It is hard to fathom the inability of the United States of America to end gun death massacres via controlling the access to these weapons of mass destruction. To an outsider looking in it seems a no brainer to ban these high tech automatic guns from people who don’t need them. This is the crux of the situation. You have ordinary citizens playing with guns for recreational purposes and a society valuing this over the lives of children and other innocent victims of gun deaths in America. There have been more than 300 mass shootings in 2022 and this number continues to rise. This is a staggering figure in a supposedly civilised country.
There is no real need for people to have these weapons in a nation with multiple police forces and a national guard. Lots of guns and armed citizens does not make a place safer, quite the reverse, it makes life more dangerous for everyone.
Armed Rioters at The Capital Causing Havoc & Deaths
The January 6th riots at the Capital illustrated this point, with armed protesters wearing body armour causing havoc and costing the lives of police defending the house of government. Corporations making guns and ammunition have put their profits before the lives of vulnerable Americans. The dysfunctional democratic system in the US has been gamed by big business and their lobbyists to the detriment of the people. Elected politicians have been bought via campaign donations to vote against changes to gun laws despite the overwhelming evidence of school massacres, shopping centre massacres, and night club shootings. The fact that these have become almost daily occurrences has deadened the outrage to some degree. The public and the media are despairing of their governments’ inability to do something about these tragedies.
American Gun Death Massacres & Thou Shall Not Kill
America is fast losing any moral high ground with which to lead the world, if it ever actually possessed it in the first place. Christianity in the US is associated with corrupt and morally repugnant individuals like Donald Trump.
If there ever was such a historical figure known as Jesus Christ, he sure would not want to be associated with what passes for the religion in his name in the USA. The hate speech and aggressive posturing coming from the pulpit is both astonishing and loathsome.
Of course, there are probably many quieter Christians who do not support Trump but we do not ever hear from them to know that definitively. I wonder if these high profile Pastors have actually read the New Testament and the message of love it contains. I do not hear these ministers of religion calling for bans on automatic weapons. Thou Shall Not Kill.
Education is always the answer. However, vested interests running higher education whether it be private enterprise or the church can muddy the waters and make it harder for more people to get the education they deserve.
Quality of education is important and that educators are not impeded by dumb dogma or bean counters is essential to good outcomes in this space. One side of the political spectrum is committed to maintaining the fog of ignorance and disinformation to keep getting their candidates elected. Attacking elites is a favourite strategy for those wanting to piss in the pockets of those without university degrees. Trump likes to gather all those with a grievance or chip on their shoulder re-the hand life has dealt these folks. In Australia, we have had the conservative governments under Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison making humanities’ degrees twice as expensive as technical degrees. People who study the humanities learn about things like human rights and history, thus, they are less likely to vote for the LNP. Making higher education unaffordable for many prolongs inequality and the remnants of the class system in our societies. What has this to do with the inability of the United States of America to end gun death massacres?
It is only during the college years that many individuals come to understand things like human rights. Tolerance for other people’s views and the ability to see the perspective of others commonly occurs at this age and in an environment of learning about these things. If you do not study these questions via philosophy or human rights units at university most people will never take the time to delve deeply into them. Thus, those who have not are prone to the sensationalist view of shock jocks on Fox or the radio. Without education many of us are not well versed in the real issues facing minority groups like LGBTQI+, black people everywhere, ethnic minorities, the disabled, and our most consistently disadvantaged group women.
The ability to consider the experience of others and NOT judge them accordingly to our own standards and perspective is what comes with real higher education. You cannot walk in the shoes of a black person, transexual, or disabled individual and so you cannot judge them by your experience. You do not have that depth of experience.
Thus, saying I am not a racist, after making a derogatory comment about their race or social group, does not measure up. You do not have the sensitivity to the issue because you have not been slurred and sledged on this basis all your life. You are most probably a member of the dominant social cohort – white, male, WASP etc. Your wanting to maintain your right to play with guns, your recreational pursuit of shooting innocent creatures with automatic weapons, in the face of repeated mass shootings of children and other victims – conveys your inability to really see another’s perspective. A parent who has had their child’s life savagely murdered by a gun toting individual – but you value your own right to play with guns over their tragedy.
All these anti-woke commentators have no idea what they are talking about. Largely it is a beat-up by the conservative forces to distract voters from the fact that they are being ripped off left, right, and centre by the very politicians who claim to be representing them. The Murdoch press loves to play this game via Fox and all their right wing newspapers chock full of opinion pieces and no real investigative journalism.
The failure of the US during the recent global pandemic is another example of this. The crazy libertarian stance of GOP governments to refuse measures like mask wearing and vaccines whilst hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying from Covid was gob smackingly dumb in the eyes of the rest of the world. There are plenty of Americans who fought against dumb stuff like this. Thankfully Joe Biden led the Democrats to defeat Trump in 2020. The recent Midterms showed this resolve by more Americans continues, even in the face of corporate profiteering forcing up inflation and the cost of living. The American political system seems incapable of tackling the hard questions like gun deaths and ingrained corruption within its democratic set-up. The polarizing split between red and blue America is a worry for the world. The extremist right wing groups and candidates backed by Trump makes all of us concerned about the future of this powerful nation. Sociologists tell us that places with very large populations in the hundreds of millions are susceptible to phenomena like conspiracy theories. There is a shared feeling of powerlessness amongst many which leads them to believing in made-up stories about things. UFOs, Qanon, demonising individuals and groups, and social media helps fan the flames more rapidly than in previous eras. Human beings love stories over facts. The survival of religion despite science’s factual pre-eminence is a perfect example of this. American screen entertainment is full of gun wielding characters in every genre. It is as if the gun is America’s talisman no matter the situation. Supernatural forces are brought down by the gun in the movies. The gun is the American answer for everything. Bullets killing infants in pre-school will not faze them. Their political leaders are a joke in the eyes of the rest of the world in that they cannot even protect their own vulnerable citizens from mass shootings with automatic weapons.