Mass Shootings and the Culture of Violence in the U.S.
Violence is the oxygen of authoritarianism. It is the symbolic and visceral breeding ground of fear, ignorance, greed, and cruelty. It flourishes in societies marked by despair, ignorance, lies, hate, and cynicism.
Violence—and especially the killing of children, such as the recent mass killing that occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, leaving 19 students dead—can’t be understood in the immediacy of shock and despair, however deplorable and understandable. The ideological and structural conditions that nourish and legitimate it have to be revealed both in their connections to power and in the systemic unmasking of those who benefit from such death-dealing conditions.
Among Democrats, the general response to mass violence in the U.S. is to call for more gun regulations and criticize the NRA, gun lobbies, and the weapons industry. This is understandable given that the arms industry floods the United States with all manner of lethal weapons, pays out millions to mostly Republican politicians, and in the case of the NRA, has sponsored an amendment banning “any federal dollars from being used to research gun injuries or deaths in the US.”
We should indeed criticize the gun lobby and arms industry, but this critique does not go far enough. The tragic murders of the 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in rural Texas at the hands of a young man who resorted to a horrific act of violence—and the killing of Black shoppers in a Tops grocery store in Buffalo by a hate-filled racist and self-proclaimed fascist—represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries and values the accumulation of profits over human needs. All of the latter is amplified by a modern Republican Party that accelerates a gun culture, revels in violence as a form of political opportunism, strips young people of crucial social provisions, and enables a culture of lies that make it difficult to discern the truth from falsehoods, good from evil. The New York Times columnist Charles Blow rightly claims that “The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.”
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2022/06/13/end-mass-shootings-violent-culture
We have to resist the militarization in our culture.
