It's not the guns, it's us

Like many of my fellow Americans, when I woke up Tuesday morning to the reports of another horrific mass murder in California, there was little emotional response, no feeling that “we’ve got to do something, anything, to stop this slaughter.” I, like too many others, have become desensitized, numbed by what has become an all-too-common event.

“We’re still trying to understand exactly what happened and why, but it’s just incredibly, incredibly tragic,” said state Sen. Josh Becker, who represents the area. Tragic yes; unexpected, no.

By the next day the political response was focusing, as it always does after these tragedies, on gun control. But wait a minute, doesn’t California, which has seen 3 mass shootings in the last week or so, have a mandatory waiting period for the purchase of firearms? Doesn’t the state ban assault rifles? Didn’t the legislature adopt a “red flag” law that allows guns to be seized from people believed to be a threat to themselves or others? And haven’t California voters overwhelmingly approved limiting the number of bullets allowed in a gun’s magazine? And yet …

Don’t get me wrong. I’m totally in favor of gun control. In my perfect world, we wouldn’t even allow guns for hunting. At least against a hunter with a bow and arrow, the deer would have a chance. But we don’t live in that perfect world. We live in the United States of America, where violence is accepted as the solution to all problems, in many cases the only solution. It’s a fact, as H Rap Brown quipped, that “violence is as American as cherry pie”.

Think about it. The country was settled by violence, as the English immigrants did all they could to exterminate the native peoples and expropriate their land, rounding up the few that weren’t killed and forcing them onto reservations (later making movies about how the savages were killed by the heroic cavalry coming to the rescue of peaceful white farmers).

The US grew into a powerful industrial society by forcefully enslaving millions of Africans and exploiting their labor. What is more violent than slavery? And, country expanded its borders by waging war against its neighbor to the south, referring to Manifest Destiny as its justification. It’s okay to kill when God’s on your side.

American society has glorified war during its entire history. Many of its early leaders where military heroes; its national anthem is about a war – “and the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…” The statutes of its heroes, more often than not, are of generals (until recently even Confederate generals, who were traitors to the Union).

Although it managed to avoid having a large standing army until just after WW II (due in large part to very weak neighbors and two oceans), it relied on a growing internal force to “keep the peace” domestically by applying the violence of the state to protect the interests of the wealthy. And, since WW II, it has maintained the world’s largest military, with a budget greater than combined total of the next 11 largest military budgets in the world.

Today, the US government spends the American people’s hard-earned money to extend Its military reach to every corner of the world so that it can take out (the nice way to say kill) those forces (that is, human beings) it deems the enemy almost anywhere (along with an occasional wedding party), while at the same time condemning other countries that have used force just outside their borders claiming it is necessary to guarantee their national security.

Our “civilization” continues to glorify war and gratuitous violence. Its media is filled to the brim with violence, celebrating death and destruction in too many ways to even count. Go to the movies, watch TV, play video games, etc., it’s all the same. And it’s been that way all of my 80 years on this planet, although it seems to be even more pervasive today than it was when I was a kid.

Our society’s response to problems and conflicts, both home and abroad is violence. Even when dealing with social problems in a supposedly non-violent way, we use violent terms, an example being the War on Poverty. Is it any wonder that ordinary Americans, particularly in time of personal crises see violence, even random violence, as the normal response.

To “protect” our citizens at home we have a militarized police force, generously funded with resources, not to help people, but to kill them (or, in a gentler form of violence, to lock them in cages). And kill people they do. The year 2022 was the deadliest year on record in the United States for fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people last year. As I write, the news is filled with reports of another murder by the people who are supposed to protect us.  These generously fund police departments are actually occupying armies, using their resources to keep people in line, especially poor people of color whose needs are not being funded.

Case and point. While there is no end to funding for more police and more weapons, universal healthcare can wait (forever?). The governor of California reported that, while visiting a man in the hospital, whose leg had been shattered by the gunfire during the latest mass shooting, he was informed that the victim was hoping to leave quickly to avoid high medical bills. The patient’s mother and son arrived later and told Gov. Newsom they were "worried he's going to lose his job at a warehouse the next day unless he can go back to work."

So there we have it. As our country and the world face the interrelated crises of global warming, runaway inequality, the COVID pandemic (and who knows how many more are waiting in the wings), a real threat of escalation to nuclear war, and the attacks from the extreme right on democracy, instead of devoting the resources needed to provide for the people of our country and our larger community, the world, we are pumping just under $1,000,000,000,000 (that’s one trillion) into the military and billions more into the police.

Until we can begin to deal with the violence that permeates our society, gun control will have only minor effects on the murder rates (both mass and individual) in the US. The glorification of violence and guns in the US has resulted firearms becoming the #1 cause of death among children 1-19 years of age. One more aspect of the policrisis we face.