U.S. bosses’ hypocrisy has been front and center since the February 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which a student murdered 17 of his former classmates and staff members with an assault weapon. This open act of terrorism has further identified splits within the ruling class, as Democrats and Republicans make a show of battling over gun control on a national stage.
Neither demands for gun control—nor, on the other side, for proposals to arm teachers—will save working-class lives. The liberal bosses’ calls for perceived safety and control (read: trust the capitalist state, consent to fascism) will never protect the working class—only we can break our own chains. Progressive Labor Party counts on you to join us and build a mass movement against the capitalist rulers’ imperialism, by far the biggest killer of working class lives.  
Violent system begets violence
The United States was built on systematic murder. It grew out of genocide for indigenous peoples and enslavement and Jim Crow for Black workers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the ruling class supported gun ownership, freely arming members of the KKK and killer cops who continue to murder workers to this day.
Internationally, the U.S. unequivocally supports the murder of workers to maintain control of resources, people, and land. During both World Wars, the U.S. killed indiscriminately, from the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the U.S. became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons in combat. From Syria to Yemen to Afghanistan, U.S. bosses continue to murder workers to protect their control over Middle Eastern oil.
The U.S. ruling class is not for gun control; they will arm people when it suits them. They are for profit control. But while these big terrorists will kill millions without a blink to keep their profits flowing, they also understand that domestic terrorism is bad for their global brand.
Domestic terrorism hurts global credibility
Historically, demands for or against gun control in the U.S. have fallen along party lines. Republicans continue to get re-elected and line their pockets with favorable advertising and funding from the National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2016 alone, this fascist organization spent nearly $140 million on “legislative programs and public affairs,” including $30 million on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and at least $20 million on Republican Senate races (huffingtonpost.com, 11/16/17).
Meanwhile, the Democrats are seizing an opportunity to win allegiance from workers and control a growing mass movement within the limits of electoral politics. Democratic politicians are leading rally cries to slap down the NRA and pass stronger laws to restrict the sales of firearms:
Democrats have scrambled to dust off a raft of gun-control legislation that’s sat on the shelf for years: expanding background checks, allowing police and family members to ask judges to disarm gun owners who show signs of violence or instability, prohibiting gun sales to people deemed too unstable to handle their own finances, raising taxes on guns and ammo, changing the gun-buying age from 18 to 21 (Rolling Stone 3/1).
The rulers’ main wing, representing finance capital, is now calling for gun control so as to not to lose more ground to its imperialist arch-rivals, Russia and China. China’s Global Times recently shamed the U.S. in an editorial titled, “China can offer lessons to U.S. in protecting human rights” (2/22). It reads:
Washington has been pointing an accusing finger at other countries over human rights issue[s]. However, more [people in the U.S.] have been killed by gunfire in the country than [U.S.] soldiers being killed in all U.S. wars. It’s inhumane for the U.S., which boasts about its human rights record, to turn a blind eye to gun violence, [to] snub increasing calls for gun control and risk more innocent lives….The US should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights.
The U.S. ruling class has not controlled violence domestically because it does not want to. In Australia, a capitalist country where more than 17 percent of children live in poverty, the government created stricter gun laws after one mass shooting in 1996. Since then, not a single mass shooting has occurred (BBC, 10/4/17). Gun control or lack-there-of is not a mystery, it’s a conscious political decision. Infringing upon workers’ rights, in particular their right to live, is the capitalist way.
The rulers’ main wing, however, understands these flawed optics and is now striving to control—not stop—national murders in an effort to save face as an international super power and regain the trust of workers within the U.S. As the mostly white students from Parkland call for revised gun legislation, main wing Democrats are seizing an opportunity to get disaffected workers to vote in the coming midterm elections in 2018.
Reform vs. revolution, rifle edition
Gun violence in the U.S. has disproportionately affected Black and Latin workers. They are the ones brutalized most egregiously at the hands of murderous police, yet no one is calling for legislation to disarm hyper-militarized police forces.
Black youth have been calling for gun control for years. No action was taken in 2012, after racist vigilante George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in Florida. In 2014, after the murder of Michael Brown, Black working-class leaders in Ferguson organized a militant fightback, which Mass Murderer in Chief Barack Obama dismissed by saying he had “no sympathy at all for [people] destroying [their] own communities” (CNN 11/26/14).
But on February 22, to the students of Parkland, Obama tweeted: “…Marching and organizing to remake the world as it should be. We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.”
When Black and Latin workers fight to remove guns from their neighborhoods, they are rejected and reprimanded. But when white students call for reform and appeal for the assistance of opportunistic lawmakers, they are applauded.
Under capitalism, gun control is about controlling the working class, containing their protests, and attempting to lead them like sheep to trust a system that will ultimately orchestrate their own deaths. In recent months, we have seen the bosses mobilize in the Alabama election against Klansman and gun nut Roy Moore. We have seen it throughout the #MeToo movement, and now we are seeing it clearly in the chorus of calls for gun control.
But the fact remains that Black workers are the key to communist revolution, and that none of the bosses’ guns—or gun control—can stop a conscious working class.
Freedom from mass shootings is revolution
The U.S. has been built on mass murder of the working class. Conversations about arming teachers and intensified background checks are not about protection; they are about normalizing fascism in schools.  
The only freedom workers can have from mass violence and killings is to unite as a class—to form an international, multiracial, revolutionary front against the bosses.
In the hands of the masses, armed with communist class-consciousness and led by the Progressive Labor Party, organized violence can be revolutionary. One day, the international working class will bury these mass slaughterers with the very weapons we have built.