Too much gun
industry money flows into the pockets of Republicans for
them to note or even care about the fact that “around
35 people in the U.S. are murdered with a gun every day
(and) that more than 550 school shootings (have taken place)
in the U.S. since Columbine.” Republican politicians
completely ignore studies that connect the wide availability
of guns to the fact that gun deaths in 2020 were the leading
killer of U.S. children and that in the same year more than
4,300 young Americans died from gunshot wounds. They also
refuse to acknowledge that a vast majority of Americans
support background checks on all gun sales, the creation
of a national data base, the banning of assault-style weapons
and restrictions on private guns sales.
The United
States has become the wild west of violence and a signpost
of the power of gun lobbies, the arms industry, and the
military-industrial complex to buy off politicians in order
to get their support. As one example, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas
receives more money from the gun lobbies than any other
Senator. Unsurprisingly, his response to the horrific mass
shooting of children in Uvalde, Texas was to arm teachers.
Other arms propagandists in the GOP have called for putting
fewer doors in schools. It gets worse. Some politicians
and media pundits have called for supplying students with
bullet-proof blankets. It is hard to make this stuff up.
While the Democratic
Party laments the lack of gun regulations, its hypocrisy
is astonishing as it pours money into the military-industrial
complex, the defense budget, and police departments in the
form of outdated military weapons. As Jeffrey St. Clair
points out, $7.4 billion in military equipment has been
transferred to police departments across the United States
since 1990. He also observes rightly that both parties support,
benefit from, and are in collusion with the merchants of
death “whose arms exports totaled $138.2 billion in
2021, before the blank check given to Ukraine.” Not
to mention the millions racked up by gun manufactures who
received Covid relief checks.
The right-wing
playbook does more that deflect anger after such shootings,
it actively creates the conditions that produce them. Yet,
the answer to such violence cannot be restricted to gun
regulation and more mental health checks, however important.
The US is plagued by a culture of violence and corruption,
the roots of which lie deep in a form of gangster capitalism
that elevates profit, greed, and self-interest over human
needs. Under neoliberal authoritarianism, violence is not
merely legitimated and used in the interest of political
opportunism. Violence as a form of domestic terrorism is
used by the Republican Party and its followers to destabilize
American society and reinforce their call for a national
security state that dispenses with constitutional rights
and social justice.
As one of the
most violent countries in the world, the US has declared
war on its own citizens. This is not a society that simply
embraces war as a permanent feature of domestic and foreign
policy, it is a society that revels in violence as an answer
to all social problems, making it a defining feature of
masculinity, and spectacularizing it as a form of entertainment
and pleasure. Right-wing politicians and pundits such as
Tucker Carlson and Sen. Josh Hawley suggest a connection
among their defense of guns and a view of masculinity in
which men are portrayed as soldiers–warriors in defense
of their families, religion, and freedom against a government
trying to crush them. The dark underside of this militarized
view of masculinity suggest that men have become feminized,
code for viewing women as eroding manhood and, as such,
constituting both a threat to men and deserving of their
aggression and control. In the name of protection, “men
regularly acquire guns to protect women and children, but
women and children in the U.S. are often the victims of
gun violence and accidents.” In this scenario, male
violence and support for a gun culture are accelerated and
legitimated by a view of hyper-masculinity and patriarchy
that not only identifies with gun ownership but does so
in the name of dangerous notions of gender identity, protection,
security, weakness and resentment.
A less visible
expression of such violence can be found in a society that
has lost its vision and punishes children through zero tolerance
policies in schools, creates the largest prison system in
the world, militarizes the police, produces staggering forms
of inequality in wealth and power, and uses the language
of violence to address social issues. For the Republican
Party, violence is a political tool to instill mass fear,
spread hate and racism, and strengthen its path towards
fascism and the destruction of the very idea of democracy.
The increasing call for violence as a form of political
opportunism, buttressed by the Republican Party’s
defense of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, reinforces
and legitimates the Party’s appropriation of domestic
terrorism as a viable political strategy to put in place
a minority government.
The Republican
response to the shootings in Buffalo and Texas is to pray
for the victims and their loved ones, assign pure evil to
the killers, and then do nothing to address such violence
except to hide from view how they produce it. In the age
of fascist politics, youth are no longer viewed as a marker
of the future. In fact, they no longer have a future in
the updated model of American fascism. They have become
non-existent as viable long-term investment and resource
for the future. Rather than viewed as central to the alleged
American dream, they are now portrayed as part of the American
nightmare—lazy, unproductive, ethically indifferent,
self-absorbed, and so it goes. Youth, especially youth of
color, are mocked more than treasured and are increasingly
written out of the script of democracy. They are told that
critical race theory, critical thinking, and history will
make them uncomfortable. This is simply code for keeping
them uniformed about the political, social, and economic
conditions that produce massive violence in the U.S. and
pose a threat to their lives.
Violence in
the US has been elevated to a defining feature of almost
every aspect of American society. One example can be seen
in how sports, reality TV and other sites of entertainment
have become battlegrounds where violence becomes spectacularized.
As John Whitehead observes, “Mass shootings have taken
place in schools, on college campuses, movie theaters, nightclubs,
grocery stores, concert venues, bars, workplaces, churches,
on military bases, and in government offices. In almost
every instance, the shooters were dressed in military-style
gear and armed with military-style weapons.” Not only
are mass shootings ubiquitous, they are so routine as to
become normalized. As I have sense elsewhere, “Given
the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry,
gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress,
it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot
be abstracted from either the culture of business or the
corruption of politics.”
The more general
response to the endless mass shootings in the U.S. and the
needless killing and maiming of innocent children is that
something is not working in American society. Actually,
the system is working. Under neoliberalism, society has
become criminogenic, elevating the accumulation of capital
over human needs, and increasingly defining itself under
the banners of white nationalism and white supremacy. This
is a society that under the rubric of fascist politics revels
in hate and racial cleansing; it is deeply anti-intellectual,
and it thrives in a newfound cult of authoritarianism. At
the core of this society is a form of necropolitics wedded
to violence, death, greed, and hatred. Violence in this
setting terrifies, terrorizes, distracts, and legitimates
the putrid language of “law and order” and racial
divisions. As the blood flows freely in Mosques, malls,
churches, schools, supermarkets, and other places, the latter
point not only to the abyss of senseless violence, but a
society that uses it to define its core values, principles,
and interests.
The country
has blood on its hands, the bodies of children are piling
up, and the legitimacy of the system can no longer be defended.
Fear and terror keep the public anxious and create a mass
psychology that encourages people to purchase more weapons
in order to protect themselves against immigrants, Black
people, youth of color, women defending their reproductive
rights, trans-gender youth, and others considered a threat
to the despicable mantra of neoliberal fascist politics.
Protective spaces, especially for young people are disappearing.
Every space from schools to the streets has become militarized,
a battleground, and target those who embrace the second
amendment with religious fervor.
