Hunt the Rich?
Many of the fur clad or black tie attendees of the NRAs annual members banquet, at which former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney, was the keynote speaker, seemed quite shocked to greeted by several dozen members of the Safety Orange Bloc. Brandishing absurdly-sized mock weapons, decked out in all their hunting finery, waving a black and orange flag, and standing behind a "Hunt the Rich" banner, these anti-capitalist hunters took aim at the root of not only gun violence, but all violence in the US - an inherently brutal capitalist system which places property and profit above human life.
Violence in contemporary America takes many forms; workplace injuries, environmental devastation, police violence, lack of access to health care, gentrification, hunger, and prison labor are all acts of violence. Organizers of the Safety Orange Bloc refused to fall into the trap of "issue activism," opting instead for a holistic, uncompromising critique of the systemic conditions, which must be addressed if any real, permanent change is to take place. With chants such as "Cheney, Cheney show your face, we want you for our trophy case" and "1-2-3-4, hunt the rich and feed the poor, 5-6-7-8, nows the time, disarm the State" members of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group NRA Working Group, and friends, sought to bring to light the social and economic conditions which foster violence, rather than to focus on the single issue of firearms.
The anti-capitalist hunting party was met with mild State resistance when it left the designated "free-speech" zone in order to spread their message to the banquet attendees, but cooler heads prevailed and the Orange Bloc was able to make its way to a sidewalk near the entrance to the Convention Center. Most of the banquet attendees kept their eyes on the ground or waved sheepishly, with the exception of a Reuters reporter, named John Barnes, who became very hostile and vulgar, until escorted away by a police lieutenant.
A spokesperson for the Orange Bloc skillfully used the Confluence Against Gun Violence stage to address the racism, homophobia, and sexism being peddled to the NRA members, and maintained that self-defense is essentially a human right, not a civil one granted by the slave-owning framers of the US Constitution, a contention that even the NRA faithful could not dispute.
The call to action for a Safety Orange Bloc read in part, "Given the States self-appointed role as the greatest and exclusive perpetrator of violence, one cannot claim to be an adherent of non-violence or a pacifist, while believing in the legitimacy of the State. As in electoral politics, the middle class and liberal elite share the same agenda as the gun lobby, but use different terms to describe their desire to further disempower and exploit working class and declassed peoples. The desire to play white savior is motivated less by charity and goodwill than by the desire to protect their privilege and the prevailing social order from the same urban drug gangs, porous borders, home invasions, terrorists, and many of the other media boogeymen that the NRA are fond of invoking to solicit money from their membership and votes from their pet politicians. " In short, the violence perpetuated by the current ruling elite will not go away by merely outsourcing it to a different political party, and denying the rights of oppressed peoples to defend themselves is indicative of "white-skin privilege" and the North American exceptionalism, which romanticizes armed resistance in the global South, such as that of the Zapatistas, or in historical movements, but cringes at the prospect in the US. The organizers of the Safety Orange Bloc hope that their tongue-in-cheek actions were successful in helping to focus the debate regarding violence on the diseased corrupt, hierarchical profit system, instead of the symptoms.