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the question of when it's justifiable to use weapons for political ends is pretty difficult ethically, but it's central to any revolutionary politics--if you consider that it is inevitable that you will end up moving outside of conventional processes. nothing about it is broached by questions of whether one does or does not have a formal right to own a gun. nothing about it is broached when you talk about your heroism in situations that are entirely in the subjunctive.
one way the old left dealt with it was the loop it through engels--the state will attempt to suppress any threat to it's political legitimacy and will use violence to do it--which in a sense evacuates the ethical problems by making what you, as putative revolutionary, would then do as reactive. so even as much of that strain of revolutionary theory is opposed to the capitalist order in general, and to the state as an expression of theclass structure, as an instrument of bourgeois power, it still relies on the state to set its project into motion.
there's also a long tradition of criticism of leninism in that the vanguard party is effectively a military structure--top down hierarchy for example---so that should a situation present itself that a revolutionary organization actually gets to power, chances are that it will impose on the next phase of things not what it says about organization, but it's own pattern of organization. this is at the base of many left critiques of the russian revolution and of leninist organization.
i've been more interested in variants of the general strike model (in the old school framework) which gave way to revolutionary action as a type of ideological conflict that is capable of undermining the legitimacy of the existing order by exploding the way it orders its surroundings ideologically--by structuring dominant worldviews, modes of thinking and doing.
the problem this runs into is a version of the repressive tolerance thesis: the dominant order deals with dissent by accepting its premises.
which leads to the question of whether there is or can be a revolutionary political movement.
i think there can be one, but that it's a long process to build it and requires steady work and the fashioning of continuity.
if any that holds, then the question of gun ownership is trivial.
it doesn't enable you to defend your rights because you tend, we tend, being nice adaptive creatures, to move with the dominant frame of reference, either by assent or by standing it on it's head, which repeats the same thing except upside down. so it's likely that you will either not recognize infringements on your prerogatives or rights because you agree to give them away, or everything is an infringement on your prerogatives or rights, in which case you're just a paranoid. either way you loose. and having a gun isn't going to help you.
you have to get outside the dominant ways of thinking. but the dominant ways of thinking are what enable you to get outside, so it's never complete--and they allow for communication of your positions, which means that you can't loose contact with it or you'll end up talking a private language--so you loose again. and having a gun will not help you sort this out. having a gun in this case really is like having a shower curtain of a tennis shoe.
it does different things, of course, but it's no different in kind.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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