discussing the latest mass school shooting and related public policy and action debates, I recently struggled articulating some thoughts in the moment which crystallized a bit after…
a common point of departure is the question of what distinguishes America that it has become such a grotesque outlier in gun violence, and particularly mass shootings.
opposers of regulation are quick to deflect examination of gun proliferation as not-the-problem, even though easy common access and fetishistic celebration of them as equated with ‘freedom’ itself is unique(ly pathological) to this country.
they point instead to ‘mental health’ as the problem, despite overwhelming opinion on the part of psychiatric professionals that most people suffering with mental illness are never violent, and are much more likely to be the victims of (gun) violence themselves than to be perpetrators of it. America’s incidence/distribution of mental illness within the general population is also said by the medical professional community to be on par with that of other nations. further, mental illness is at least as common in women as in men, and we find approximately 0.00 of mass shootings to be committed by women.
‘Mental illness’ as such does not then seem to be a sufficient explanation for why these incidents have become regularized in America as distinct from the rest of the world.
we can consider a deeper societal dysfunction concerning our raising of boys and/into men. that most of these shooters exist on the social margins and identified deeply with experiences of social rejection seems evident. we are failing to give these boys/men supportive means to express and process their social-emotional issues, including reconciling weakness and vulnerability, and experiences that place them outside of the paradigm of the alpha masculinity into which they were formatively conditioned and to whose fruits (status, wealth, attention, deference, power, particularly over women and other perceived lessers) they were raised by the society at large to feel entitled…
The World is Yours, but if that turns out not to be your experience, keep that shit to yourself, there’s something wrong with you.
the insidiousness of this paradigm is not only that it excludes by subjugation more than half of the world’s population from de facto entitlement to the world’s spoils, but that in order to do so it also denies the supposed inheritors of power the full range of expression of their humanity, and obscures paths to navigating insecurity and injury that could avoid begetting further amplified, reactionary harm, for the sake of maintaining the facade of raw strength upon which the whole trick depends.
when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
…critically, at the same time, we have provided them easy access to killing machines and whooped them up about their inalienable right to wield lethal force as fundamentally equated with their birthright as free and sovereign American men.
in these cases, all they find in their toolbox for coping, for empowering themselves to right the wrongs visited upon their deeply ingrained sense of toxic entitlement, is a gun. er, guns. ..and ammo, ..and accessories that make the weapons they can buy at their local walmart ever more deadly. as many as they can get, to become the epic heroes of their own warped vindication.
but really, that is not the whole of it.
we are a society which undervalues and undermines human life.
we prize our might-made right to be the world’s fakerighteous vigilantes above the worth of the hundreds of thousands millions of lives we snuff out (directly and by way of the quid pro profit proxies and customers we arm with our munitions) in the interests of the preservation of our hegemony (status, wealth, attention, deference, power..). we carry out bipartisan-sanctioned armed interventions and war campaigns throughout the world, justified by false/pre-emptive ‘security’ narratives, with total impunity. we literally, unilaterally determine who lives or dies at the scale of not only so-called high value target individual enemies of state, but entire collateral populations, backed by an unmatched arsenal of killing machines and military apparatus that is somehow never enough. We ruin the minds and souls of the mostly-poor youth we send abroad to do this bidding. They come home and take their lives in record numbers and we feign surprise.
we twist our aggression into a bedtime story of exceptional heroism that we may indoctrinate our children to believe, and thus sleep soundly at night. After all, freedom isn’t free, and when that 3am call comes, our firearms and nuke buttons will be handy and pre-cocked.
we are so comfortable with these realities that we don’t even consider them when poking around in a hysterical post-mass-shooting recoil for dots to connect. but they operate on the collective societal consciousness and conscience. they establish a precedent of permission for self-sanctioned monstrous acts, as long as one believes oneself righteous in his mission.
we are a culture of winners. everything is a superbowl cagematch biggest loser reality show, most especially civic and political engagement, and all Life is a zero sum game. not even a game. just an endless competition. gains made (justices recovered) by any individuals or groups who’ve been historically disenfranchised are perceived as losses of the dominant group’s birthright passed down from white forefathers and the unfettered power vested in them by the 2nd amendment, without qualification or condition. any regulation on our gun fetish addiction a ‘slippery slope’ to our total loss of freedom as (landed euro-ancestried fronteirs)men.
first, they came for the AR-15s, and I did not speak out, because I was not technically an assault rifle…
this culture and its gurgling supremacist underbelly is all too ready to exploit lost and impressionable outsiders for grooming as footsoldiers in the alt-war which is ever looming at the event horizon of a Clash of Civilizations that can’t arrive soon enough to vindicate them once and for all, or so they masturbate.
(& all this is not to mention the demagorgon that is the private militarized security industry and its heat-seeking profit motives at home and abroad, letting no opportunity go un-spun… a topic for a tangential post, perhaps… but I see you, Eric Prince whispering sweet teacher-arming nothings through sis Betsy’s empty dome into Trump’s simpleminded ear…)
by now, you’re hardly still with me (or long since gone). But nevertheless persisting, you’ll note that we’ve really only just scratched the psoriatic surfaces of a societal character which gives rise to the condition of possibility for such pathology as has been recurringly made manifest by (gun) violence of all forms, but most pertinently in this moment of public discourse, of mass shootings. an American character, with plenty more to excavate – good, honest work that Must Be Done, but not yet undertaken apart from some nibbling around the edgebits. hopefully there’s growing indication that the pin-the-tail on the donkey game of single-cause or -point-of-failure is dumb and wholly insufficient. Too Many Guns! No, Mental Illness! is a bankrupt, flattened ‘debate’, a boomerang gif in which we are stuck in part, perhaps, precisely because it fits so neatly into our left-right, winner-loser, zero-sum binary shell game.
we are a species that others, and America is a heterogenous plurality. some cultures, like ours, are more hooked on the zero-sum con than others. But across cultures, by and large, humans other. Octavia Butler astutely observed in one of her series [cit. Lilith’s Brood] a kind of fundamentally untenable contradiction in humans, which she articulated as existing between our species’ (relatively recently evolved) advanced complex intelligence and our (far more ancient) propensity toward hierarchy and domination. There is much to think about in this proposition, but I found myself coming back and back again to the idea that underlying the hierarchy and domination urge is our seemingly intractable habit of othering. We are clannish (/klannish), and limited and superficial in our ability to define self and kin. As a self-interested species as most (/all?) are, we make decisions that preference the survival of those we most closely align to our concept of ‘self’ over those we perceive as ‘others’. If we were not so narrowly horse-blindered in our scoping of self/kin, or if we did away with these notions entirely, would we still maintain this violently hierarchical/dominating tendency?..
while this othering problem is much bigger and deeper than America, it does undergird in some way everything from Imperialism/ related supremacy -isms to all manner of less formally named, more localized, and subtler conflicts. but coming back to America and the particular problem at hand, we can reasonably suspect the potential occurrence for conflicts lubricated by othering to be higher and more volatile here than societies that are more homogeneous in composition (and historical complexity). This is both our challenge and our opportunity – but take a young person who has been groomed into a heightened bias and practice toward othering (shoutout armed supremacist (sub)cultures) and/or who himself feels ostracized and othered apart from the social mainstream of the community in which (/at the margins of which) he finds himself, one he’s been acculturated to expect to dominate (or at least flourish within), and we have, in combination with all the aforementioned factors and easy access to killing machines, a potential perfect storm.
how willing are we to examine all of these factors and more, in active earnest, to apply them in reshaping attitudes and behavior at the societal level – that means all of us, individually, institutionally, systemically – in addition to stopgap or long term legislative policy undertakings? what commitment can we make to go beyond bad-appleing and lone freak-framing/-shaming to disabuse ourselves of the not-us-ness of the societal pathology and instead begin to practice collective accountability?
potentially most importantly of which, what restorative justice and compassion work can we each and collectively do to counter the dehumanizing manifestations of othering, reject clannishness and brutality, and put ourselves to the daily service of the affirmation of sustainable Life? ‘mental health’ does not exist in isolation, but as a part of our larger social fabric.
We are each and all responsible for each and all.