Authoritarianism breeds violence, and revels in its use as a weapon of fear, division, and terror. The Republican Party in its white supremacy incarnation now holds firm to an absolutist view of the second amendment and argues that freedom is synonymous with unlimited gun rights. For instance, in Texas, where 19 elementary children and two teachers were murdered by an 18-year-old with an AR-15 type assault weapon, Governor Abbott defines freedom by putting into place laws that allow individuals to buy and carry guns without a permit.
He and his fellow gun disciples refuse to recognize that with more guns comes more violence, especially in a country in which “a record 39,695,315 guns were sold to civilians in 2020.” Too much gun industry money flows into the pockets of Republicans for them to note or even care about the fact that “around 35 people in the US are murdered with a gun every day [and] that more than 550 school shootings [have taken place] in the US since Columbine.”
Republican politicians completely ignore studies that connect the wide availability of guns to the fact that gun deaths in 2020 were the leading killer of US children and that in the same year more than 4,300 young Americans died from gunshot wounds. They also refuse to acknowledge that a vast majority of Americans support background checks on all gun sales, the creation of a national data base, the banning of assault-style weapons, and restrictions on private guns sales.
The United States has become the wild west of violence and a signpost of the power of gun lobbies, the arms industry, and the military-industrial complex to buy off politicians in order to get their support. As one example, Sen Ted Cruz of Texas receives more money from the gun lobbies than any other Senator. Unsurprisingly, his response to the horrific mass shooting of children in Uvalde, Texas was to arm teachers. Other arms propagandists in the GOP have called for putting fewer doors in schools. It gets worse. Some politicians and media pundits have called for supplying students with bullet-proof blankets. It is hard to make this stuff up.
While the Democratic Party laments the lack of gun regulations, its hypocrisy is astonishing as it pours money into the military-industrial complex, the defense budget, and police departments in the form of outdated military weapons. As Jeffrey St. Clair points out, $7.4 billion in military equipment has been transferred to police departments across the United States since 1990. He also observes rightly that both parties support, benefit from, and are in collusion with the merchants of death “whose arms exports totaled $138.2 billion in 2021, before the blank check given to Ukraine.” Not to mention the millions racked up by gun manufactures who received Covid relief checks.
The right-wing playbook does more that deflect anger after such shootings, it actively creates the conditions that produce them. Yet, the answer to such violence cannot be restricted to gun regulation and more mental health checks, however important. The US is plagued by a culture of violence and corruption, the roots of which lie deep in a form of gangster capitalism that elevates profit, greed, and self-interest over human needs. Under neoliberal authoritarianism, violence is not merely legitimated and used in the interest of political opportunism. Violence as a form of domestic terrorism is used by the Republican Party and its followers to destabilize American society and reinforce their call for a national security state that dispenses with constitutional rights and social justice.
As one of the most violent countries in the world, the US has declared war on its own citizens. This is not a society that simply embraces war as a permanent feature of domestic and foreign policy, it is a society that revels in violence as an answer to all social problems, making it a defining feature of masculinity, and spectacularizing it as a form of entertainment and pleasure. Right-wing politicians and pundits such as Tucker Carlson and Sen. Josh Hawley suggest a connection among their defense of guns and a view of masculinity in which men are portrayed as soldiers–warriors in defense of their families, religion, and freedom against a government trying to crush them.
Excerpted: ‘Targeting Children: Killing Fields in the Age of Mass Shootings’.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org
