A website representing Brandeis University highlighted an anti-gun song by a music professor who stated, “It is crystal clear that gun rights and white supremacy are intertwined.” The website breathlessly stated, “This professor used music to address some of America’s most pressing issues.”
As Campus Reform reported, Professor Eric Chasalow wrote a preamble above the recording of the song in which he began, “The history of our obsession with guns in the U.S. is long. Feelings about it run so deep that rational discussion about the horrific violence the obsession causes has been impossible. I chose a traditional folk genre to signify that long history and wrote a text that is purposely without a specific reference to any time period, remote or present.”
“The urgency that rises with each horrific incident recedes almost immediately, normalizing violence as something we are all supposed to accept for the sake of the rights of a minority to live without even reasonable restrictions,” he continued, then bemoaned his own “racial privilege”: “I find this intolerable, even from my position of both economic and racial privilege. It is our communities of color that suffer most from our glorification of guns. It is crystal clear that gun rights and white supremacy are intertwined.”
He attacked gun rights supporters, “The deeply entrenched, well-financed gun-rights movement is, at its core, a fear-driven reactionary institution for maintaining our racist and classist power structure. So the insanity I sing of in this song is about much more than unbridled gun ownership. It is about ever-present violence fueled by fear, greed and hate.”
The song’s lyrics, in the long tradition of heavy-handed lyrics for leftist anthems, read:
John William was a very fine tailor
John William never hurt no one
John William was nothin’ but your neighbor
Til the day that he got a gun
Feelin’ fear and rage because they said so
Couldn’t say where it would stop
Always said he’d never have to use it
But everybody wants to take their shot
All that hatred blowing through the country
All that hate can’t be contained
Every hate just calling for another
When did life become hate for gain
It’s a story older than the ages
Hatred calling from the mountaintops
All those neighbors angry at another
All this insanity has got to stop
Every gun just calling for another
Calling out from the mountaintop
Calling out like the only true religion
This insanity has got to stop
John saw them bowing down to dollars
Calling citizens to take their shot
It’s your right to murder one another
Everybody wants to take their shot
John William was a very fine tailor
John William was a very fine shot didn’t think about his brother
Took aim didn’t think about his brother
This insanity has got to stop
This insanity has got to stop
This insanity has got to stop