After a short hiatus, I’m hoping to get back to posting on a regular basis. To start I’m going to put together short commentaries on what’s in the news, and, more importantly what’s not in the main stream media, while I work on longer analytic posts.
Today’s edition follows.
A while back I wrote a piece on gun control titled “It’s Not
the Guns, It’s Us. The gist of the post was that the US is and has always been
a violent society, from the original settlers’ genocide of native people, through
slavery, and right down to our culture today. (I’ve reposted it below, for
those who missed it the first time around.)
So I was not at all surprised to read about this in “War Made Invisible” by Norman Solomon. The top grossing movie in 2014 was American Sniper, which according to the NYT, was “one of the 10 most influential films of the decade”. “One of the key themes of American Sniper is the strong culture of machismo—the masculine-oriented aggressiveness, competitiveness, and glamorization of danger—found in the U.S. military”.
Reflect for a moment on how that film might have affected a teenage boy (note that we are always talking about male perpetrators when shootings take place) who, as an adult ten or twelve years later, has access to a weapon which could replicate the “heroic” actions of the movie character. Killing “bad guys” is, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, as American as cherry pie. Who gets to determine who the “bad guys” are? Why not me?
January 27, 2023 – 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.
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