(Image: Lauren Walker / Truthout)
Nine people were killed and seven wounded recently in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Such shootings are more than another tragic expression of unchecked violence in the United States; they are symptomatic of a society engulfed in fear, militarism, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos and a growing disdain for human life. Sadly, this shooting is not an isolated incident. Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States this year alone, proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed.
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In the United States, calls for liberal, Band-Aid reforms do not work in the face of the carnage taking place. "The United States sees an average of 92 gun deaths per day - and more preschoolers are shot dead each year than police officers are killed in the line of duty." (1) Mass violence in the United States has to be understood within a larger construction of the totality of the forces that produce it. Focusing merely on the more dramatic shootings misses the extent of the needless violence and murders that are taking place daily.
US politicians now attempt to govern the effects of systemic violence while ignoring its underlying causes.
State repression, unbridled self-interest, an empty consumerist ethos and war-like values have become the organizing principles of US society, producing an indifference to the common good, compassion, a concern for others and equality. As the public collapses into the individualized values of a banal consumer culture and the lure of private obsessions, US society flirts with forms of irrationality that are at the heart of everyday aggression and the withering of public life. US society is driven by unrestrained market values in which economic actions and financial exchanges are divorced from social costs, further undermining any sense of social responsibility.
In addition, a wasteful, giant military-industrial-surveillance complex fueled by the war on terror, along with the United States' endless consumption of violence as entertainment and its celebration of a pervasive gun culture, normalizes the everyday violence waged against Black youth, immigrants, children fed into the school-to-prison pipeline and others considered disposable. US politicians now attempt to govern the effects of systemic violence while ignoring its underlying causes. Under such circumstances, a society saturated in violence gains credence when its political leaders have given up on the notion of the common good, social justice and equality, all of which appear to have become relics of history in the United States.
In the face of mass shootings, the public relations disimagination machine goes into overdrive claiming that guns are not the problem, and that the causes of such violence can be largely attributed to people living with mentally illness. When in actuality, as two Vanderbilt University researchers, Dr. Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish, publishing in the American Journal of Public Health, observed that:
Fewer than 6 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness. Our research finds that across the board, the mentally ill are 60 to 120 percent more likely than the average person to be the victims of violent crime rather than the perpetrators.... There are 32,000 gun deaths in the United States on average every year, and people are far more likely to be shot by relatives, friends or acquaintances than they are by lone violent psychopaths. (2)
It may not be an exaggeration to claim that the US government has blood on its hands because of the refusal of Congress to rein in a gun lobby that produces a growing militarism that sanctions a love affair with the unbridled corporate institutions, financial interests and mass-produced cultures of violence. The Oregon community college shooting is the 41st school shooting this year while there have been 142 incidents of violence on school properties since 2012. Yet, the violence continues unchecked, all the while legitimated by the cowardly acts of politicians who refuse to enact legislation to curb the proliferation of guns or support measures as elementary as background checks - which 88 percent of the American people support - or for that matter, ban large-capacity ammunition magazines and assault rifles.
In part, this cowardly refusal on the part of politicians is due to the fact that gun lobbyists pour huge amounts of money into the campaigns of politicians who support their interests. For example, in 2015, the gun lobby spent $5,697,429 while those supporting gun control paid out $867,601. In a New York Times op-ed, Gabrielle Giffords pointed out that the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the 2012 election cycle "spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending."(3) Outside money does more than corrupt politics; it is also responsible for people being shot and killed.
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