Policing Has Always Been a Tool to Repress the Working Class

Modern policing was born out of a series of transatlantic ruling class experiments to repress radical rebellion.

By brian bean ,

Truthout/HaymarketBooks

September 1, 2025

Activists march from Dupont Circle during the "Solidarity Season: Labor Day 2025 Rally and March," on August 28, 2025, in Washington, D.C.MEHMET ESER / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images

This article is an excerpt from Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition by brian bean, Copyright © 2025. This text was originally published by Haymarket Books and has been reprinted here with permission.

There is no origin story of the police without the story of the reorganization of human society by the birth, expansion, and dominance of the system of capitalism. While capitalism did not create inequality, it structured society such that new methods and tools were required to impose its uniquely unequal order — with threat of, and acts of, violence — in new ways. The police became one of the most important tools, specially adapted to fit the contours of this new social order.

During the early decades of capitalist development — first in England, then the United States — uprisings, rebellions, and strikes became commonplace. The participants were what elites would come to describe as “the dangerous class,” which included white workers, immigrants, and enslaved and free Black people. At this point, the existing precursors to the police were attempts by the ruling class to organize and manage the urban environment. The emergence of the mob and the restive crowd posed a massive challenge to the urban order and thus required new solutions.

Cover artwork by Charlie Aleck

The hope and rebelliousness of the “dangerous class” grew with the promise of the American, French, and especially Haitian revolutions, which reverberated through the networks of the revolutionary Atlantic. Ruling classes found the spread of uprisings increasingly worrisome and unmanageable. Since the working class was largely employed in port cities, they were concentrated at nodal points of Atlantic trade, connected by news and word of mouth to these revolutionary developments even if they weren’t personally able to participate. The revolutionary waves created a profound problem for the capitalist class: How could they maintain control over the working masses in this context of revolt and compel them to dutifully submit to exploitation?


His Majesty King Mob

For about a week in June 1780, London was shaken by what some consider the most significant urban rebellion England has ever faced. Nominally instigated by progressive legislation to ease discrimination against Catholics, it detonated deep resentment against the wealthy and their fledgling carceral system. What became known as the Gordon Riots — in which two Afro-American radicals, John Glover and Benjamin Bowsey, and a Black woman, Charlotte Gardiner, played leadership roles — saw, day after day, workers, armed with everything from rifles to frying pans, roaming the streets, openly plundering of the homes of aristocrats, looting and destroying the homes of judges and magistrates, and attacking the properties of industrialists. Newgate Prison — London’s largest — and several other jails were burned to the ground, while workers freed hundreds of prisoners on a single night. The offices of the Bow Street Runners, a police precursor, were raided and their records torched. In what could be described as a near revolution, Parliament and the Bank of England almost fell to the uprising. Graffiti on the walls of the ruins of Newgate Prison proclaimed that the inmates had been released on the “authority of His Majesty King Mob.” A nascent abolitionist sentiment of the participants can be heard in the later courtroom testimony of one of the liberators, who was asked by the judge about the “cause” of the riots. His reply: “There should not be a prison standing on the morrow in London.” Military encampments were built in parks, and, ultimately, it would take the army reoccupying the city to wrest control from King Mob, leaving four hundred to five hundred dead.

The existing system of magistrates and constables completely failed to stem or slow the Gordon Riots. Subsequently, Parliament was unanimous that a new system of public order was needed to prevent any future insurrectionary occurrence that marked “every property” as target for appropriation by the unruly crowd. While it is too simple to see the creation of the municipal police in London and elsewhere as a direct response to a single riotous act, events like the liberation of Newgate Prison instilled the ruling-class experiments to manage unruly workers with a new urgency and seriousness. In England and elsewhere, the new class of the free, enslaved, and dispossessed peoples not only resisted the new order but actively attacked it. It was directly because of the Gordon Riots that the first bill was introduced in Parliament for a “system of police” in 1785; although it failed to pass. Prime Minister William Pitt argued that a solution was needed that was more efficient, cheaper, and would provoke less alarm than resorting to the army.

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Within the workplace — and the workhouse — employers devised all manner of disciplinary regimes to keep workers “in their place.” Outside the factory gates, however, workers were beyond the immediate command and control of the bosses. Here, they could commiserate, air grievances, and — worst of all from the bosses’ point of view — discuss ways to collectively fight back. This presented a volatile situation. At the time, the only real recourse that constables had for managing crowds was the reading of the Riot Act, a proclamation ordering dispersal that was read aloud to crowds deemed unruly or threatening to public order. Failure to comply exempted vigilantes and mobs from legal recourse when the crowd was then violently suppressed. However, this strategy proved less and less useful as the size of crowds increased with the dramatic growth of the urban proletariat. The size of the crowd could simply overwhelm the constable, as happened in 1792 in Edinburgh, during protests in solidarity with the French Revolution, where a sheriff sauntered up to the angry crowd, read the Riot Act, and was promptly run off by a hail of stones.

Though the ruling class did its best to keep Black and white laborers divided, there were also instances where these two oppressed milieus converged and linked arms in struggle. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, multiracial rebellions — in 1676 in Virginia or in 1683 in Barbados, for example — were met with legal strictures that forbade trade, running away with, and many other interactions. As Ben Brucato has written, the goal of such restrictions was “to encourage the growing division between white and Black worker.” In New York City, in 1712 and in 1741, attempts at insurrection and revolutionary arson were organized together by enslaved Africans, Irish immigrant dock workers, and poor whites, which almost burned the city to the ground. Especially in the port cities, such cooperation made it “hard to police” these “dangerously insurrectionary connections,” according to historian Ira Berlin.

Overall, 70 percent of America’s cities with a population over twenty thousand saw major disorder in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the threat of slave rebellion haunted the slavocracy in the South. London experienced major riots almost every year of the second decade of the nineteenth century, and revolt was openly feared by those in power. Between 1825 and 1830, New York City saw riots once a month. In Paris, food riots were commonplace in the latter half of the eighteenth century, but the commissaires were notably absent when they happened. One commissaire reported that, if he left his home, he would be “assailed and plundered by the crazed populace.” In 1775, the Flour Wars, riots of Gordon-level explosiveness, rocked Paris. Only one brave — or stupid — commissaire attempted to quell them, but he quickly found himself impotent to stop them and ended up being forced by the crowd to help disperse bread at the “price” set by the rioters. Historian Eric Hobsbawm writes that these unruly expressions of crowds, looting, and machine-breaking were “a traditional and established part of the industrial conflict … in the early stages of the factory and mine” in what he calls “collective bargaining by riot.” This political situation was described by a conventional police historian, who bemoaned the fact that


It was not difficult for political extremists to secure the following of a mob, incite them to rise, and lead them in a march upon Parliament. Mobs which marched on Parliament usually carried some grievances, real or imagined, which they hoped Parliament would redress. It was not unusual that mobs were unruly, destructive, and bore little regard for the well being of local residents and their property.

This relative ease of resistance — even if it was not able to culminate in victory for the underclasses — stoked the fear and contempt of the ruling classes.
“We Must Break the Yoke”: Insurrection in the Slavocracy

If we jump back to the American South, we can see how urbanization produced similar changes to the institution of the slave patrol. Urbanization moved and consolidated the free Black and enslaved populations into cities, a process described by historian Julius Scott as one of the “key demographic trends of the early national period.” In Charleston, for example, the number of free Black inhabitants more than tripled from 1790 to 1820. This process was driven by rapid industrialization in the South that also had a tremendous impact upon the enslaved population. Although field work was still predominant, enslavers began leasing out individuals for work, meaning enslaved Blacks worked more and more in the textile mills, iron works, mines, tobacco factories, hemp factories, and tanneries of the cities. Free and enslaved Black artisans and “hired out” workers all took part in a sort of quasi-proletarianization. The process would be a factor in the doubling of the industrial output of the South by the mid-nineteenth century. But the urbanization of the South also brought increasing fears of revolt and required changes in the apparatus of repression.

Revolts of the enslaved — from the Stono rebellion to the German Coast uprising to Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion to Nat Turner’s revolt — struck fear into the hearts of the slave-owning ruling class, and, as resistance from below became ever more difficult to manage, the slavocracy opted for more professionalized and reliable ways of containing it. There was great anxiety about the events in Jamaica, where, in 1739, fugitive maroon communities in the mountains united and fought a guerilla war with the British to a standstill, winning the maroons limited autonomy. But few things haunted the enslavers more than the example set by the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and culminated in the liberation of the island’s Black population, giving enslaved people in the United States more confidence in rebellions. In 1796, a number of Black citizens of Charleston were executed for a large-scale plot to burn the city to the ground; they were described as having “intended to make a St. Domingo business of it” (St. Domingo was the name used for Haiti at the time). Fears sparked by the success of the Haitian Revolution provoked ports from Charleston to Boston to ban, and in some places deport, Black people originating from the Caribbean. Social controls like curfews and restrictions on movement targeted Black folks — free as well as enslaved. But these were difficult to enforce with ad hoc bands of vigilantes.

While the enslaver class relied upon the cities, they also strove to keep the social space of the labor camp and the city separate, fearing that field workers would be “ruined” by exposure to the cosmopolitan interconnections and propensity to revolt of the free Black and proletarianized enslaved workers of the city. The hiring-out system expanded the already existing networks of communication and connection between the rural and the urban. Moreover, the various legal restrictions proved unable to completely regulate city workers, to the point where “neither owners nor municipal officials could effectively monitor the enslaved bricklayers, carpenters, painters, and other craft workers who traveled freely around the city and surrounding countryside.” It was from these craft workers that many of the ranks and leaders of major attempted revolts emerged, such as Gabriel Prosser (a blacksmith) or Denmark Vesey (a carpenter).

The white ruling class in Charleston, a city that was 60 percent Black in 1820, acted on its anxieties with a more intensive and professionalized watch system than other contemporary cities in the form of the City Watch and Guard. This was especially the case on Sundays, market days when movement and interaction were freer among both the enslaved and free Black majority population. It was on these days that — similar to Barbados — day patrols of musket-armed and blue-uniformed squads would “observe and suppress indecent or riotous behavior” at the markets. In the time before the invention of the modern police, it is no coincidence that Charleston, as David Whitehouse points out, was the most heavily policed major city in the US and also “the only one where a majority of the people were enslaved.”

Then, in 1822, a planned insurrection in Charleston was uncovered that confirmed the worst fears of the white slave-owning class. The conspiracy consisted of an extensive network in both the city and labor camps, with a plan to assassinate key officials, loot weapons depots, kill as many whites as possible, set fire to the city, and either escape on boats to Haiti (where revolt leader Denmark Vesey reportedly had contacts) or establish an armed outpost of freedom. Although the plan was aborted before attempted, and thirty-five people were hanged in response, the planned insurrection reflected the explosive potential of Black rebellion and the challenges of the city.

In 1822, in direct response to the thwarting of the planned slave insurrection of Denmark Vesey and his comrades, a daytime patrol was created. By 1856, this patrol had become fully incorporated into a modern uniformed police force. The escalation in repression required the creation of a new organization with more permanent and centralized authority than the slave patrols. A Charlestonian enslaver in 1845 described the change in a perversely matter-of-fact way:


[In the rural setting] the mere occasional riding about and general supervision of a patrol may be sufficient. But, some more energetic and scrutinizing system is absolutely necessary in cities, where from the very denseness of population and closely contiguous settlements there must be need of closer and more careful circumspection.

While it is somewhat simplistic to see the slave patrol as simply turning into the modern police via linear progression, there is an unbroken blue line in the history of the U.S. South from the experiments of the slave patrol to the formation of the modern police, as the private violence of the labor camp was moved into the public city.

Two years before the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, on August 16, 1819, in Manchester, England’s industrial center, one hundred thousand workers marched in organized columns onto St. Peter’s Field as part of a demonstration for suffrage and for the lowering of food prices. This was the culmination of a years-long process of organizing and politicization in which the working class progressed from hunger marches to strikes, to a General Union expressly forbidden by law, to political organizations fighting for radical democracy. The same year witnessed illegal unions parading in the streets, while state attempts to arrest the reformers proved inadequate when juries refused to find them guilty. Here, arrayed on St. Peter’s Field, “King Mob” now appeared as a disciplined army. The volunteer yeomanry militia was sent in first to disperse the protests and arrest one of the leaders, Henry Hunt. The yeomanry was comprised of volunteers drawn from bosses and shop owners — the equivalent of the “cities business mafia”— and thus its members were recognizably from the same class responsible for abuses, hoarding of grain, and driving up of prices: the very target of the workers’ anger. Workers fought to stop the raid and the arrest of Hunt, carrying out a “de-arrest,” to use contemporary parlance. In response, the waiting English military charged the crowd and committed what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre, in which eleven were killed and four hundred injured. This act of brutal repression had the opposite effect to quelling the protests. Several nights of rioting and unrest in Manchester and surrounding towns followed. A military occupation was required to quell the resistance.

This bloody event created scores of working-class martyrs and provoked an uproar and radicalization. Some sections of the movement began amassing arms in defense, training for military action, and spreading calls for “revenge for Peterloo.” The radical wing of the workers’ movement began agitating for an insurrection against the government to occur in November 1819. “Reform cannot be achieved without bloodshed,” one radical publication proclaimed. Although the more conservative leadership called off the armed rising, the political mood can be seen in the report of a police informant who attended a delegate meeting representing 12,500 workers. The spy stated that workers had begun arming themselves to prepare and that there was “much regret on the part of many” that the insurrection had been called off. One speaker railed, “If we had met all over England on that day the business would have been done before now.” An 1820 editorial in the London Times lamented, “Radicalism is every day most alarmingly and portentously increasing; and will, we predict more and more, till, without change, … end is certain.” A relatively new urban ruling class was frightened and still determining how to control the emergence of the powerful new working class.

For the ruling classes, this problem was ultimately solved via the modern police force. Of course, organized repression and violence have been used by the ruling class for as long as there have been class divisions, but modern policing is a very specific kind of repressive institution with a number of historically unique features. Some histories simplify the process of emergence and present it as proceeding from either London or the slave patrols directly to the modern police. A closer reading of history reveals that modern cops came about as the preferred tool through a process of ruling-class experimentation, rooted in different repressive precursors and different institutional inertias, but nonetheless a conscientious process of mutual borrowing and sharing experiences.

brian bean
brian bean is a socialist agitator and organizer based in Chicago, founding editor of Rampant Magazine, member of the Tempest collective, and co-editor and contributor to the book Palestine: A Socialist introduction. Their newest book, Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, is out now from Haymarket Books.

​Why We’re Gaslit on Guns and Don’t Know It

What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less the gun lobby’s money than the ideology that it’s been spreading for years.


People gather at Lynhurst Park where a candlelight vigil was being held for the victims of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis that left at least two dead and 17 others injured, in Minnesota, United States on August 27, 2025.
(Photo by Christopher Mark Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Frank Smyth
Aug 29, 2025

Common Dreams


“Not again,” countless Americans have said for decades after another mass shooting like the one on Wednesday, August 27 at a mass in church at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Some experts say we should focus more on the “red flags” that potential shooters may give off so authorities could have a better chance of stopping them. Others say we need to fortify schools and deploy more armed guards to deter them.

Hardly anyone has said, however, what would work, and has been proven to reduce gun violence in every other advanced nation. To license new gun buyers and require both criminal and mental health background checks, and a permit each time they want to purchase either a semiautomatic weapon or handgun. A handful of states like New Jersey have required all these measures for decades every time to buy a handgun, and no court has ruled these regulations violate the Second Amendment.

Back in 1959, the organization that became Gallup reported 75% of Americans would not oppose requiring a permit to buy a gun. Today, however, few Americans including even gun reform advocates talk about gun permits. The reason is that Americans on both sides of our ongoing debate over guns have been gaslit and don’t know it.

There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), whose leadership has since been ousted over their embezzlements, and the gun industry, represented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have both wielded tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns. But their donations explain only part of their influence. What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less their money than the ideology that they’ve been spreading for years.

“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” US President Donald Trump told reporters during his first term after a weekend of deadly shootings in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso and on a bar-lined street in Dayton. He said it after a phone conversation with the NRA’s now-disgraced leader Wayne LaPierre. The phrase is based on the idea that gun control is just a step or two away from gun confiscation and then tyranny.

This view is taken like gospel truth among the ranks and leadership of today’s Republican Party, even though it’s a myth. Gun control has never led to gun confiscation. Communist nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba declared firearms illegal under the threat of imprisonment to compel people to turn them in. Nazi Germany seized few usable firearms from Jews, as one NRA-funded author, Stephen P. Halbrook, admitted, but only in the back pages of his book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, published by a small California think tank. Democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have used buyback campaigns to voluntarily compel people to turn in semiautomatic weapons.

Democratic Party leaders and gun reform advocates are partly to blame. Despite their good intentions, they both chose to play it safe, while sidestepping the disinformation long peddled by the gun lobby. Reformers built the strongest movement for “gun sense” that this nation had ever seen after the Parkland high school shooting, which incorporated surviving students and parents from prior school shootings in Newtown and Columbine. But what its advocates failed to realize is that the movement for gun rights was even stronger.

Money on its own rarely moves people for very long. But what people may believe tends to resonate more, whether even one word of it is true. There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.

Donald Trump has flip-flopped over guns throughout his life, the last time in 2019 over better background checks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. One doesn’t have to look back very far to find posters in online gun forums doubting his loyalty. But he seems to have proven himself to most pro-gun people today.

President Trump along with allies and followers continue to claim that he is the only one keeping tyranny in America at bay. Even as his followers, including paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and the National Front and the expanding ranks of federal immigration enforcement agents, gradually impose an armed presence loyal to the president across the land.

This is the kind of outcome that many gun rights activists have long said they feared. Considering how their alleged evidence has always been nothing more than a fairy tale may help explain why President Trump and his armed allies and troops are the ones imposing what looks like an emerging tyranny today, while our daily violence from guns goes on.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Frank Smyth is the author of the book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).
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One radical step will horrify most but it can end our national nightmare

Mourner Tim Barr prays outside the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis. REUTERS/Tim Evans

Thom Hartmann
August 30, 2025 
COMMON DREAMS

Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.

There are lessons we must learn from both, as I’ll lay out in a moment.

Immediately following the Minneapolis shooting, another pathetic Republican congressman claimed that the slaughter wasn’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.”

A community is grieving, school kids across America are terrified, and after 339 mass shootings since the start of this year you’d think average Americans would finally understand that the horrors of this gun violence have been intentionally inflicted on us by Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court in exchange for cash from the NRA and Russia.

This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.

Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.

Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on Aug. 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any meaningful consequence.)

His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.

Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said two years ago, honoring the release of the movie Till:

“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.”

That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.

We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?

The odds are pretty close to zero. Most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children.

But we need to learn. Because pictures really work when it comes to changing public opinion.

In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s anti-abortion movement began the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils.

Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, still often carry or allude to these graphic images.


Those in the movement will tell you that the decision in the 1990s to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“

Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helped finally turned the tide on the Vietnam War.

Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.

There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.

And yet, pictures convey reality in a way that words cannot. One of these days, the parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision Mamie Till did in 1955.

America’s era of mass shootings kicked off on Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman murdered his mother and then climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas and begin shooting.

The vast majority of our mass killings, however, began during the Reagan/Bush administrations following the 1984 San Ysidro, California McDonald’s massacre, the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office shooting of 1986, and the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991.

Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the gun lobby, his repeal of modest restrictions like the Brady Bill waiting period, and his rhetoric casting firearms as symbols of “freedom” helped unleash a flood of guns into American society, fueling the explosion of both gun ownership and gun violence that has scarred the nation ever since.

We’ve become familiar with the names of the places, and sometimes the dates, but the horror and pain of the torn and exploded bodies has escaped us.

It’s time for America to confront the reality of gun violence. And all my years working in the senior levels of the advertising industry tell me that a graphic portrayal of the consequences of their products is the greatest fear of America’s weapons manufacturers and the NRA.


We did it with tobacco and drunk driving back in the day, showing pictures of people missing half their jaw or mangled and bloody car wreckage, and it worked.

And now there’s a student-led movement asking states to put a check-box on driver’s licenses with the line:
“In the event that I die from gun violence please publicize the photo of my death. #MyLastShot.”

This isn’t, however, something that should just be tossed off, or thrown up on a webpage.

Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism — print, television, web-based publications — should get together and decide what photos to release with parental permission, how to release them, and under what circumstances it could be done to provide maximum impact and minimum trauma.

But Americans must understand what’s really going on.

A decade ago, President Barack Obama put then-VP Joe Biden in charge of his gun task force, and Biden saw the pictures from school shootings back then.

Here’s how The New York Times quoted Biden:
“‘Jill and I are devastated. The feeling — I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling,’ he said, at times struggling to find the right words.”

Obama himself, after seeing the photos, broke into tears on national television.

And we appear to be tiptoeing up to the edge of doing exactly this. The Washington Post featured an article about what happens when people are shot by assault weapons and included this commentary:
“A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that ‘disintegrated’ a toddler’s skull.

“This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.

“The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.”

But we need to go the next step and show the actual pictures for this truth about the horror of gun violence to become widely known. Doing this will take leadership.

And, of course, there must be a Mamie Bradley: a parent, spouse or other relation willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.

In 1996 there was a horrific slaughter in Tasmania, Australia, by a shooter using an AR15-style weapon, culminating a series of mass shootings that had plagued that nation for over a decade.

While the mainstream Australian media generally didn’t publish the photos, they were widely circulated.

As a result the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.

And that was with John Howard as Prime Minister — a conservative who was as hard-right as Reagan!

In the first years after the laws took place, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have only been two mass killings in the 29 years since then.

The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment.

America needs ours.

Minneapolis Mass Shooting Exposes Trump-GOP Lies on Crime and Gun Violence, Critics Say

"Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids," said one healthcare advocate.


Parents await news during an active shooter situation at the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis on August 27, 2025.

(Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Aug 27, 2025

COMMON DREAMS

Another horrific mass shooting that left multiple children dead and injured has once again ignited a wave of fury at Republican lawmakers who refuse to take action to stop gun violence.

Two children—ages 8 and 10—were killed when a shooter fired through the windows of a church at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. Another 17 people, including 14 more children, were also injured in the attack before the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Minneapolis police say the shooter carried out the attack, which is now being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, using three weapons: a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, not even eight months into 2025, there have already been 286 mass shootings—defined as cases in which four or more people are shot or killed—in the United States just this year, averaging more than one per day.

Gun violence is the number-one killer of children in the US, causing more deaths each year than car accidents, poisonings, and cancer. The victims of the shooting in Minneapolis join the more than 800 children killed and more than 2,200 injured by firearms this year.

Like dozens of mass shootings before it, Wednesday's deadly attack has stoked calls in Minnesota and around the country from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for stricter gun laws, which have been repeatedly shot down by Republicans in Congress.

"We need better laws on the books nationally," said Minnesota's Democratic senator, Amy Klobuchar. "When you have so much access to guns right now and so many guns out there on the streets, you're going to continue to see these kinds of mass shootings."

"Don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. "These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church."

"They should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence, and their parents should have the same kind of assurance," Frey said. "These are the sort of basic assurances that every family should have every step of the day, regardless of where they are in our country."

Congress has not passed a significant piece of gun legislation since 2022, when it passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

That law, which was supported by just 15 Republicans, introduced some modest reforms—including extended background checks for firearm purchasers under 21, funding for state red flag laws, and the closure of gun purchasing loopholes.

However, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) only agreed to negotiate the bill if Democrats abandoned more ambitious reforms, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks.

Since its passage, even this watered-down piece of legislation has been fought aggressively by Republican lawmakers backed by the gun industry's lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, who have attempted to have it repealed.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to present an action plan to reverse any law that the Department of Justice determines has "impinged on the Second Amendment rights of our citizens."

Through executive orders, Trump has rolled back efforts under the Biden administration to regulate ghost guns and enhance background checks.

The administration has also choked off more than $800 million in grants to local gun violence prevention groups and pushed for "concealed carry reciprocity" legislation, which would require all states to honor concealed carry permits issued by other states.

Instead of stricter gun control measures, Trump has personally advocated for schools to arm teachers and focus on improving mental healthcare—even as he's rolled back rules ensuring Americans have access to that care.

"Until we have more elected officials willing to place gun safety over allegiance to the gun lobby, more and more families will face unbearable suffering from random acts of violence," said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Wednesday. "Congress could—and should—pass stricter gun safety laws, but continues to cave to the gun lobby."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added: "The United States continues to be the only country where school shootings are a regular occurrence. We must stop this epidemic of gun violence and finally put the lives of our kids first."

Other advocates noted the contrast between Trump's response to the imaginary "crime wave" in Washington, DC, where he has initiated a militarized takeover, and his lack of interest in fighting America's endless wave of gun violence.

"Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in the US," said Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. "Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids."

Charles Idelson, a former communications director for National Nurses United, said: "If Trump wants to pretend he is 'fighting crimes,' stop protecting the pro-gun violence cabal."

Update: This report, which originally referred to the shooter as a "gunman" has been corrected to accurately reflect new information about the gender identity of the shooter, who has been identified as Robin Westman, a transgender woman.

Far Right Exploits Children’s Deaths in Minneapolis to Target Trans People


Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has decried those using the tragedy “as an opportunity to villainize our trans community.”

By Zane McNeill ,

 Truthout

August 28, 2025

People attend a vigil at Lynnhurst Park to mourn the dead and pray for the wounded after a gunman opened fire on students at Annunciation Catholic School on August 27, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Scott Olson / Getty Images

Trump supporters are exploiting the mass shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday — in which two children were killed and 17 people were injured — to escalate their broader attacks on transgender people.

“Two innocent children are dead and the far right are racing to use it as pretext to further eradicate trans people,” civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo said on Bluesky.

Early reports suggest the shooter may have identified as transgender, and the far right has seized on this to advance their ongoing campaign to demonize and criminalize trans people.

Within hours of the shooting, MAGA influencers began circulating the shooter’s reported gender identity as evidence of a so-called pattern. Far right commentators like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh called transgender people “dangerously delusional,” “mentally sick,” and “crazy.” U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted that the shooter “claimed to be transgender,” a claim that Elon Musk then amplified on X, writing: “There is a clear pattern here.”

This pattern, however, is one the far right have been trying to manufacture for the past few years as a routine scapegoating tactic in the wake of mass violence. “The fact of the matter is a shooter is more likely to be a non-transgender white male rather than a transgender person,” LGBTQ legislative researcher Allison Chapman told Truthout. “The right-wing media machine has been quick to blame a trans person in almost all recent shootings and this time it just happened to be plausible.”

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The HHS web page that once featured the former surgeon general’s advisory on gun violence now reads “Page Not Found.” By Chris Walker , Truthout March 18, 2025

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey condemned the transphobic backlash, saying that anyone “using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.” He added on X that “thoughts and prayers” are not enough to confront the systemic causes of mass shootings.

Despite such “thoughts and prayers,” the Mass Shooting Tracker currently reports 339 mass shootings this year, leaving 388 people dead and nearly 1,500 wounded. Everytown for Gun Safety has recorded 91 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2025 alone.

Yet rather than confronting this crisis or advancing meaningful gun control — even though the shooter obtained the firearms legally — advocates say that the far right has instead chosen to weaponize the tragedy. “I’m absolutely disgusted by how the right-wing media and the Trump regime have tried to make this story about transgender people rather than the victims. They should be ashamed,” Chapman told Truthout.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has dramatically escalated efforts to roll back transgender rights. He directed the Food and Drug Administration to convene a panel to determine if hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases a propensity for violence among trans people, and his administration has pushed bogus research on the efficacy of gender-affirming care for trans kids. He has also taken steps to pathologize trans people in what many trans people see as an effort to regulate and institutionalize transgender people.

“The Trump regime is desperate for a story to legitimize their attacks on the transgender community and this is simply a convenient way to demonize a community based on the actions of a singular person,” Chapman said.

Even in the rare instances when a mass shooter is transgender, the statistical reality remains: The overwhelming majority of such incidents are carried out by cisgender men. Meanwhile, transgender people are four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime — not the perpetrators.

“I’m terrified for my kids, I’m terrified for my community, and I’m terrified at the thought of what the Trump regime could do to me and my community in response to this tragedy,” Chapman told Truthout.

Sandwich Guy Redux: In Your Fascist Face

Sandwich guy targets most vilely deserving target ever

Photo from RedditStreetArt

FURTHER
Abby Zimet
Aug 30, 2025

COMMON DREAMS

When Pigs Fly Dept: The "remarkable failure" of prosecutors to indict the D.C. "hero with a hero" who hurled his sub at a neighborhood thug prompted glad praise that, "Ham sandwiches are finally getting a break." It also reflected a growing resistance to a fascist takeover that, with its inept efforts to turn small breaches - an open beer, a wrong door, a nap in the car - into felony charges, has judges, lawyer and an aggrieved populace denouncing it as merely, malignantly "fucking with people for no reason."

In the now-famous "assault with a deli weapon," Sean Dunn, a 37-year-old decorated Afghanistan veteran and former trial attorney and foreign affairs specialist with the DOJ, got up in the face of one masked, armed, burly goon among many in D.C., yelled, “Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here?" and hurled his wrapped sandwich, reportedly salami, at said goon's bullet-proof-vested chest before sprinting away. About 30 federal agents, with little else to do, chased down, handcuffed and arrested him. He was quickly released, but the next day, in the well-worn name of totalitarian pageantry, the DOJ recorded dozens of stormtroopers swarming his apartment, guns drawn Bin-Laden-like, to re-arrest him and charge him with felony assault for what U.S. Attorney Boxwine Pirro called "a serious crime," but definitely not like the Jan. 6 now-pardoned rioters who assaulted over 140 cops.

Despite the perp's later confession - "I did it. I threw a sandwich" - and the maxim that, given the famously low bar for grand jury hearings, resolute prosecutors can successfully find cause to indict a ham sandwich - the grand jury summoned to put away the "Hoagie Hero" basically responded to the evidence presented with, "Sandwich? What sandwich? I don't see no sandwich," and rejected the call to charge him with a felony. The "exceedingly rare," "sharp rebuke by ordinary citizens" fed up with the dystopian mayhem inflicted on them by bulked-up bullies on all sides rendered Dunn "America’s most famous food thrower since a bunch of guys in Boston hurled tea into the harbor." Like the refusal of LA residents to indict anti-ICE protesters, it showed most Americans reject the regime's cynical attempt to escalate minor scuffles into felony assaults, in the words of one attorney, as "horseshit."

To date, prosecutors have accused at least 17 people of felony “assaulting,” “resisting” or “impeding” a federal agent doing their "duty" since Trump declared his imaginary "crime crisis." As phalanxes of bored, masked, ill-trained cops - FBI, DEA, DHS, USBP - join D.C. police on patrols, the charges get preposterous, and the people get pissed. They caught Mark Bigelow with, gasp, "an open container of alcohol" in his parked van; when he struggled with cops shoving him into a squad car, he allegedly "struck" one. The same day, another mob went to investigate possible fireworks or gunfire; as they dispersed a crowd, Terrance Wilson "struck" an officer with his elbow; when his friend tried to retrieve her sweatshirt as he was carted away, she too diabolically "struck" an officer. When Rios Esquivel inadvertently took the wrong exit door at the zoo, multiple agents grabbed him for another felony.

As Pirro wildly pushes prosecutors to bring cases to court "with the most serious charges they can pursue" and tries to keep them in jail pending trial to impress Daddy with "big numbers" - helped by the ending of cashless bail - attorneys say the courts are "buckling." One DC public defender, "It’s a real mess." Meanwhile, prosecutorial failures to retool garden-variety encounters into fake "assault narratives" pile up. Prosecutors tried three times to indict Lori Reid for felony "assault" on a cop's hand at a protest; after grand juries kept calling bullshit, they reduced it to a misdemeanor. After Alvin Summers drove his car near the Mall where he shouldn't, police charged he "speed-walked away" and, when caught, "grabbed (a cop) by the upper body with force"; the grand jury rejected their testimony after seeing body-cam video, which doesn't lie like they do. And then there was Dunn's lethal sub.

Many judges have likewise grown skeptical. Trump-appointed Judge Thomas Cullen dismissed a farcical regime lawsuit against all 15 federal judges in Maryland to limit their power over immigration as a "Constitutional free-for-all," blasting the "concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it." In an assault case, Judge Zia Faruqui charged, "Masked and anonymous law enforcement are terrorizing innocent and hardworking residents (to) smear good people and build upon their false narrative they are capturing ‘bad criminals.'" Friday, multiple judges handed Trump big court losses: They ruled most of the tariffs illegal, blocked Ice Barbie from stripping protections from 600,000 Venezuelans - she slammed them as "unelected activists," like her - and blocked government's "startling' claim they can do "expedited removal" of migrants with no due process.

Still, all good inside the MAGA bubble. At a cringe, pointless gathering of bootlickers "that would make Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin blush," Cabinet members called their dear bigoted autocrat, with a "big beautiful face," the "transformational president of the American worker," thanked him for "saving college football" and "the whales," said he should def get the "Noble (sic) Prize," and declared "we're in a revolution," like the one "in 1863 or so." Their beaming idiot king bragged "I have the right to do anything I want," so he did. He illegally returned a massive portrait of Gen. Robert E Lee, a slave holding his horse, to the library at West Point. He offered military funeral honors to Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt. Using his "weapon of choice" of fake mortgage fraud allegations, he tried to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for being a black woman doing her job at the Fed; in response, she sued him.

Meanwhile, his lunatic Brain-Worm Health Secretary - not a doctor or scientist - dismantles the CDC, fires its leaders, prompts mass resignations and the charge he's using CDC "to generate policies (that) do not reflect scientific reality and (will) hurt rather than improve the public’s health." This week he suggested anti-depressants may have led the Minneapolis shooter to gun down praying children, flubbed statistics on autism and diabetes, said we should "stop trusting the experts, which is not a feature of science or democracy," and diagnosed kids he walked past at an airport with "mitochondrial challenges," which one expert called "wacky, flat-earth, voodoo stuff." Others: "I'm sorry but what?", "This batshit asshole should not be anywhere near the levers of power," and, "Scientist here. Maybe those kids just don’t like you because you’re staring at them like a creep who wants to give them measles."."

Enter, in his defense, Stephen Goebbels Voldemort Miller, who calls RFK Jr. "a crown jewel of this administration" and "one of the world's foremost voices (and) experts on public health." Also, the CDC lacked "credibility" and was run by "partisan bureaucrats." America was a "killing field" before Trump launched his "liberation." D.C. was "body after body after body." Chicago has "shut down" their police, "handcuffed law enforcement." Democrats should be “jumping up and down saying, ‘Thank you, President Trump, for saving our lives.'" The "Democrat Party (is) devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers...(It) is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization." And Sean Dunn, now charged with a misdemeanor, goes to court Sept. 4. For now, Banksy-inspired posters celebrating his tasty heroism bedeck D.C; its latest iteration hits Miller on his bald head. Let freedom ring.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Abby Zimet
Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
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Fox News confronts Jeanine Pirro on sandwich case: 'You can't get a grand jury to indict'

David Edwards
August 31, 2025

RAW STORY


Fox News/screen grab

Fox News host Shannon Bream confronted Jeanine Pirro, President Donald Trump's U.S. Attorney for D.C., after she was unable to get a grand jury to indict a man who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal officer.

"So you talk about getting to court, getting your prosecutors together and getting these cases together," Bream told Pirro in a Sunday interview. "But here's the headline from the Washington Post just days ago. It said D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge."

"There's at least one high-profile case where they're making a lot of headline news about the fact that you couldn't get a grand jury to indict," the Fox News host said.



"I know the case that they're referencing, and there's not a lot I can talk about in terms of grand juries, but what I can tell you is this," Pirro replied. "You know, there are a lot of people who sit on juries and they live in, you know, they live in Georgetown or in northwest or in some of these better areas and they don't see the reality of crime that is occurring."

"And my office has been instructed to move for the highest crime possible consistent with the law, the statute, and the evidence," she continued. "And in that one case, in that particular article, we were on point. But the grand jurors don't take it so seriously. They're like, you know, whatever."

Pirro noted that the Department of Justice had decided to charge Sean Dunn, the man accused of throwing a sandwich, with a misdemeanor after the grand jury declined to indict him.

"My job is to protect the victim," she insisted. "We're going to make the criminal accountable."

Watch the video below from Fox News or click the link.

'Much worse situation than we ever were in Watergate' as Trump runs wild: historian

Robert Davis
September 1, 2025

RAW STORY

Donald Trump (Photo via Reuters)

A prominent historian warned on Sunday that President Donald Trump has created a situation much worse than what the country faced during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.

Garrett Graff, author of the Doomsday Scenario newsletter, joined Emma Vigeland on "The Majority Report" to discuss the Trump administration pushing the U.S. towards authoritarianism. Graff argued that Trump's "speedrunning abuses of power," such as deploying federal troops to cities across the U.S., have "fundamentally changed" the country.

Vigeland noted that there are some similarities between the Trump administration and former President Richard Nixon's administration, and asked Graff to compare the two moments in history.

"We're in a much worse situation than we ever were in Watergate," Graff said. "I say that because of what we've seen from the actions of the other two branches of government...both of which are also obviously under the control of the Republicans at this point, where they are aiding and abetting the national slide towards authoritarianism."

Graff argued that Republicans who were in office during Watergate realized their first duty was to the Constitution, not to the president. That doesn't seem to exist in the current Republican party, he added.

"Over the course of this year, we have seen Congress not care when the president takes prerogatives to ignore congressional law," Graff said. "The Supreme Court under John Roberts has written Trump effectively a blank check as president for immunity for criminal actions."

Watch the entire clip below or by clicking here.

Only one thing can stop Trump turning the US into Russia

Tom Tyner
August 31, 2025 

RAW STORY


Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Anchorage, Alaska. 

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Governor Gavin Newsom is doing exactly what he had to do with his redistricting plan in California: attempting to stop Donald Trump rigging the 2026 midterms election in Republicans’ favor.

When you have a president bent on maximizing his autocratic power and positioning his party to dominate federal elections and create virtual one-party rule, no response is too extreme.

Newsom didn’t choose to create five Democratic-leaning House districts out of territory currently held by Republican lawmakers. He threatened it as a tactic to get Trump and his obeisant Texas governor and lawmakers to back off their gerrymandering scheme to rig the election.

Since Texas went through with the redistricting, Newsom had the choice of allowing Trump’s attempt to steal the House to go unchallenged or to counterattack and re-level the playing field.

That Trump would attempt to rig the 2026 midterms should shock no one.

This is the guy who lied that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — who coerced governors, state legislatures, and election officials to change votes, who created fraudulent elector slates to cast fraudulent electoral votes, who tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the electoral certification process, and who incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol in an attempt to halt the presidential certification of Joe Biden.

It is also no coincidence that three of Trump’s most admired political pals – Vladimir Putin, Victor Orbán, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — enjoy virtual one-party rule, their parties having long-established strangleholds on election results and governmental power. Thinly veiled autocracies today, the erstwhile democracies of Russia, Hungary, and Turkey have been crushed.

This is exactly what Trump and his Project 2025 chums have in mind for the US.

Trump is attempting to kneecap the Democratic Party’s chances in all future elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression. Measures such as eliminating mail-in voting, disallowing voting machines, reducing the number of polling places, eliminating election-day registration, and requiring proof of citizenship are all aimed at suppressing the vote of minorities who traditionally support Democrats.

Trump’s successful ploy to add five Republican districts in Texas is part of a grander scheme to reshape America’s governance system and render the two-party democratic system defunct.

In virtual one-party systems, the ruling party controls all branches of government, Trump’s obvious goal.

In one-party rule autocracies, opposition parties and shows of public dissent are often suppressed through legal, political, or violent means. Power is centralized within the ruling party and its authoritarian leader, with no democratic system of checks and balances to restrain it. Constitutions are reinterpreted or rewritten to help the ruling party and its authoritarian leader remain in power indefinitely.

This is the direction the US is headed. We have an overreaching, power-grasping president and a rubber-stamp Republican Congress that obediently does his bidding. Atop the judicial system is a pliant Supreme Court filled with Trump appointees. Federal judges who rule against Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders are maligned and served with lawsuits.

Authoritarian bullying is rampant. Trump punishes universities and states that refuse to bend a knee to his demands. He calls out the national guard to militarize Democratic-controlled cities and launches sham investigations of Trump’s critics conducted by the servile heads of the DOJ and FBI. Trump signs executive orders that violate states’ and the federal legislature’s rights. These anti-democratic acts are just the beginning.

Trump may steal the 2026 House election by other red states following Texas’s gerrymandering lead coupled with repressive voting laws that disenfranchise traditional Democratic voters. Republicans’ one-party rule would then be given two more years to entrench itself in the manner of Putin’s, Orban’s, and Erdogan’s parties. Democracy as we have known it would no longer exist.

With his redistricting plan, Newsom is pushing back. Other Democratic states may follow suit. But Trump’s election scheme has created a chillingly dark day for American democracy. Thanks to Trump, the winning party in 2026 must out-manipulate the other, since winning fairly is no longer an option.

Democrats must win the House by hook or by crook in 2026 to save America from becoming an autocratic, one-party rule country. Every anti-democratic act that Trump commits provides more striking evidence of the intent.

Governor Newsom did not stand by and let Trump’s dirty election tricks go unchallenged. If other Democratic leaders and the vast majority of voters follow suit, Trump’s second attempt to destroy American democracy will be his last.

Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor