AMERICAN VIOLENCE: GUNS AND PARANOIA.

By Tom Kando
 
It happens with uncanny regularity. We have become inured to it, to the point of boredom.  On May 23, there was another mass murder: the Santa Barbara college student Elliot Rodger killed half a dozen people and then himself.

Right away, people are asked for and offer comments, for example  Michael Moore, journalist Charles Pierce  and myself. Moore’s best-know film is “Bowling for Columbine,” the 2002 movie about a Colorado mass murder which  also took place in a school. Pierce has often written about social issues for Esquire.  I taught criminology  at the university for decades.

Do we, “experts,”  have  answers about mass mayhem in America?  Maybe not. But there are important things to be said, misconceptions to be cleared up:

Michael Moore:
“I no longer have anything to say about what is now part of normal American life...: We are a people easily manipulated by fear which causes us to arm ourselves with a quarter BILLION guns in our homes that are often easily accessible to young people, burglars, the mentally ill and anyone who momentarily snaps...The gun, not the eagle, is our true national symbol. While other countries have more violent pasts (Germany, Japan), more guns per capita in their homes (Canada), and the kids in most other countries watch the same violent movies and play the same violent video games that our kids play, no one even comes close to killing as many of its own citizens on a daily basis as we do -- and yet we don't seem to want to ask ourselves this simple question: "Why us? What is it about US?" Nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males. Even when 90% of the American public calls for stronger gun laws, Congress refuses -- and then we the people refuse to remove them from office. So the onus is on us, all of us. Enjoy the rest of your day, and rest assured this will all happen again very soon (Michael Moore, Facebook, May 24)

Charles Pierce:
“At the beginning of this Memorial Day weekend, another American decided to make war on his fellow Americans....This is a country now at war with itself... for profit... Because its ruling elite is  too bribed or too cowardly to recognize that there are people who are getting rich arming both sides, because the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, so you make sure that it's easy for the bad guys to get guns in order to make millions selling the guns to the good guys. This is a dynamic not unfamiliar to the people in countries where... civil wars are kept alive because distant people are making a buck off them. In Africa, war is made over diamonds and rare earths. In South America, war is made over cocaine. Here, for any number of reasons - because Adam Lanza went crazy or because Elliot Rodger couldn't get laid - and the only constant in all those wars is the fact somebody gets rich arming both sides.
This is a country at war with itself because cynical people have told its citizens that their fellow citizens - all of them, because you can never tell, can you? -- are the enemy. This  is a guerrilla war, fought on darkened streets against children in hoodies brandishing Skittles, against children in cars who play their music too loudly.....Our movie theaters are our Wheatfields, our Peach Orchards, or our Bloody Lanes. A quiet college campus is the Hornet's Nest. An elementary school is Cemetery Ridge. Those are the killing zones. The enemy, we are told, is everywhere, and nowhere

This is the country that Wayne LaPierre, that malignant profiteer, talks about when he says, at he did at a conservative conference last spring:

    In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive, to protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want. We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and  rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all. I ask you. Do you trust this government to protect you?

Wayne LaPierre gets paid when his masters sell guns to the bad guys. Wayne LaPierre gets paid when his masters sell guns to the good guys because of the guns he's already arranged to sell to the bad guys.(The Country is at War with Itself)

In July2012, I wrote an article about Colorado Mass Murderer James Holmes, also focusing on the role of guns.

So let me cut to the chase, dispel  some  misconceptions, and give you some facts:

1. Violence is DOWN - both in the US and in the world at large. Historically, humanity has become gradually less violent in the long run, as have Americans  in the short run: Today, the US murder rate is less than HALF what it was  a generation ago - under 5 per 100,000 vs. Over 10 per 100,000 in the late 1980s.

2. Race: Young white males may commit the brunt of these spectacular  SPREES (many of them occurring in schools, from elementary to universities), but the vast majority of the perpetrators AND THE VICTIMS of  murder   are people of color. The vast majority of murder consists of violence WITHIN  families and within your own group.  Crime is far more strongly associated with social class than  with race. Elliot Rodger, by the way was (part) Asian-American.

3. At the same time, US rates of deadly violence remain  shamefully  high compared to the  rest of the post-industrial world - Canada, Japan, Korea,  Australia, Europe, etc.

4. All of which goes to prove that Pierce, Moore and I are right:

What IS unique to America  is not our high rate of gun ownership, or our high rate of untreated mental illness, or an unprecedented high murder rate. What distinguishes us,  is  our extremely high level of PARANOIA. This is  fostered  by the media and by  the likes of Wayne  La Pierre and the NRA: Paranoia about  everyone, about our neighbors, about the artificially and vastly overblown threat of crime and terrorism. We have been made paranoid by the powers-that-be. Whether it be Communists, Muslims or street criminals, there MUST be groups out there whom we must fear,  hate and be ready to kill in self-defense. This attitude is much more pronounced here than just about anywhere else.

© Tom Kando 2014

leave comment here