Shooting Ourselves: Mass Killings, Austerity, and the Breakdown of American Society

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/11/08-0


Alice Chen, right, and Alizza Manzoeillo participated in a candlelight vigil outside the White House for victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. (Photo: Common Dreams File)

Sandy Hook. Columbine. Aurora. Tucson. Fort Hood. These names ring out in popular memory as the sites of seemingly random, horrific atrocities.

Mass violence and how we can address it has become a hot-button issue and for good reason. Last week, between October 26thand November 1st, there were five mass killings in the United States. And Monday, a gunman opened fire in a New Jersey shopping mall, firing several shots, but killing only himself.

Our nation leads wealthy democracies in allowing the market to disseminate, nearly unchecked, huge numbers of guns into the hands of a society riddled by extreme economic inequality, widening social polarization, and deep racism. In this context, advocating gun control is the only sane thing to do. Yet, to jump from mass violence to the conclusion that there are just too many guns - and that the solution is simply to reduce them - is to fatally misdiagnose the problem.

While mass shootings are the most publicized American gun deaths, they are far from being the only ones. Every day dozens of people are killed in this country, mostly young people of color and mostly in the poorest and most economically devastated neighborhoods of our major cities. This chronic social crisis largely appears in the establishment press as statistics or else as a situation to be managed but never fundamentally addressed. And typically, these everyday killings are assumed to have a different explanation than the spectacularly horrific mass shootings that are covered in the national press, if any explanation for them is offered at all.

[Loudly]

1. Tell that to Japan. If you make guns scarce you make gun crimes scarce. n/t

[Denninmi]

2. Give people access to quality mental health care ...

... In a way that doesn't stigmatize, discriminate, or set them up to be labeled for life. That would help a lot, too.