Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Wednesday,
August 14 was going to be the evening I finished writing an article I’d begun
the previous weekend after America’s three most recent mass shooting events:
the July 28 shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in northern California,
killing three people; the massacre of 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas
on August 3 and, just a day later, nine more in a bar district in Dayton, Ohio.
That was before 1:30 p.m. Pacific time — 4:30 p.m. East Coast time — there was
yet another mass shooting with the AK-47, a military-grade assault rifle which,
along with the similar AR-15, has become the weapon of choice for mass
murderers everywhere. This time it was in Philadelphia, near Temple University,
and the gunman was attempting to block police enforcement of a drug-related
search order.
According to
news reports during the day, the suspect barricaded himself inside the house
that was the target of the search warrant and shot at least six police officers
during a standoff lasting over an hour. The officers were wounded, but
mercifully none were killed. Eventually the cops got their own people out as
well as the other three civilians in the house. According to sources, the
suspect live-streamed part of the incident, as if part of the sickness that was
making him do this was to get himself behaving bestially on TV — as if this
were something to be proud of.
I had settled on
the title “Mass Shootings and the National Rorschach” to make the point that
every time there’s a major incident in the U.S. involving guns being used to
shoot large numbers of people in a very short time, the bare facts serve like
the ink blots in the famous psychological test. People see whatever images they
want to see in the ink blots, and the psychologists giving the tests use those
responses to gauge how these people think and what, if anything, might be wrong
with them from the standpoint of mental health. Likewise, mass shootings evoke
Rorschach-like responses from people on both sides of America’s ever more
divided politics.
Progressives and
Leftists hear about them and say we need more regulation about who in this
country can own guns, and what sort of guns they can own. Rightists, ranging
from America’s dwindling number of thoughtful, intelligent conservatives to the
radical reactionary revolutionaries that have largely taken their place, say
that the real causes are a climate of moral “permissiveness,” a legacy of the
1960’s counterculture; limits we’ve placed on the ability of the police to
protect us without being second-guessed; the abandonment of “traditional moral
values” by the urban intelligentsia; and the decline of faith in God (one
former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee argued seriously: see https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-09/op-ed-guns-and-god-disproving-the-huckabee-hypothesis
for a withering rebuttal).
I got a good
dose of the national Rorschach the mass shootings have become when the
Philadelphia hostage situation was being discussed earlier tonight on Fox News.
I was watching Fox News because at least they were talking about it — CNN and
MS-NBC were doing their usual stale programming about the Trump Administration
scandals and the political dead and rotting horse that is the Robert Mueller
report. I was in the middle of the Sean Hannity show and I heard Hannity and
Geraldo Rivera (whom I can remember from the early 1970’s when he was a
self-proclaimed progressive hanging out with people like John Lennon) insist
that because the Philadelphia shooter had been a criminal, he had almost certainly
not bought his AR-15 legally and therefore a background check of the kind being
described in Washington, D.C. wouldn’t have stopped him from acquiring the
weapon. (But then how did the person who sold it to him — or whom he stole it
from — get it?)
Hannity played a
couple of clips from other networks, including Senators (and Democratic
Presidential candidates) Kamala Harris from CNN and Cory Booker from MS-NBC,
demanding sane restrictions on Americans’ ability to obtain guns. Then he and
Rivera lampooned the comments, saying that it was the height of
irresponsibility to use the Philadelphia incident to make a political point
when the suspect was still barricaded inside the house and the brave,
courageous police were still trying to get him out, hopefully alive to stand
trial instead of on a stretcher with a sheet over his head. (Rivera sounded
particularly bloodthirsty when he said he’d want to kill the suspect
personally.)
Then, after
criticizing two vaguely Leftist Democratic Senators for trying to make
political points off the Philadelphia shooting, Hannity and Rivera proceeded to
make political points off the Philadelphia shooting. They said that it was all
the fault of Democratic politicians and African-American “Black Lives Matter”
for mounting campaigns against police officers in places like Ferguson,
Missouri and thereby leaving police officers gun-shy and unable to do their
jobs properly for fear that they’ll be second-guessed by investigating
committees and review boards, and maybe even prosecuted.
They trotted out
former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who served while Rudolph
Giuliani was Mayor, to defend the constitutionally dubious anti-crime measures
they implemented during Giuliani’s mayoralty. Kerik’s message seemed to be that
if you want a low crime rate in a major city, you have to treat all African-Americans and Latinos as potential criminals
subject to “stop-and-frisk” policies whereby they could be pulled over and
searched on the street at a police officer’s whim, never mind all that wimpy
stuff in the Constitution about “probable cause.” And they also leveled a few
racist attacks, obviously inspired by President Donald Trump’s vicious tweets
about Chicago and Baltimore, about how Black mayors and city governments have
ruined one great American city after another and left them rat-, rodent- and
crime-infested hellholes now that the great auto and steel factories that once
gave them thriving economies have closed.
Never mind that
America’s auto and steel companies have closed because the CEO’s of the
corporations that owned them decided, purely to make more profits, that they’d
be better off making their stuff in low-wage countries like Mexico or China
(or, increasingly, even lower-wage countries like Bangladesh or Viet Nam). And
never mind, also, that Bernard Kerik, presented on Fox News as the very model
of a modern aggressive crime-fighter, is himself a criminal. In 2010 he
accepted a plea bargain in a case accusing him of eight federal felonies,
including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.
“Federal
prosecutors had denounced Mr. Kerik, a former police detective who rose to the
upper echelons of power, as a corrupt official who sought to trade his
authority for lavish benefits,” wrote New York Times reporter Sam Dolnick in a story published February
19, 2010 (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/nyregion/19kerik.html).
“He pleaded guilty on the eve of his trial in November.” But, apparently
willing to let bygones be bygones, Sean Hannity and his producers at Fox News
nonetheless presented this convicted criminal as an authority on fighting crime
in general and keeping our cities safe from mad gunmen in particular.
Government Inaction
Gives Shooters Permission
I’ve got the
sense that every time one of these incidents happens I’ve thought, and often
written, the same thoughts all too many times before after similar mass
shootings — Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado; a movie theatre in
Aurora, Colorado; Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut; a military
academy in Virginia Beach, Virginia; a Black church in Charleston, South
Carolina; a Gay disco in Orlando, Florida; a country-music festival in Las
Vegas; a Congressional baseball-game practice in Washington, D.C.; a high
school in Parkland, Florida; a Jewish synagogue (with an elderly congregation
that included survivors of the Nazi Holocaust) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and
no doubt others I’m not recalling at the moment — and I’m wondering what there
is left to say.
Oh sure, there’s
the obvious: we’re sorry these things happen. We’re sorry for the people killed
and what they had done, or could have done, with their lives if they hadn’t
been struck down before nature (or God, if you will) was ready to take them.
We’re sorry for the wounded people and we hope they have good enough medical
insurance to cover the costs of their ongoing health-care needs from having
been shot. We’re sorry for the victims’ relatives and their significant others
who will be left behind and face ongoing sorrow from the absence of a loved one
who should still be there, and won’t be.
When I wrote
about the Pittsburgh shooting I structured my piece as a series of diatribes
dismissing all the fashionable explanations, excuses and pretexts for this sort
of violence and cut to what I thought — and still think — is the core issue: too
many guns. I wrote a piece in sheer
visceral anger in which every other paragraph read, in italics, “We
need to get rid of the goddamned guns.” We
can argue all we want to about what the motives of each individual shooter in
each individual case — including their politics, if they had any, or if the
internal demons that shaped their actions included allegiance to a political
cause, Right or Left. But that
doesn’t take away from the central issue.
The central
issue is this: We, the citizens of the United States of America, have given
official permission for individuals to commit mass shootings. That doesn’t mean that we won’t punish these people,
either by arresting them or killing them ourselves through our representatives
in law enforcement. But by our abject failure to legislate any sensible regulations on who can own guns in this
country — including allowing just about anyone to have military-grade assault
weapons or high-capacity magazines when there is absolutely no legitimate
sporting or self-defense reason for individuals outside the military or law
enforcement to own them — and our subcontracting our nation’s firearms policy
to the National Rifle Association (NRA), we have essentially given a whole
bunch of crazies not only incredibly easy access to guns but also a kind of
social permission that says, “Mass shootings are a price we have to pay for our
Second Amendment freedoms.”
As I’ve said in
these pages when previous mass shootings have occurred in the U.S., a
country that refuses to protect its citizens and residents (documented or
otherwise) from mass shootings — i.e., from domestic terrorism — is a country
that has forfeited its right to call itself “civilized.” The U.S. at all political levels has so totally
abdicated its responsibility to protect its people from gun violence that those
of us interested in ensuring the survival of ourselves and our loved ones are
in the pathetic position of having to plead with the powers-that-be at the NRA
and the politicians they have bought and paid for to let us have some little
scrap of attention, like background checks on gun purchasers and so-called
“red-flag” laws allowing police to take guns away from the mentally ill.
President Trump,
elected with the staunch political and financial support ($30 million) of the
NRA, timidly proposed “meaningful background checks” in the wake of El Paso and
Dayton. And, like a Roman emperor of old deciding which gladiators got to live
or die, NRA executive director Wayne La Pierre put his thumbs down and thereby
condemned us to more years of inaction that gives people blanket permission to
commit mass shootings.
Living in a War Zone
24/7
The scariest
thing I saw on TV in the wake of the El Paso shooting (when this segment was
shown the Dayton shooting hadn’t happened yet) was a CNN interview with a
retired FBI officer, James Hamilton, who now works for the Gavin de Becker
private security firm and has apparently recently published a book on how you
can avoid being the victim of a mass shooting if you’re unlucky enough to be
where one is taking place. The basic advice he was giving is the sensible “Run,
Hide, Fight” — in that order — warning already given as policy by the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security.
Usually you’re
supposed to “Run, Hide, Fight” in that order — run if you can, hide if you have
to, fight only as a last resort — but, as Hamilton explained to Zahra Barnes of
the Self.com Web site in a March 2018 interview (https://www.self.com/story/what-to-do-mass-shooting),
mass shootings aren’t predictable, so your response can’t be either. “It happens so quickly and with such fluidity,” Hamilton
told Barnes. “You need to make the choice based on what you’re seeing and where
you are.”
Hamilton continued, “What can really help people to not
freeze is going through mental rehearsal. If I hear gunfire or what I believe
to be gunfire, where is my nearest exit? Plan it out in your mind. The one
resource you will not have any of [in a mass shooting] is time. You have to not waste it.” He’s right —
especially about time being the one resource you won’t have any of; it’s well
established that most of the people who get killed or wounded in a mass
shooting are struck down in the first five to 10 minutes, before people have
had the chance to call the police and the cops have had the chance to get
there.
But it’s also a sad commentary on what modern life has
become, especially with the NRA basically in control of U.S. policy towards
guns. that Hamilton and other experts with law-enforcement experience are
basically telling Americans they need to learn to live in a war zone 24/7.
They’re saying that the attack could come any time, so you’d better be psyched
for it the next time you go to a restaurant, bar, movie theatre, public park or
shopping mall. You need to do “mental rehearsal” much the way a soldier has to
do when faced with an enemy shooting at him or her — and you have to do it for
a situation that has a lot more surprise elements than a battle.
James Hamilton and his colleagues are basically telling
Americans that they are in an urban street battle 24/7, and that every time
they go out they need to be aware of that and be ready to respond in ways that
will save their lives. The nation isn’t going to protect you, he says, so you’d
better be ready to protect themselves. Law enforcement officers across the
country have acted heroically when mass shootings have occurred, and sometimes
at great risk to themselves they’ve been able to capture the shooters alive
instead of killing them or letting them kill themselves. But they’ve also
complained that at times they feel “outgunned” because the service revolvers
they patrol the streets with — or even the rifles they can be issued when they
have to respond to a mass shooting — aren’t a match for the military-grade
assault weapons the shooters have.
Ideological
Battles Over the Shooters’ Minds
Few aspects of the mass shooting stories have illustrated
the Rorschach-like aspects of the events more than the public discussions of
the shooters’ political or ideological motivations. Progressives and Leftists
seized on the online manifesto published on a far-Right Web site 27 minutes
before the attack, which police are “reasonably confident” was written by the
alleged shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Wood Crusius. Not that we were allowed
actually to read the manifesto ourselves: with a prissy self-censorship that forbade
mention of Crusius’s name on the ground that it would only give him what he
presumably wanted — publicity for himself and his ideas — the mainstream media
have refused to link to Crusius’s manifesto and even challenged his right to
call it that, on the ground that almost no one had heard of him when he
published it online. (But then almost no one had heard of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels when they published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, either.)
The Wikipedia page on the El Paso shooting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_El_Paso_shooting)
discusses the manifesto and offers brief quotes from it which certainly make it
sound like the work of a writer either convinced by President Trump’s slashing
attacks on immigrants and U.S. people of color to target Hispanics or having
similar convictions that, as the manifesto writer him/herself claims, “predate
Trump.” Crusius is reported to have driven all the way across the east-west
expanse of Texas from his home in Allen at the east end of the state to El Paso
in its southwest to target a town on the U.S.-Mexico border, and he reportedly
admitted to police when they arrested him that he was the shooter and he was
specifically targeting “Mexicans.” Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about the
manifesto:
The manifesto
promotes the white
nationalist and far-right conspiracy
theory of The Great
Replacement [the idea
that, by having more children than whites Jews and people of color are seeking
to “replace” whites as the dominant voices in the political system]. The New York Times
characterized the manifesto as racially extremist, noting the passage:
“Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved
Texas, changing policy to better suit their needs.” It states that Hispanics
and their intermarriage with
whites would cause the loss of purity of race. It criticizes strict gun control laws in Europe, arguing these would make them
unable to “repel” immigrants.
It criticizes
both the Democratic
Party and Republican
Party, saying that their politicians are either complacent or
involved in the “takeover of the United States government by unchecked
corporations.” However, the manifesto states that “at least with
Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly
reduced.” It warns that “heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a
Democrat stronghold.” It also states that the Democratic Party’s appeal to
an increasing number of Hispanics in the country would ultimately ensure
Democratic Party dominance in the United States, a theory that has been
promoted on right-wing radio shows. According to the document, the attack
was meant to provide an “incentive” for Hispanics to “return to their home
countries”, thus dissolving “the Hispanic voting bloc” in the United States.
Much of the racism in general and attacks on Hispanics in
particular sounds like Trump, particularly the President’s repeated references
in his speeches and tweets to the influx of Latino immigrants into the U.S. as
an “invasion” and his demands for severe restrictions on the number of legal
immigrants to the U.S. and a switch to a so-called “merit-based” immigration
system that would benefit whites and Asians and disadvantage Blacks and
Latinos. But on least one key point — the human race’s relationship to the
environment — the manifesto’s author takes a position almost diametrically
opposed to Trump’s.
Not only is the manifesto called The Inconvenient Truth — a ripoff of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice-president Al Gore’s book and documentary film
warning of the threat human-caused climate change (which Trump has famously denied
is happening at all) poses to human survival — but it contains some very
strongly worded environmentalist passages, which were referenced in this
passage from an earlier version of the Wikipedia page on the El Paso shootings
that doesn’t appear on the current one:
The manifesto
also promotes environmentalism,
attacking corporatism and imperialism. It states
that “our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. …
Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly
overharvesting resources.” It cites The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
as a “brilliant” portrayal of this.
The document
attacks corporations not only in the context of the environment, but in
general, including a claim that they like immigration. The reason the
government is unwilling to fix the various problems outlines is that they’re
owned by the corporations, the document states. It claims that they should be
forced to see that Americans will not tolerate their excesses. It also attacks
imperialistic wars. It does laud automation, though, as a means of replacing
immigrant jobs.
Assuming that the manifesto is the work of the El Paso
shooter and it honestly portrays his motives, he was inspired not only by
Right-wing causes like racism and white supremacism but also by Left-wing
causes like environmentalism and anti-corporatism. Indeed, Left-wing
environmentalist writer Natasha Lennard was moved enough by the
environmentalist passages in the manifesto that she wrote her own response on
the Web site The Intercept (https://theintercept.com/2019/08/05/el-paso-shooting-eco-fascism-migration/), noting that the man who shot up a mosque in Christchurch,
New Zealand — whom the manifesto cited as an inspiration — called himself an
“eco-fascist” and wrote in his own manifesto that “there is no nationalism
without environmentalism.” Lennard continued:
Against the
perilous climate change denialism typical of U.S. conservatives, environmental
decimation is broadly seen as a liberal and left concern. But eco-fascism has
seen a notable re-emergence among far-right groups and festering corners online
in the U.S. and Europe. While campaigning for the European elections, Marine Le
Pen of France’s far-right National Rally party promised to
make the “first ecological civilization” of a “Europe of nations,” claiming
that “nomadic” people with “no homeland” do not care about the environment.
Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer wrote in a 2017
manifesto, “We have the potential to become nature’s steward or its
destroyer.”
And if the El Paso shooter’s stated motives were a mix of
Right and Left causes, the shooter in Dayton, Connor Betts — who didn’t leave
behind a manifesto and died in the massacre — left behind social-media posts
that suggested his motives were Leftist politics. He retweeted someone else’s nasty post about
former vice-president and current Democratic Presidential front-runner Joseph
Biden, saying, “Millennials have a message for the Joe Biden generation:
hurry up and die.” Betts also retweeted messages supporting Biden’s two most
Left-wing rivals for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, Senators
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (It apparently didn’t occur to him that
Sanders, Warren, Biden and Trump are all part of the same generation.)
Though the
Dayton shooter’s Left-leaning retweets were reported August 8 by CNN (https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/05/us/connor-betts-dayton-shooting-profile/index.html),
that hasn’t stopped Right-wing media outlets from attacking the so-called
“liberal media” from covering them up in an attempt to create a master
narrative that the current mass shootings are all motivated by white supremacy
and inspired by Trump.
There’s
certainly evidence to argue that Trump’s election has motivated
white-supremacist political activism, including violence. While
white-supremacist hate crimes usually go up when a Democrat is President and down
when a Republican is President, they’ve risen under Trump. But it’s clear the
mass murderers in El Paso and Dayton, if they had political motivations at all,
were inspired by a rag-bag of causes that don’t fit neatly into the usual
“Rlght” and “Left” categories.
Go
Into People’s Homes and Take Away Their Guns!
And, as I argued
after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, it really doesn’t matter what the motivations for each individual shooting
are. Even when it’s obvious what a shooter’s motives are — as it was in
Pittsburgh, where the killer showed his colors by targeting a synagogue with a
largely elderly congregation, including Holocaust survivors — it’s less
important to determine the individual shooter’s reasons for acting than to
address the real problem: there are too many guns in the U.S.
Not only are
there too many guns in the U.S., there is also a history of this country’s
politics and culture endorsing the idea that the way to solve political and
social problems is to kill people. While it’s almost never possible to say a
specific shooter was motivated by a specific movie, TV show or video game,
American culture in general promotes the idea that violence is the way issues
get resolved. The El Paso and Dayton shootings took place on a weekend in which
one of the most popular movies in American theatres was Quentin Tarantino’s Once
Upon a Time … in Hollywood, an historical
fantasy in which [spoiler alert!]
two over-the-hill movie cowboys slaughter Charles Manson and his gang of
crazies before they have a chance to murder Sharon Tate and her friends.
America has sold
the world the idea that violence is the ultimate solution to any social evil.
We’ve not only created the mass shooting incident but we’ve exported it, like
many of our most violent movies, TV shows and video games, to the rest of the
world — including countries like Norway and New Zealand whose citizens never
thought that someday they’d have to deal with this kind of shit.
America puts its
governmental money where its cultural mouth is by spending more on its military
than the next 25 countries in the world combined, and by maintaining a network of military bases throughout the world,
always protected by the doctrine of “extraterritoriality.” That means that if a
U.S. servicemember commits a crime while stationed in a foreign country, that
country has no jurisdiction and therefore no right to punish the U.S.
servicemember for that crime.
We have a lot to
do if we want to put an end to the scourge of mass shootings America’s lax
policy towards firearms and cultural glorification of violence has loosed on
our country — and, increasingly, on the entire world. First, there needs to be
an outright, permanent, total ban on AR-15’s, AK-47’s and other weapons of mass
slaughter. If that means going into people’s homes and forcibly taking their
guns away, so be it.
These weapons
have only one purpose — the killing of large numbers of humans in a short
period of time — and there is no earthly reason any private citizen should be
allowed to own one. We banned private ownership of machine guns in the 1920’s;
we can ban assault weapons now if we can summon the political courage to do so
and the determination to outvote the NRA and their zombie minions.
There also needs
to be a sweeping change in America’s culture industry. Many of the people who
run or work in it claim to be “liberals,” but they’re putting out movie after
movie, TV show after TV show, and video game after video game, that sells the
world the message that the way you solve social problems is with guns and
bullets. It’s time for our culture-makers to start telling stories that exalt
peace and diplomacy, not war and violence.
America is a
nation that began with a hard heart. For all our noble, shimmering ideals of
liberty and equality, we built our country on a genocidal war against its
Native population and on the forced labor of Africans kidnapped and owned as
slaves. Indeed, activist and professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argued in a Monthly
Review article and her 2018 book Loaded:
A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
that the purposes of those “well-regulated militias” referenced in the Second
Amendment was to resist any attempts by Native Americans to reconquer their
land, and to recapture fugitive slaves and return them to their bondmasters.
The history of
our country is one torn between our nobly expressed ideals of freedom and
justice for all and the dirty, disgusting ways we’ve oppressed and exploited
people. Our ongoing national affair with guns is an example of our oppressive
side, a souvenir of the dirty work we felt we “had” to do to secure this
country for a white majority.
Now that
demographics — particularly the rising percentages of Americans who are people
of color, either via immigration or differences in birth rates — are jeopardizing
white Americans’ status as the majority population, we’re seeing Americans
react in various toxic ways. The less violent among them acted by electing
Donald Trump on a quite explicitly stated platform to “Make America Great
Again” by making America majority-white again.
While not all
the mass shooters recently active in the U.S. have expressed a white
supremacist ideology — or, indeed, any particular ideology at all — the ease
with which they can get high-powered firearms with which to commit their
massacres is a legacy of white America’s historical determination to retain its
dominance. Just as you can’t treat a disease successfully if you only treat its
symptoms and don’t address its underlying cause, so you can’t treat the social
disease of mass shootings without addressing the pathology of America’s
relationship with firearms and its generations of glorification of their use.
