Trump's "looting and shooting" Tweet is Even Worse Than You Think

At 11:53 pm last night, the President of the United States, referring to protests in Minneapolis, sent a tweet that included the phrase, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” As bad as this is (see today’s NY Times article for the historical context of this phrase), what it’s doing is actually much worse than is plainly obvious. It’s not just signaling to law enforcement that it’s okay to shoot unarmed civilians. It’s also signaling this to the portion of the gun-rights community that carries weapons in public, openly or concealed. The president’s words will be heard by millions of Americans as a justification for a kind of violence they’re already primed for. 

Let me explain by taking you down a rabbit hole of gun-rights literature. 

Many gun-rights advocates are familiar with the 1925 court case of Ossian Sweet, a Black doctor who moved to a white neighborhood in Detroit, because they claim it sets a legal precedent for when someone is allowed to shoot people in a “mob” (a word they often apply to nearly any group demonstrating for causes they dislike). Sweet and his wife faced such racist hatred in their new neighborhood that they asked friends to stay with them to defend their home, and they armed their friends with rifles. When a racist mob attacked, the armed defenders shot at least two men, one of whom died. Murder charges were filed, famed lawyer Clarence Darrow took the case, and Sweet and his friends were exonerated.

The lesson that many in the gun rights crowd take from the Sweet case is that a person who feels threatened by a “mob” is justified in shooting anyone in that mob regardless of whether the person they shoot is directly threatening them, because every member of the mob is equally responsible for the actions of every other member. This particular line of reasoning comes from an interpretation of a still-influential 1938 legal text, Warren on Homicide, often mentioned alongside the Sweet case. The gun-rights writer Massad Ayoob, a legend in pro-gun circles, says this about Warren after summarizing the Sweet case: “The author(s) made it clear that when an individual faced a mob bent on doing violence to him or his compatriots, each member of that mob shared the culpability of the entire organism of the mob … and, therefore, was equally and individually fair game for the defensive violence suffered at the hands of the lawful defender(s)” (Ayoob, Deadly Force pg. 48)

In the hands of gun-rights folks, this line of reasoning can be used to justify violence against protesters of all kinds. And because the gun-rights movement is largely white, largely opposed to the political interests of non-whites, and specifically freaked out by Black Lives Matter, this logic, which starts with a Black man defending himself against a racist white mob, is used to justify shooting Black people protesting for their right not to be shot.   

For example, in a recent issue of Concealed Carry magazine, an author (who is an attorney) discusses the case of Alan Scarsella, who shot five people at a 2015 Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis. The demonstration was against the police killing of Jamar Clark, an African American man. Scarsella, who claimed he fired at the protesters because he feared for his life, is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence. In the trial it was revealed that he had sent a text message saying that he “had a gun designed to kill black people.” The Concealed Carry author argues that Scarsella was in the right. Echoing the Sweet-Warren line of logic, he says, “Every member of a mob is jointly and equally liable for the acts of every other member of the mob, even if the person shot was completely ignorant of what the other mob member has done. Still, Scarsella was convicted.” One reason for this justification, according to this author, is that a “mob is not human […]. It is more in the sense of our most horrible diseases.” [1] 

Within the gun rights community, then, there is an established and rehearsed legal and moral justification for shooting protesters, who themselves are systematically dehumanized. That this justification originates in the defensive actions of a Black family against a racist white mob seems to strike no gun rights advocates as ironic. And in some ways, it isn’t ironic at all.

This is because the core of gun rights rhetoric is the manufacture of victimization, so hijacking the legacy of an actual victim is perversely perfect. As the rhetoric scholar Laura J. Collins has pointed out, gun-rights advocates, and especially advocates of carrying in public, see themselves as a marginalized group just as oppressed as any other. Collins quotes carriers who refer to store owners who won’t allow them to carry their weapons inside, and the customers who agree with these owners, as “bigots.” “In this construction,” says Collins, “it is not the firearms that are banned but the people themselves. […] Those who wish to open carry are ‘victims of bigotry.’ Open carry is not a practice or an act that one engages in at certain times. It is a permanent state of being, akin to an immutable identity – the sort of thing that forms the basis of a class ‘protected’ against discrimination.” And, as you might imagine, this is just a single example of a sense of victimization that runs much, much deeper.

Within the gun-rights community, there is a kettle of resentment sitting at a high simmer, ready to boil over. We saw as much in the Michigan protests against Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders. Trump’s “looting and shooting” tweet threatens to crank the heat on that kettle by activating all of this – the manufactured victimization, the red-faced resentment, the legal and moral justification for shooting dehumanized protesters – even more than it’s already been activated. In this moment, the person occupying the highest office in our government is pointing his followers to violence. The things they have been saying and writing for years suggest that they are ready. 

Update

Now this representative of the state where I live is helping to make my point:

Non-linked reference:

[1] Kevin L. Jamison. “Intolerance & Self Defense.” Concealed Carry, vol. 16, no. 1, January 2019, 

pp. 40-42.