By Firestorm Books & Coffee
November 2020
In this wide-ranging conversation on the history and analysis of armed community self-defense, scott crow and Kim Kelly speak to their experiences growing up working class and their relationship to guns, violence, and liberatory movements. Far from a call to arms, their conversation offers nuanced reflections and questions about the role of firearms in small-scale collective defense efforts and their relationship to larger efforts for autonomy and liberation. scott crow is an international speaker, author and story teller who is proudly from a working class background. He has engaged his varied life as a coop business co-owner, political organizer, educator and strategist, activist, filmmaker, dad and musician. For over two decades he has focused on diverse socio-political issues and the explorations of creating and exercising counter-power to capitalism, power, and unsustainable civilization. His first book was the critically acclaimed Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective. Crow is also the author and editor of two book anthologies Setting Sights: Histories and Reflection on Community Armed Self Defense and Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams: A scott crow Reader. Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL, a forthcoming book of intersectional labor history. Follow her on Twitter @grimkim.
scott crow is an international speaker and author. His first book, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective, was included on NPR’s Top Summer Reads of 2015. Black Flags and Windmills has been translated into Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. He is a contributor to the books Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab, Witness to Betrayal, The Black Bloc Papers, and What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation.
