Truemors
Originally posted to Intelligentaindigena 04.18.2007:
As the United States reels from yet another mass shooting by yet another mentally unstable male assailant, the rest of the intelligent world asks why Americans, no matter how much carnage firearms cause, still refuse to give up gun ownership.
Dozens of independent as well as government approved and subsidised medical studies have proven repeatedly that marijuana is not a harmful nor addictive substance that possesses multiple medical applications that show promise of treating and curing many major diseases such as cancer. Yet, draconian social attitudes towards marijuana as a “gateway” drug, (disproved) that encourages anti-social behaviours (such as interracial dating and listening to jazz) and anti-Anglo violence from illegal immigrants, (Mexicans according to this theory, regularly attack White women while experiencing the drugs effects) has managed to maintain an unreasonable and quasi-legal environment that insists such “soft stimulants” by kept out of the public sphere with laws in place to enforce the ban.
There is no question that there exists immense empirical scientific evidence that blatantly contradicts the syllogistic logic passed off as factual information by the U.S. legal and moral structure. But in spite of this reality, Americans still, somewhat hypocritically, still deride marijuana as a life-threatening dangerous intoxicant. Scientific medical evidence and the scholarly examination of the social factors that blur discourse on the subject have literally no effect in modifying the steadfastly jaundiced mainstream American public consciousness.
The same selective judgement exists on the subject of firearms in the United States.
This month, a student of Virginia Tech University killed 33 people and wounded scores of others in a pistol-riot at one of America’s most respected educational institutions. This case of “contagious shooting” by a Korean-born immigrant has already fuelled calls for violence against Asians and tougher restrictions on immigration in the name of national security. The NRA was swift to release the dogs and they began snapping at the heels of the anti-gun folks by crying foul when gun control is raised as an effective barrier to such heinous acts.
As with their infamous apathetic reaction to the Columbine School killings, NRA’ers articulated the customary condolences and then immediately launched into tirades condemning illegal immigration and the assumed inner-city criminality that obliges every red-blooded American to own at least one gun. And many, far too many Americans feel virtuously patriotic to the max. And among these flag-wavers, there are others who also subscribe to a more ominous creed of belligerent retorts to personal intuitive instabilities.
The first American that would go down in history for “mass murder” typified the model we generally recognise in the United States. A maladjusted White Christian heterosexual male suffering from delusions of self-doubt and personal inadequacy due to a rapidly changing social and economic landscape that the protagonist believes unfairly penalises European males at the expense of women and minorities. He began his day by killing his mother and several others while en route to the University of Texas campus to begin vomiting outbursts of randomised violence killing sixteen people and wounding another 31 before authorities downed him nearly 90 minutes later. Thus, the angry White male at the end of his rope archetype was born and nurtured as an illustration of what can happen if social changes grow to turn its back on the American White man in favour of ethnic and gender equality.
Then in 2002 this stereotype was challenged by African radical John Allen Muhammad’s plan to inspire an African revolution in the United States by instigating the Beltway Sniper attacks and instantly, such acts of violence had a Black or Brown face. The corporate news media rushed to highly inaccurate comparisons between this case and the 1993 Long Island Railroad shooting in which a Jamaican immigrant in a fit of rage shot and killed six passengers and wounded nineteen others before being apprehended by three men in the train’s car. The latter was a case of insanity brought on by a variety of factors including Eurocentric ethnic bias. But clearly the Long Island incident differs greatly from the Beltway shootings in that the perpetrators had a political motive behind their actions, while the other was purely a case of one man’s inability to cope with his reality.
In fact, all of the cases I mentioned, and others I could not due to lack of space, could reasonably be seen within the same light. The notion that some among us may decide for a variety of reasons to injure or kill complete strangers because they themselves are in emotional or psychic pain never really seems to factor into public discourse into why such things occur. Even in the cases where authorities manage to take the life of the killers before they can harm larger numbers, typically these individuals take their own lives once they are immediately confronted with the brutality of what they have done.
What does all of this have to do with guns? Quite a bit, actually. In a culture that ignores its genocidal history and internal as well as external policy of violence while vociferously defending it’s “right” to own and produce weapons of mass and minor destruction, is it any real surprise when such extreme incidences occur? Only in America it seems.
European nations were not at all surprised when the German Rifle Clubs turned out to be the raw basis for the Third Reich’s regeneration of the Bundeswehr. In an attempt to skirt the Treaty of Versailles, the German government promoted an ethic of “masculine sport” and along with this new drive came along private gun ownership. Only they had specific targets in mind. Americans see danger everywhere.
Is the threat real? Apparently it is. Someone is always ready to point out some peril that lurks just around the corner. The paranoia is deep seated and can be historically noted since first contact between Europeans and American Aboriginals and throughout Reconstruction well into Jim Crow. The paranoia at that time amongst Europeans used to marginalising and brutalising Africans at will led them to form reactionary organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils. Today the threat level varies and the threat itself takes on morphing forms shaping itself into whatever will serve the needs of the suspicious. The widespread and unrelenting violence that occurred to Aboriginals and Africans remained in play clear up to the mid-1970’s. Yet when discussions of violence are entered to in the U.S., these histories rarely enter into consideration. Wounded Knee is one, and White racist destruction of Rosewood, Florida and Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street” are two others intentionally forgotten in the scope of America’s sordid history. In all three cases, hundreds of helpless and in the case of Wounded Knee, unarmed and defenceless human beings were without hesitation, shot down in cold blood. Yet, when White people kill other White people, this the nation wants us all to remember.
Selective Paranoia
The sudden shock of extreme violence, when it occurs in European America anyway, nearly always engenders widespread confusion as to how instead of why such acts could occur, “here.” “Here” generally meaning places where such acts are not expected to occur such as middle to upper-middle class suburbs or municipalities primarily populated by Christian Euro-Americans and euphemistically referred to as the “Heartland.” When such acts occur in the low-economic strata, inner-city ghettoes advertised in popular culture and populated by non-Europeans, it comes as no surprise, no shock and is accepted by the mainstream as “normal.”
We see the very same reasoning in how most American policy makers as well as American citizens view the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Random bombings, assassinations, partisan and sectarian religious violence, abuse towards women, children and prisoners and the extra-legal executions of non-combatants is, on the other hand, routinely dismissed as “acceptable,” provided it occurs over there. Even before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the current looming shadow of a military conflict against Iran, Americans are quite comfortable with violence provided it does not affect them personally or directly. And when it does, expect Americans whether from the more libertarian mode of thinking to the unabashedly fascistic and narrow reactionary persuasion, to comprehend and respond with chimeras rather than veracity.
The slogan, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” is one of these commonly accepted illusions. Guns indeed kill people, if this were not so, no prosecutor anywhere is the United States would probably be able to successfully win a case involving such weapons if the instrument used in the course of the crime cannot be viewed as “guilty” or capable of performing its intended function.
Cases have been dismissed on the sole basis of an un-working or unloaded firearm used in a suspected crime that made the prosecution’s case inert. This phrase is most often uttered by supporters of the American National Rifle Association and habitually utilised by gun enthusiasts to quell any and all debate surrounding private gun ownership. While no one in the federal government has dared to buck the U.S. gun lobby to any appreciable degree, private citizens have and continue to struggle for reasonable firearm rights and proper checks on the firms that produce WmD’s, (Weapons of minor Destruction) to prevent the unauthorised commerce of illegal firearms to criminals and other individuals who probably shouldn’t even be allowed to own a packet of matches. So the idea that witty slogans can diffuse the reality of the issue is an old one and inaccurate. But that does not mean that Americans still have come to grips with their sinister love affair with the gun.
Filmmakers such as Michael Moore and countless television news programmes have asked the question of why so many Americans feel the need to own a gun. The responses range from hobbyists who enjoy developing and practising a skill to individuals and groups seeking to enforce a variety of theological and political agendas. But the most mentioned reason for owning a firearm is fear. Fear of home intruders, fear of personal attacks and fear of “them, that ubiquitous them “they” always warn us about.
In a country that prides itself on rational thought, this frequently expressed fear of the unknown has outside of extreme circumstances of social instability, no basis in fact. But as mentioned copiously above, fact, science and logic do not factor in American thinking. We can easily qualify this statement with the current debate surrounding global warming. The planet is slowly breaking down and the physical signs are all around us, yet few people are willing in the United States to reduce the nation’s use of the fossil fuels driving the Earth’s destruction. The President of the United States has unwaveringly voiced his support for big energy firms rather than ensuring that humans will have a future on a habitable planet.
As the public in Nazi-controlled Germany “allowed” their country to be swallowed whole by their latent hatreds and irrational fears of a persistent and faceless menace, millions died as a world watched in silence because they too feared this same nameless nuisance. At some point the negativity has to return to its source. To paraphrase Malcolm X, this is in my estimation, merely a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”
In Germany it was the ethnic, theological and political minorities. Today, it is the ethnic, theological and political minorities. Both nations actively promoted gun ownership. If the reader cannot see the parallels between the two, then I dare suggest that the dear reader is not looking. Ignorance engenders fear. Fear in turn gives rise to hostility and the American gun mythology in greater turn vigorously feeds that pathology.
How much has really changed in the span of time between 1938 and 2007? Nothing much but the geographic locale.
- The Angryindian
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