Matter of National Security

Why Gun Control Is Now a Matter of National Security

Biden should seize on the rise of far-right militias to make an urgent new case for action.

By STEVEN SIMON and JONATHAN STEVENSON

Steven Simon, an international relations professor at Colby College, served on the National Security Council during the Clinton and Obama administrations, including as senior director for counterterrorism.

Jonathan Stevenson, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival, served on the NSC as director for political-military affairs, Middle East and North Africa, from 2011 to 2013.

For all the tragic mass shooting headlines this year, the American gun control debate seems permanently stuck. Last week, nine people were killed by AR-15 fire in Indianapolis; before that, 10 died in Boulder, and eight in Atlanta. Despite the anguish over the past month — and despite a push by President Joe Biden — Congress looks unlikely to take any immediate action.

We share Biden’s view that the level of U.S. gun violence is a “national embarrassment.” But as National Security Council veterans who have specialized in counterterrorism—with direct experience involving far-right American terrorism, burgeoning jihadism, and Northern Irish extremism in the 1990s—we also see a new threat rising, one that has the potential to change the urgency of the debate: the growing, and heavily armed, American militia movement, which made a show of force on January 6.

Increasingly, as militias acquire and stockpile weapons, they’re turning guns from a public-health concern into a threat to national security. And it’s possible that if proponents of reform—including advocacy groups, congressional leaders and Biden—began addressing it that way, they’d have a chance of energizing the debate against the National Rifle Association and its allies. Indeed, the shock of the insurrection has increased the political burdens of an NRA in internal disarray and offered a new perspective on the need for significant gun control legislation.

As America learned on January 6, anti-government militia groups are more than willing to jump walls, break doors and disrupt the underpinnings of our democracy. These groups, with transnational ties, also enjoy easy access to high-power, high-capacity, small-caliber semiautomatic weapons—many of which can be converted to fully automatic. The concern isn’t that these weapons will somehow enable militias to challenge the U.S. military on the battlefield, which they certainly will not. It is that they make mass casualty attacks against political or cultural adversaries both easy to carry out, and easy to frame as inspirational events of the kind that mobilize insurrection.

The executive orders Biden issued earlier this month imposing restrictions on gun kits and devices that turn pistols into rifles are marginal safeguards and rather thin gruel overall. But his call for reviving the federal ban on assault weapons is more promising and an acknowledgment that serious action is required. An important additional measure would be more rigorous required background checks. At least one key Republican senator, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, has expressed openness to working with Biden on a gun bill.

Generating bipartisan consensus for an effective crackdown on firearms will always be difficult. While gun control is now unlikely to lose existing supporters, it is also unlikely to win many new ones. But reframing the issue as a national security imperative could galvanize passive backers now focused by the assault on the Capitol on maintaining political stability in the United States. A plausible objective would be to impel the U.S. government to take further substantial regulatory steps and to lay the groundwork for effective legislation should the Democrats consolidate their Senate majority in 2022.

The administration, however, will have to tread carefully to avoid provoking the very behavior it means to deter. Extremists will interpret increased firearms regulation as validating their narrative of government-imposed social engineering and personal disempowerment. The showdowns at Ruby Ridge and Waco, which fueled the militia movement, demonstrate the risks. Law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels need to prepare better than they have in the past for non-violent enforcement. But the increased magnitude of those very risks is exactly why we need to recast gun control as a national security challenge.

As delicate an issue as gun rights is, without action the prospect of cycles of escalating civil violence is particularly worrisome. Even assuming law enforcement agencies adjust their threat perceptions to accord domestic terrorism due attention—as they should—the wide distribution of automatic weapons and abundant ammunition to individuals hostile to the state is likely to be seen as justification for the further militarization of law enforcement in the post-9/11 era.

Heavier police firepower, combined with the martial mindset it tends to engender, stands to increase tensions between law enforcement and political protesters, which started in June 2020 with the death of George Floyd and culminated in the riot at and breach of the Capitol on January 6. While Trump’s nod to white supremacism and incitement of far-right insurrection have already prompted some Black citizens to arm themselves in self-defense, continuing police antagonism on top of that could increase the likelihood that Black militias will emerge. Armed conflict between nonstate groups would be even harder to subdue than one-sided, far-right aggression.

Meanwhile, the broad dispersal of mass casualty small arms makes every individual willing to use one a potentially catalytic lone-wolf terrorist on the order of Brenton Tarrant, the Islamaphobic white supremacist who killed 51 people with a semiautomatic shotgun and an AR-15-style rifle at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. Many far-right American militias, including the anti-authoritarian Boogaloo Bois, explicitly encourage their followers to act on their own initiative, as Tarrant did, in “leaderless resistance” against the state, and several, starting with Timothy McVeigh, have done so.

The symbol of militia volunteers carrying assault weapons and the reality of their using them lethally have historically been enormously powerful social forces.

In 1981, emboldened by the political impact of the prison hunger strikes, Danny Morrison—a senior official of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army’s political alter-ego—asked rhetorically, “Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an ArmaLite in the other, we take power in Ireland?” He was referring to Colt’s commercially marketed version of the M-16, and expressing the IRA’s strategy of combining violence and electoral politics to change the political system. The “ArmaLite and ballot box” imagery inspired a new generation of IRA volunteers, and took the group—by way of over 1,000 more dead and Sinn Fein’s political rise — to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Unlike contemporary American militias, of course, Irish republicans had at least partially legitimate, historically based grievances.

One skeptical response would be that late twentieth-century Northern Ireland differed from the early twenty-first century United States in that its factions were engaged in what amounted to civil war. But the extreme political polarization in the contemporary U.S. is not terribly far from what existed during and immediately after our own Civil War. That toxic and potentially explosive intramural animosity has remained latent and is now resurfacing in the form of the white supremacism preached by most of the armed militias, convinced that the country is run by a malign and treacherous liberal “deep state” and destined to be ethnically compromised unless they take drastic, violent action.

To many Americans, and especially these Americans, firearms are exalted as symbols of liberty and patriotism; it is merely inconvenient that using them to impose political change is starkly inconsistent with American democracy, a subject to be elided rather than confronted and resolved.

The high level of gun ownership, the ease of purchasing more weapons, and Second Amendment absolutism only amplify the risks such attitudes pose to the stability of the republic. Any legislative effort targeting guns, even if it survives the likely Supreme Court challenges, is sure to be greeted explosively on the right. Indeed, the election of a Democratic president had already caused gun purchases to surge, a trend that has followed such elections over the past several decades.

Right-wing extremists hold guns in vastly disproportionate numbers. Law enforcement appears constrained to tolerate their training in military-style camps, more or less openly, and their incendiary, often seditious rhetoric, turbocharged by the internet, as the lawful exercise of free speech. The possibility of muscular legislation, like “red flag” laws permitting law enforcement officers to seize firearms from those judged to be public-safety risks — has only fueled their anti-government fervor.

Large-scale confiscation and deradicalization and are not realistic prospects in the near future. But an assault weapons ban does seem within the Biden administration’s political grasp. If the president wants to follow through on his desire to rebuild American democracy, a push to curb gun violence offers an invaluable opportunity and a potentially persuasive argument.

Just as in dealing with mature insurgencies or ongoing civil conflict, wise policy in contemporary America would seek to separate destabilizing extremists from ordinary people with remediable grievances. This is common sense. The administration’s message to garden-variety firearms enthusiasts should be: Don’t let seditious radicals imperil your access to the guns you cherish. Protect your hobby by backing enforcement. Hunting, recreational shooting and personal defense against criminal threats are all fine; anti-government, white supremacist militia activity is not.

In a deeply divided society and a political sphere in which threats of violence have become part and parcel of political discourse, combat rifles can do tremendous damage to social cohesion. As is the case with terrorist movements worldwide, attacks can be expressive but also strategic, designed to force adversaries to take actions that deepen divisions, complicate governance and win converts to the terrorists’ cause.

Durably reducing the threat to political stability clearly hinges on the resolution of big issues, including income inequality, cultural anxieties and an overheated media environment. But we will buy ourselves room to maneuver and time to deal with these challenges by reducing the firepower of militias and the lone wolves they inspire.