Words words words words words...
It can all be summed up in four words,
Same old, Same old.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/8/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The NRA's Real Mission
President Trump, with National Rifle Association Executive Vice President
Wayne LaPierre, right, and NRA lobbyist Chris Cox at the 2017 NRA
Leadership
Forum. (Evan Vucci / AP)
After the usual shock and horror, my reaction after hearing about the
latest
United States mass shooting perpetrated by a demented white male with an
assault weapon was, sad to say, "Here we go again." I waited for the
standard cycle to run its depressing course.
The venues and details are different each time, of course, but the story is
always the same: a demented psychopath with weaponry and ammunition made
available to him through loose gun laws. He wreaks mass-murderous havoc on
soft-target innocents. Often the shooter dies, too. Sometimes-like the
teenage Nikolas Cruz, who is alleged to have killed 14 of his fellow high
school students in Parkland, Fla., three weeks ago-the mass murderer lives.
First come the ghastly details of murder, maiming and mayhem. Then come the
breathless reports on the shooter and his history, the press conference
with
the authorities, the statements of dismay, condolence and prayer from the
governor, the president and other public personalities and officials.
And then comes the debate. Liberals and moderates in media and politics
advocate gun control, pointing out the obvious fact that military-style
assault weapons magnify psycho-killer body counts to a horrifying degree
and
have no place in a civilized society.
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Liberals call for elementary restrictions, such as banning assault weapons
and more stringent background checks. Gun control advocates note that other
nations do not experience the astronomically high levels of gun violence
and
murder rates that plague the U.S., thanks in great part to the civilized
gun
laws they have in place. This "left" opinion is, and has long been, shared
by most of the populace.
We learn again that the really big bloodbaths are just the tip of the U.S.
gun-slaughter iceberg. Multiple-death gun incidents occur with shocking
regularity in a nation saturated by lethal firearms. As The Guardian
reported last fall after the record-setting massacre in Las Vegas, "No
other
developed nation comes close to the rate of gun violence in America.
Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every adult.
Data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive reveals a shocking human toll:
there is a mass shooting-defined as four or more people shot in one
incident, not including the shooter-every 9 out of 10 days on average."
Led by the powerful National Rifle Association, the right pushes back. It's
time, pro-gun politicos say, for prayers, mourning and healing, not for
"politicizing a great tragedy." Many "conservatives" blame the bloodbath on
sheer evil. The more sophisticated "conservatives" say it's a mental health
issue, not a gun policy problem: "Guns don't massacre people, crazy people
do." We are expected to think they seriously believe that diminutive and
cowardly psychotics like James Holmes, Adam Lanza and Dylann Roof could
have
shed the same amount of blood with a machete as they did with guns.
Some on the right advance the dangerous notion that more people should be
armed and ready to fight it out with mass shooters. The solution, these
reactionaries think (or claim to think) is more high-power guns in
circulation, not fewer. (The ridiculous Trump-approved call for teachers to
be armed has never been run up the right-wing flagpole with such
amplification as it has in the wake of the Parkland killings.)
The post-shooting argument ends in stalemate and nothingness. Another
momentary upsurge of domestic popular revulsion against American gun
madness
gives way to resignation and retreat. We count the days until the next big
gun massacre.
Could the aftermath of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
be different? It seemed possible. It sparked a more impressive and
potentially influential wave of gun-control activism than have high-profile
mass shootings of the last two-plus decades. As The New York Times reported
in a recent Page 1, above-the-fold news story:
"
"The mass shooting . in Parkland, Fl., has thrust gun rights into the
midterm campaign, scrambling traditions in both parties as the debate
shifts
toward firearms restrictions. . A host of House Republicans and a handful
of
the party's governors are beginning to distance themselves from their
party's gun-rights orthodoxy, signaling an openness to restrictions that
reflects the rising anger among suburban voters. .. Democrats are under
even
more pressure from within to recalibrate their position on the issue. Even
as they attempt to reclaim governorships and congressional seats in
red-tinged regions, moderates recognize that bearing the mark of the N.R.A.
could be fatal in their primaries . the grim spectacle of [repeated mass
shootings] . by individuals wielding military-style semiautomatic rifles
has
mobilized gun control advocates in a new way-and pushed even red- and
purple-state Democrats to move abruptly in their direction. ."
Popular support for gun control usually rises a bit after mass shootings.
But Parkland was different. As Politico reported, "Support for stricter gun
laws has spiked in polls conducted after the fatal South Florida school
shooting, hitting its highest level in at least a quarter-century. . The
percentage of Americans [68 percent] who want more restrictive gun laws is
greater now than after any other recent shooting" (emphasis added).
No less an NRA-backer than President Donald Trump was moved to sound as
though he'd been turned into a gun control advocate. In an hourlong
televised White House gathering with congressional representatives, Trump
freaked out Republicans by voicing openness to a variety of Democratic
Party
gun proposals. He appeared to embrace a reform package including a
prohibition (supported by 77 percent of Americans) on bump stock devices
that "turn legal weapons into machine guns" (Trump's words); the raising of
the minimum age for legal assault weapon purchase from 18 to 21 (supported
by 81 percent); a significantly improved system of background checks
(supported by 88 percent). It sounded as though Trump was ready to call for
bringing back an assault weapon ban, which is backed by just over
two-thirds
(68 percent) of the populace. "Take the guns first, then go to court,"
Trump
said on the topic of crazy people with weapons.
But then the NRA and Republican Party rebelled, calling Trump's liberal gun
rant "surreal" and an un-American threat to "freedom" and "due process."
Trump huddled in the Oval Office with NRA Executive Vice President Wayne
LaPierre and top NRA lobbyist Chris Cox. LaPierre certainly reminded Trump
of the significant backing the NRA gave Trump in 2016-and of the remarkable
passion with which its "14 million members" will resist even the slightest
abridgement of their cherished "right to bear arms."
The NRA intervention seems to have worked. So what if 68 percent of
Americans want gun control? On Thursday night, NRA leaders triumphantly
tweeted that "POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong
due process and don't want gun control." By Friday, a White House official
told reporters it was unlikely the president would push for raising the
minimum age for purchasing assault weapons because of a "lack of support"
for such a change. Trump's scowling press secretary, Sarah Huckabee
Sanders,
announced that "nothing had changed" in the president's views on policy.
Thrown into full scramble mode by Trump's strange spasm of liberal-sounding
comments, the White House failed to deliver on its promise of a
comprehensive gun policy package by the end of the week.
Reporters were confused. "Nothing had changed" from what? A CNN report
Friday was titled "No One Knows Where Trump is on Guns-Perhaps Including
Trump."
Beneath Trump's mixed messages and the by now standard, new-normal White
House dysfunction lie some harsh political realities. Given the intense
personal, cultural and political hold that guns possess for much of the
Republican Party and Trump's heartland, white-nationalist base, a drift
left
on gun policy could cost the president support from a significant component
of the small but so far durable group of Americans (from 32 percent to 40
percent of the U.S. populace, depending on which poll you consult) that has
backed him no matter how idiotic, dangerous and clueless he has shown
himself to be.
What has been different about the latest mass shooting and its aftermath?
Part of it may simply be about cumulative effect, as the sheer number of
these soul-numbing and nation-disgracing incidents pile up on top of each
other: Columbine (a high school attacked by neo-Nazi students); Virginia
Tech (a college); Aurora, Colo. (a movie theater); Sandy Hook (an
elementary
school in Newtown, Conn.); Charleston, S.C. (a black church); Orlando, Fla.
(a gay dance club); Sutherland Springs, Texas (a white church); Las Vegas
(an outdoor concert); and now Parkland.
Another part has to with the age of the people murdered. The killing of the
young in and around their schools is a particularly ghastly crime. It is
precisely the sort of thing no civilized society tolerates. The younger and
more defenseless the victims, perhaps, the more hideous the violation. But
unlike the young Sandy Hook survivors, the surviving Parkland students were
old enough to take up the cause of gun control on their own. Student
activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have emerged as some of
those most compelling and eloquent gun policy reform advocates in history.
They've inspired fellow high school and junior high school students to walk
out, march, protest and pressure policymakers across the county.
Another factor, perhaps, is the graphic failure of local and federal
authorities to pick up and act upon clear signs that Nikolas Cruz was a
menace to his fellow students. This malfunction exposed the pathetic
weakness (in many states and locales) of the supposedly stern regulations
the NRA claims are already in place to restrict Americans' holy Second
Amendment right to own weapons of mass slaughter.
Also relevant, perhaps, is the political timing and context. The latest
assault weapon massacre has taken place as the primary campaigns for the
midterm elections are starting to heat up against the backdrop of an
epically unpopular and maddening presidency.
There's another twist to the Parkland story: It elicited some strange and
revealing comments from the NRA's longtime CEO, Wayne LaPierre. He
responded
to the renewed and escalated calls for gun reform by going to the
Conservative Political Action Conference to give a classically hard-right
and paranoid-sounding speech denouncing liberal and moderate gun control
advocates as radical socialists. LaPierre concluded his unhinged oration
with the same ridiculous advice he gave in the wake of the Sandy Hook
massacre five years ago: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a
good guy with a gun."
This time though, LaPierre went beyond the gun issue to tackle other and,
he
felt, related aspects of government and society. He worried about national
intelligence leaks and alleged liberal media bias. He criticized the FBI.
He
trumpeted "free market capitalism" as the source of America's "greatness."
He railed against American universities he accused of advancing a socialist
revolution by assigning the teachings of Karl Marx. He manically claimed
that "during the last decade, the Obama decade . a tidal wave of new
European-style socialists . seized control of the Democratic Party . a
party
that is now infested with saboteurs who don't believe in capitalism, who
don't believe in the Constitution, who don't believe in freedom, and who
don't believe in America as we know it. Obama may be [gone] but their
Utopian dream marches on. President Trump's election, while crucial, can't
turn away the wave of these new European-style socialists bearing down upon
us . How about Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bill de Blasio, Andrew
Cuomo, Cory Booker, Christopher Murphy and Keith Ellison? . They hide
behind
labels like 'Democrat,' 'left-wing,' and 'progressive' to make their
socialist agenda more palatable, and that's terrifying" (emphasis added).
LaPierre warned that America is moving toward "a growing socialist state. .
What [gun control advocates] want are more restrictions on the
law-abiding,"
he said; "they hate individual freedom . their solution is to make you, all
of you, less free. . If they seize power . our American freedoms could be
lost and our country will be changed forever."
LaPierre's neo-McCarthyite take on the corporate-neoliberal Democratic
Party
and on the standard mild liberal and moderate calls for a glimmer of gun
sanity was, of course, ridiculous. But for many of us on the actual left
(something rather different than the positions of Barack Obama, Andrew
Cuomo, et al.), the NRA boss was ironically correct to frame the gun issue
in broad systemic and ideological terms. That's because the gun madness
that
plagues America is fundamentally rooted in the nation's atomizing,
alienating and dehumanizing system of savage capitalism (which keeps the
U.S. further from socialism than any rich country on the planet). A recent
World Socialist Web Site reflection by Patrick Martin reminds us that "this
latest massacre, like all the previous episodes of mass killings, is a
manifestation of the extreme dysfunctionality of American society."
Further:
"
"The brutal harshness of every-day American life extracts a terrible toll
in
human suffering. Loneliness and alienation underlie the depressive
illnesses
that afflict so many millions of Americans. The social despair leads all
too
frequently to suicidal impulses. But it also erupts in episodes of
homicidal
violence . the Parkland tragedy exposes and refutes the ruling class'
delusionary evasion of the terrible truth about the state of this country.
.
American capitalism has produced a society in which the killing of children
as they attend school has become a common occurrence."
It isn't just about anomie. As Chris Hedges recently noted in Truthdig,
guns
provide millions of capitalism's victims a way to feel powerful in a
society
that has turned them into marginal and surplus Americans:
"
"The gun culture permits a dispossessed public, sheared of economic and
political power, to buy a firearm and revel in feelings of omnipotence. A
gun reminds Americans that they are divine agents of purification, anointed
by God and Western civilization to remake the world in their own image. .
As
jobs and manufacturing are shipped overseas, communities crumble, despair
grips much of the country and chronic poverty plagues American families,
the
gun seems to be the last tangible relic of a free and mythic America. It
offers the illusion of power, protection and freedom. This is why the
powerless will not give it up."
How darkly appropriate it is that Stephen Paddock-a multimillionaire poker
aficionado and former Lockheed Martin auditor-set a new single-shooter
body-count record in Las Vegas, the world's gambling capital, last fall.
The
madness related by Martin and Hedges is precisely what the arch-capitalist
Casino Society created by America's vanguard "free market" neoliberalism
has
wrought.
It is a perfect match for the NRA's dream of a nation in which every
(white)
household is stocked with the latest tools of rapid-fire mass killing. This
dream, or nightmare, is perhaps the epitome and embodiment of the
capitalist
vision of possessive individualism: Each against all; divide and conquer.
The idea is to turn as many American households as possible into atomized
self-defense and survival units-to create a nation of armed Robinson
Crusoes, each stuck on his own little island. The citizenry of such a
nation
never joins hands in defense and advance of democracy, social justice,
peace, ecological sanity and civil and human rights-the common good. It
never demands something better than inadequate wages, savage socioeconomic
and racial inequality, environmental ruin, abject plutocracy, rampant
sexism, virulent racism and endless war.
The arch-neoliberal NRA vision of widely weaponized, possessive
individualism claims to advance popular "freedom" from "big government,"
but
the real goal and result is very different. It is dedicated to starving the
liberating and egalitarian-the parts of government that provide safety,
security and inclusion for the poor and working-class majority while
helping
to distribute wealth and power downward to the people. It feeds and expands
the repressive and regressive "right hand of the state": the parts of
government that concentrate wealth and power further upward while punishing
the poor, oppressing and excluding minorities, waging permanent war,
imprisoning, criminally marking, surveilling and generally repressing the
majority nonaffluent populace.
The logical outcome is a vast, militarized police state: Hobbesian chaos
leading to authoritarian state power in the name of law and order. Beneath
the multimillionaire LaPierre's warnings against alleged creeping
authoritarian socialism, one can discern the real trajectory he and his
"freedom"-touting, right-wing ilk want to put America on-toward fascism.
It isn't just about class. The people who are most repressed, tortured,
incarcerated and branded by the right-handed state that LaPierre promotes
in
the name of liberty are very disproportionately black, Latino and Native
American. The massacres typically carried out by crazed white males become
a
pretext for the strengthening of a police and mass-incarceration state that
is fundamentally committed to-and largely rooted in-the white-supremacist
project of keeping blacks, Latinos and Native Americans down in their
socioeconomic and related geographic places. The NRA is all about guns for
white people above all. And many of the white people who cling to their
guns
as prized and precious possessions across a "gunfighter nation" forged in
violent racial conquest see their weapons as protection not against the
actual rulers of America-Bernie Sanders' "billionaire class"-but rather, as
Hedges observes, against "the black and brown underclass, an underclass
many
whites are convinced will threaten them as society breaks down."
Will the nation tighten its gun laws in the wake of the Parkland massacre?
If the nation were a democracy, based on majority rule, that would be a
done
deal. Two-thirds of the nation's registered voters support stricter gun
control. Just a quarter of the electorate opposes gun reform.
But so what? On guns, as on so many other key issues (take the "Dreamers"
and the border wall, for just two among many examples), alas, the nation is
not a functioning democracy-not even close. The majority does not rule; an
oligarchy of concentrated wealth does. The majority doesn't have democracy
so much as it has, to quote George Carlin, "owners." If the owners thought
that widespread gun ownership threatened their rule with an armed uprising,
Hedges rightly notes, "a draconian form of gun control would instantly be
law." But the masters, hidden and guarded in gated enclaves of sumptuous
hyperopulence, fear no such thing. They are content to let the carnage
continue as the news cycle moves off guns until the next massacre.
Don't hold your breath waiting for serious reform this time.
Paul Street
