Trickle-down politics
Mass Shootings Are The Tumor At The End of Decades Of Cancerous US Politics
And prohibition might not be the answer
Sometimes, when shit goes down there ain't nothing to laugh about and we gotta put on our serious underpants and ask some hard questions to get to the heart of the matter. I’m sad for the people of the United States and for the parents and teachers at that school. Everything I am about to say is just crazy thoughts, not fundamentalist facts because this stuff is complex and I’m not sure if there is even a way out.
Hollywood has spent the last fifty years glorifying gun violence.
We watch shows like John Wick 2 and piss ourselves with excitement when he murders at least a hundred people. I’m not saying violence doesn’t have a place in movies. It does. But shouldn’t we be examining our reactions to that stuff? I mean why aren’t we looking at that and realising we are conditioned to love guns? Is that an unfortunate byproduct of art or something intentional? And now, when the problem is out of control, all the same Hollywood people that make these films push for a ban on assault rifles or whatever.
And look, I’m not against an assault rifle ban. I just don’t know if it will work.
Imagine the logistics of an assault rifle ban in the US.
Sure it happened in Australia in 1996, and gun violence has reduced. But during the buyback, the public handed in 65,000 weapons, and the amount paid out to gun owners was $300 million. Also, Australia is generally a very peaceful place. I mean very peaceful in comparison to the rest of the world.
The US is a different beast, with at least 400 million civilian guns in circulation and at least 20 million of those being assault rifles. Some very crude maths would put the cost of compensation alone to US gun owners at around $92,100,000,000. In plain English, that’s about ninety-two billion dollars. Then there is the compensation for gun shop owners and makers and the administration costs of such a campaign.
This is what happens when a serious problem festers and you wait seventy years to do something about it.
Next, there is the small question of civil war.
I think that the US constitution allows for the right to bear arms. And from what I understand, this was to prevent some form of government control. So, in this day and age, isn’t it understandable that these people don’t trust their government enough to give up their assault rifles? I mean, in the event of a civil war are shotguns and cattle rods gonna be a match for the heavily armed National Guard?
While I disagree with the blatant promotion of weapons by the NRA and the pro-gun bullshit that torments the North American people, isn’t the government trying to control their citizen’s weapons at this late stage a bit like Victor Frankenstein trying to kill the very monster he created?
Imagine being told you can’t buy an assault rifle by a government that spends $800 billion a year on its military.
Sure, it’s to protect the kids. That’s what they would say anyway. And let’s face it, we are well trained to freak out about dead children on American soil a lot more than the ‘foreign’ children killed among the 387,082 civilian casualties of US post 9–11 aggression overseas.
I’m not playing down the school shootings, but isn’t there something horrifically racist (or possibly political commercial?) about our vastly different reactions to child death in different cultures? Drop a bomb on children in Afghanistan and no one blinks an eye, right?
The US government also has over 5,800 nuclear missiles in its arsenal despite the UN deeming nuclear weapons illegal in 2021.
Just one hasty launch will result in the accumulative destruction of the planet. You have to admit it’s hard being told you can’t own a rifle when these kinds of world-destroying weapons are normalised for the chosen few — especially when the US itself is ignoring international law in continuing its nuclear weapons program.
How can a country with that much civilian blood on its hands and that much firepower tell its people they can’t carry assault rifles?
Again, I’m not saying an assault rifle ban would be wrong. I’m just saying that the people who own those 20 million assault rifles might not choose to go quietly.
Let’s not forget we are talking about a country where the guy next door can have a basement full of Armalites that he bought at Walmart. It breaks my heart that families have to live in a society with that possibility. We already have an America where everyone is shit scared of each other, so surely a good portion of the firearms are purchased out of fear. If it were your family, how would you feel about that?
Will a ban even stop people from owning assault rifles?
I mean, if someone is going to walk into a school and murder children, is a background check or a small matter of the law going to stop them, or just provide them with a temporary inconvenience?
People will say a ban or tighter laws will make it harder for killers to get firearms and it’s true. Again I’m not opposed to it but these kinds of murders are not spontaneous.
They don’t wake up and just fancy murdering a group of people. They are mostly well planned and backed by some ideology.
Does the US really need a massive boom in their illegal arms trade on top of everything else right now?
Let’s not forget that prohibition gave rise to Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, and other violent criminals.
Shouldn’t we understand by now that prohibition does not stop an activity but simply pushes it into the hands of criminals?
And, yes, this is a hard pill to swallow because people who desperately want to make the world better need some big, fast action. So we say just ban guns. But isn’t this reaching for an aggressive solution out of anger and grief more than anything?
I must admit it was also my first thought when I saw yet another school shooting. But I’ve tried to consider this, and maybe we can’t just plug the hole.
What happens next time a psychopath shoots up a school with an illegal weapon? What will we push for then?
The biggest problems America have are social. This issue is not just about guns. It’s about how the US is going to address the gradual decline of its society.
The US is a country that has been abandoned by its government.
The US government in 2022 is nothing but an empty vehicle for corporate fulfilment, and anyone who believes that they serve the people is utterly delusional.
In terms of service, it’s all one way. The people serve the government and get nothing back. The government taxes everyone from the farmers to the cleaners — even the poor prisoners who make a dollar an hour — unless you are a billionaire or a corporation that is.
They loan the people their own money back to them to get educated and only forgive the loan if they serve in the military. They donate a good portion of people’s taxes to Lockheed, Raytheon, and other weapons manufacturers who publicly speak about the financial benefits of war in their shareholder meetings. And the same government can’t even pay for their citizens to get treated for toothache or depression.
In a country as big as the US, shit is gonna happen.
You can’t have a nation of 320 million citizens and not expect some psychopaths. But the path of a psychopath almost always begins in childhood, and you may not be able to stop the development in some cases, but in many cases, you can cut down those odds by encouraging a better upbringing for those children.
You could probably make a minor effort to do at least ONE of these:
- Manage your drug and alcohol problems (manage, not prohibit).
- Stop corporations from profiting from suffering.
- Stop redirecting people’s taxes into the military-industrial complex.
- Implement a fair minimum wage.
- Introduce universal healthcare.
- Support tighter control in training, psychological screening and recruitment for police.
- Get underprivileged people into housing.
- Push for gender, racial and sexual equality.
- Make the prison system an intelligent rehabilitation system rather than a hellish money-making scheme.
- Increase welfare payments and lift people out of poverty.
- Pay for education and improve the education system to be more life-focused than a training model for future capitalists.
- Plunge money into supporting mental health in society.
Let me repeat that last one. You can plunge money into supporting mental health in society.
One in five people in the US is living with some kind of mental health condition. And, over 60% of youth with major depression do not receive any mental health treatment. To put this in perspective, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 19.86% of adults experienced a mental illness, equivalent to nearly 50 million Americans.
What is the solution? Another customer for big pharma? We are talking about background checks and prohibition, but why aren’t we talking about the broken medical system that led to this?
Why aren’t we talking about the lack of mental healthcare in the US and the fact that someone with this level of horror in his mind wasn’t institutionalised or at least under some degree of care?
We are now looking to put out the flames with a fire extinguisher.
Nobody would blame anyone for wanting to ban weapons. But, it's a mammoth task that would probably take decades and cost the taxpayer tens or even hundreds of billions. It’s also reliant on the unlikely compliance of gun-loving citizens. But, the moment we witness the next school shooting with an illegally acquired assault rifle, we might wonder if it has even helped anyway.
Until we live in a world where humans have evolved enough to see the ludicrousy of firearms, what is the point?
We all learned about the fire triangle.
While there is fuel and oxygen, the flames will keep coming no matter what you do. It seems like US society right now is a big pile of fuel in the middle of a windy desert, and until somebody starts looking at that and the government-induced societal problems that help create these monsters, we might as well start preparing for more school kids to die horribly in the near future.
RIP kids and teachers. You deserved much better.
