Defense of free speech and the right to bear arms is at the center of a case brought by the National Rifle Association against New York state officials. Without the right to bear arms, the capacity of workers and our allies to defend free speech and other constitutional protections can be destroyed.
Working people have a big stake in defending liberties previous generations of toilers fought to include in the Constitution. Independence from British colonial rule was won by a popular revolution. After the war farmers and other working people continued to fight to defend themselves against taxes and debts imposed by newly formed state governments in Rhode Island, Virginia, and, most well-known, in Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts. These plebian rebellions led to two different class reactions.
The merchants and slave owners — who together formed the new ruling class — decided they needed to draw up a new Constitution to assert a more centralized state power, which they did at the Constitutional Convention in 1789. Farmers and small producers continued to demand that their liberties be first over all other considerations, and fought for legal protection of their rights. This led to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the new Constitution.
In 1833 Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote that the Second Amendment is a “palladium of the liberties of a republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers … thus enabling the people to resist and triumph over them.”
Hated today by liberal gun control campaigners, the Second Amendment allows for a “well regulated militia,” and that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
After the second great American Revolution, the Civil War, the Reconstructionist-led Congress adopted the 14th Amendment, which made the Bill of Rights applicable to all the states.
Today workers utilize constitutional protections, including free speech and assembly, when we stand up to employer attacks on our wages and conditions, build unions, fight Jew-hatred, join struggles for Black and women’s rights or speak out against Washington’s imperialist wars. The Second Amendment has a special place in safeguarding all other freedoms.
On May 30 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled a lower court decision rejecting a lawsuit brought by the NRA against Maria Vullo, head of the New York Department of Financial Services, for violating the NRA’s free speech rights. Vullo’s office regulates banking and financial transactions, with the power to impose hefty fines. She had threatened reprisals against companies that insured the NRA.
Vullo’s goal was to blacklist the group as part of a broader drive to restrict gun ownership, under the guise of preventing further horrific high school shootings, like the slaughter of 17 students and staff at a Parkland, Florida, school in 2018. While liberals push to narrow who can bear arms, the rulers’ forces, from local cops to the FBI, remain armed to the teeth.
Vullo claimed the NRA lawsuit interfered with the government’s free speech. But in fact the suit was aimed at preventing the Democratic-led government from using its power to coerce others into outlawing an organization it disagrees with.
New York’s Department of Financial Services had opened an investigation in 2017 into NRA-endorsed programs that provide insurance for injuries from gun shootings. The probe targeted three insurance companies, who faced fines of up to $7 million. After the 2018 Parkland killings, Vullo told Lloyd’s of London insurance executives the DFS “was less interested” in pursuing further inquiries into them, “as long as Lloyd’s ceased providing insurance to gun groups, especially the NRA.”
In effect Vullo “threatened to wield her power against those refusing to aid her campaign to punish the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy,” Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court. The Department of Financial Services got Lloyd’s, Lockton and Chubb companies to agree not to provide any NRA-endorsed insurance programs.
“The First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries,” Sotomayor wrote. The NRA lawsuit will now return to lower courts for consideration.
The First Amendment codifies protection from government interference with free speech and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” When the government or reactionary groups threaten to use force to prevent the exercise of that right, the Second Amendment provides protection to working people organizing to defend their rights.
That right was affirmed in an important Supreme Court decision in the Heller case in 2008, written by Justice Antonin Scalia. The court overturned an attempt by officials in Washington, D.C., to ban all hand guns except those carried by the daunting number of cop forces there.
Self-defense rights crucial for workers
“The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense,” Scalia wrote. He pointed out that these “ancient” rights were written into state constitutions long before the passage of the Bill of Rights. Of course, they’re not unlimited, he added, including prohibition of guns in schools or their ownership by the mentally ill.
At times of sharpening class struggle, workers and their unions need to be able to defend ourselves from violent assault by boss-organized strikebreakers, fascist-like thug outfits and the authorities, if attacked.
During the fight that overturned Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and ’60s, Black army veterans working in the Crown Zellerbach plant in Bogalusa, Louisiana, organized the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which defended their right to bear arms. They used that right to beat back violent assaults by racist thugs and cops. Robert F. Williams, president of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, did the same.
Safeguarding constitutional guarantees is “indispensable to engaging in the revolutionary class struggle necessary to prepare a vanguard of the working class capable, as conditions demand, of initiating and leading workers defense guards in the unions,” the Socialist Workers Party 2022 political resolution printed in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us explains.