Sandy Hook. Columbine. Aurora. Tucson.
Blacksburg. Fort Hood. The names of these places ring out in popular
memory as the sites of seemingly random, heinous atrocities that seem
to occur with increasing frequency these days. Gun-related violence
and death is a hot-button issue at the moment, and for good reason,
as the U.S. leads the advanced capitalist world in a trait that is
singular in its stupidity: allowing “the market” to work its
magic by disseminating, unchecked, huge numbers of guns to an
extremely unequal, class-riven and deeply racist society that also
worships violence, murder, and mayhem in its popular culture. In this
context advocating gun control is the only sane thing to do. However,
it would be a mistake to say that the U.S. just has a “gun
problem,” because the U.S. has a murderous, rampaging killing-spree
problem.
Let me be clear. Every day dozens of
people are killed in this country, mostly minority youth and mostly
in the poorest and most economically devastated neighborhoods of the
major cities. This chronic social crisis only appears in the
establishment press as statistics, or else as an ongoing, existential
situation that can only be managed but not really addressed. Its root
causes and conditions are clear and have
been
extensively
documented.
But this ongoing disaster is not the topic of this post, which is
another horrendous phenomenon in which the U.S. also leads liberal
societies: the individual, suicidal, heavily-armed murder frenzy that
seems to be happening about once a month now, on average.
