The Racist Roots of American Gun Culture

Live shooter drill in US school
The <activist> Supreme Court of the USA handed down a decision a few weeks ago.
In their infinite wisdom, they have decided that a ban on “bump stocks” should not stand. That every American should have the “right” to make their semi-automatic weapon function like a fully automatic weapon.
How many mass shootings in the USA over the past couple of years?
You’ve lost count, right?.
We have the endless, useless, obviously futile and utterly hollow “thoughts and prayers”.
We have the mostly boy-men who live in such fear of “gun emasculation”, that they clutch their guns like a child with a security blanket.
We have the now regular and sickening suggestion that only more guns can fix this very stupid, very American problem.
Guns in our handbags. Guns in our restaurants. Armed guards in elementary schools. Guns on the beach. Guns on the bedside table. Guns, guns, guns.
We have semi-automatic assault-type high velocity weapons and ammunition in the hands of barely post-pubescent spotty kids with little more than an internet education – and usually some serious self-esteem issues.
And now, having exhausted every flimsy and disingenuous argument in their Book of the Gun, we have ideologue politicians pivoting toward a “new solution” which they hope will allow them and their indoctrinated constituents to hold on to their security blankets.
They wheel it out now at every photo-op and vox-pop.
“Gun violence is a mental health issue”.
And for once, they are on to something – just not in the way they would like to imagine.
*****
A large segment of American society IS suffering from mental health issues.
Issues created by centuries of barefaced lies about the American project.
Issues created by books, newspapers, cinema and TV spreading an unceasing, vomitous stream of violence, untruths and fairy tales for “entertainment” and filthy dollars – for decades, for centuries.
Issues created by land theft, slavery, economic injustice and race violence.
Issues created by corporate gaslighting, with politicians and virtual oligarchs programming the electorate to believe that unsustainable environmental rape and pillage is “progress” and necessary for “creating jobs”.
Issues created by the accumulation of obscene wealth for a few – through encouraging tobacco, alcohol, gun, opioid, and social media addiction – all while blaming the social fall-out on the “moral shortcomings” of their often impoverished <paying> customers.
One-third of the American electorate gets its “news” from a corporation owned by a shrivelled husk of a man who was able to write-off a nearly billion dollar lawsuit recently – all because he makes MORE money telling gun-hugging, conspiracy-embracing Americans whatever they want to hear.
And it seems the only thing they don’t ever want to hear is The Truth.
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I always find the “guns are needed for protection against a tyrannical government” thing regularly put forward by gun lovers a bit hilarious (if the side effects of mass gun ownership weren’t so deadly serious).
The USA military machine, with tanks, drones, warplanes and sea support, RPGs, chemical and biological weapons, air-to-surface missiles, internet control and spyware intelligence, etc., just might not be too worried about a few overweight local “militia” running around the woods and suburbs with semi-automatic pseudo assault rifles.
Besides, wars are won by controlling communications, and supply lines of ammunition, energy, and food.
But that is all by-the-by.
Every serious historian knows that the promise in the 2nd Amendment not to disarm “well-regulated militias” was for two reasons:
1) Because the government was too broke to pay for a standing army at the time. Local militias – often formed to fight Indians who resisted colonial encroachment – were guaranteed “rights” to operate, as these same militias could be called-upon to function as a rapid-response non-taxpayer funded army.
2) Because states with large numbers of slaves would have rebelled at least 80 years BEFORE the Civil War over this issue. Why? Because they absolutely needed militias with guns and dogs – for hunting-down escaped slaves, for preventing slave uprisings, and for putting-down slave rebellions. The 2nd Amendment was designed to placate these slaveholders and ethnic cleansers.
Period.
Never in their wildest dreams did the framers of the US Constitution envisage a society of ill-informed dorks wandering the streets of every town with semi-automatic high velocity firearms.
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But away from the ivory towers of the corporatocracy, the NRA, and sundry ill-educated wingnuts, we can read things like the following in our newspapers after a mass-shooting atrocity like the one in Allen, Texas in May 2023:
“The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes,” he recalled. “So I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side, and she had no face.”
A child. A child, for goodness’ sake.
Shortly after, the local police department tried to discredit the witness testimony of people on the scene. For politics. For ideology. Because personal testimony has the power to change minds.
Also shortly after, the despicable, wretched and vile Republican governor of Texas, Gregg Abbott, told Fox News Sunday that his “plan” for putting an end to such carnage was to target the possession of weapons by criminals and “deal with a rising mental health crisis”.
“People want a quick solution,” he said. “The long term solution here is to address the mental health issue.”
Yes, there is a serious mental health issue here. And it’s not confined to the sick people who shoot children.
Shame on the mentally and morally bankrupt majority of the Supreme Court of the USA.
#beforewewerewhite #history #gunviolence
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