself with the gun control cause, but Jeff's suggestion that the regulation of people's access to guns is essentially conservative nagged at me, unresolved, until I read UCLA law professor Adam Winkler's stunning new book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. At the heart of his narrative, Winkler convincingly argues that the people who began the movement against gun control operated not out of the National Rifle Association's national headquarters in Washington, D.C., but out of a nondescript two-story brick building three blocks from where I sat staring at that pistol: 3106 Shattuck Avenue, in the heart of radical Berkeley. It was there, in 1967, at the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, that...