yes, the easy availability of guns facilitates violent expressions of rage but we must also recognize that american culture is, at its core, incredibly violent. as basic as this might sound, this is a country built on the genocide of native peoples and the transatlantic slave trade yet there is no proper acknowledgement of that reality. we are comfortable talking about the holocaust in germany but not about american holocausts. unless we confront those traumas and their ongoing violence, how are we supposed to heal and move on?
the systemic ramifications of this brutal history are still with us in the form of police brutality, mass incarceration, unemployment, poverty, housing segregation, discrimination in healthcare, a broken justice system, etc.
there is also the question of empire. the word is not even part of our linguistic repertoire. it’s astounding. american imperialism is global in scale and barbaric in its violence – from puerto rico and the philippines to central and south america to africa, asia and the middle east. there’s hardly a part of the world that remains untouched by american military or political assaults.
yet the myth of american exceptionalism and innocence continues – the glossy corporate media are quick to turn the tables and cast americans as hapless do-gooders and victims, constantly threatened by some abstract, invisible “terror.”
the connection between what america does abroad and how it deploys the same type of racist violence to control and subjugate its own poor, marginalized, colonized is completely lost, even in activist circles. the disconnect has always been shocking for me.
finally, most mass shootings are committed by straight white men. this underlines a particular kind of white supremacy and sense of entitlement. rather than commit violence at home, white men exhibit a sense of ownership of public spaces. therefore, when they are invisibilized or thwarted, they express their rage and frustration publicly, in spaces they see as belonging to them.