The United States of Anarchy

March 25, 2021

This March was a relief as vaccinations were administered by the millions and normalcy reappeared. People dined once again on patios, workers went to jobs, kids attended school, daffodils popped out of the soil, and, have to say it, America’s perennial mass murders resumed. In a six-day period, as if making up for time lost during the COVID19 lock-downs, two gun rampages happened which killed eight in Atlanta on March 16 and ten more in Boulder on March 22.

Daily Banter, Greenberg

This, unfortunately, is America where it’s easier to buy a machine gun or shoulder-harness missile launcher than to vote or buy a beer, thanks to lobbying and litigation by the National Rifle Association and its captive Republicans. Murderous outbreaks recur, triggering the same predictable ritual: earnest news coverage, upsetting press conferences where the names of the dead are announced, punditry on why and what to do, and then nothing.

The pattern of pathology is also predictable. The perpetrator is male, a loner who neighbors and others remember very little about, who had brushes with the law and violent tendencies, and was able to buy a powerful gun to enhance his masculinity and get even. Some, like the Sandy Hook or Las Vegas killers, were collectors and had amassed arsenals of arms.

After the deed, media coverage then broadcasts hand-wringing, vigils, eye-witness reports, funerals, and grieving families. But, in the end, the mostly white guys, who often own guns and hold public office, won’t change laws in order to prevent more of these catastrophes because, to state the obvious, America doesn’t just have a gun problem. It has a guy problem. And more mayhem is en route. During the lock-down, gun and ammunition sales jumped by 20 percent, and thanks to Republicans, the gun culture moved up a notch. For the first time, two gun-rights poster girls were elected to Congress, not coincidentally from the very two regions where the March mass murders took place.

This fall, in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District beside Boulder, a Republican gun-crazed activist named Lauren Boebert was federally elected. The Boulder area has been afflicted with multiple shootings and yet, 10 days before the grocery store carnage, a local judge knocked down a ban against assault weapons which had been proposed in 2018 to stop attacks. The Judge ruled that under a state law passed in 2003, cities and counties were barred from adopting restrictions on firearms that are otherwise legal under state and federal law. He rejected the city’s arguments that the state constitution gave it the power to adopt the bans as a matter of local concern and that the ban was necessary because the state did not regulate such weapons.

Scientific American

Two hours after the mass murders in Boulder, Boebert Tweeted to her followers “Hell No” to gun control. And it is little wonder. She owns Shooters Grill, a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, where her staff and customers openly carry firearms. She is connected to militia groups such as the Three Percenters, anti-government wack-a-doodles with roots in the Deep South, who gleefully participated in the January 6 Washington insurrection at the Capitol Building. Then there’s the gal from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

Taylor-Green and her automatic rifle threaten politicians of color

She combines a love for automatic weaponry with rabid racism and belief in QAnon’s conspiracy theories. This group believes that a secret cabal of Satanist, pedophile cannibals are running a global sex-trafficking ring and plotted against Donald Trump. Naturally -- and because she’s nuts -- the House has kicked her off all committees and some Representatives (including those threatened in her poster) are trying to expel her altogether. Meanwhile, both these women occupy public office and use their perches to promote and legitimize gunplay to America’s embedded gun culture.

This is why, after every bloodbath, solutions that exist and have been proven successful elsewhere are ignored. No-brainer cures include: requiring background checks on buyers even in private sales; imposing legal liability on gun makers and sellers; gun controls and permits; and bans on weapons of war. But, in the US of Anarchy, every remedy is attacked by the usual suspects, and initiatives are buried along with victims.

The gun guys like to blame mental illness for these crimes, but the truth is that guns are as American as apple pie. The country’s failure to provide universal public health care may indeed be a factor and there are millions of undiagnosed, un-medicated people are out there. But this is a cultural complication. Some 97 percent of mass shooters are male, and the overwhelming majority are white. They share beliefs in misogyny, white supremacy, and wife-beating. Such characteristics likely exist among mass killers in other countries, but here’s the killer statistic: Americans are dramatically more likely to die from gunfire than are citizens in high-income countries with similar rates of mental health problems.

OECD

White guys with guns, who are underachievers, is an American cultural fixture that’s become a political movement. A study in 2017 at Baylor University surveyed 577 gun owners about how their guns make them feel and created a “gun empowerment scale” to measure their relative attachments to their weapons. Those most attached were white and male, who had suffered an economic setback.

“There’s something cultural happening,” wrote the editor. “We have white men who have expectations about what it means to be a white man in America today that are not being met. We find the gun has become an interesting symbol through which they’re trying to regain a nostalgic sense of masculinity.”

And these men, attached to their “pieces”, believe in narratives that the government or minorities or affirmative action is out to get them, their guns, and their money. They romanticize themselves as “patriots” who must “take up arms” against the government or whatever. In other words, the gun obsession is the maladjusted, and murderous, coping skill of America’s self-described male losers.

Other countries, with similar male sub-cultures, have addressed the issue. In 1996, a 28-year-old Australian man went on a spree with a semiautomatic rifle and killed 35 and wounded 23 more, the worst in the country’s history. The government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a mandatory buyback program, established a registry of all guns, and required permits. There had been 13 gun massacres in the 18 years prior, and none since. Besides that, firearm homicides have fallen by 42 percent and firearm suicides by 57 percent.

In America, however, the carnage continues. The 2018 Centers for Disease Control statistics show that were 39,707 firearms deaths compared to the 37,595 involving motor vehicle mishaps. States try and address the issue, but there is a patchwork of laws and regulations and still, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, no national gun control measures.

Statistica

Post-massacre debates default into shouting matches about America’s constitutional protections for the “right to bear arms”. But this is bunk and the result of decades of litigation, social violence, and a misguided view of freedom that has replaced the rule of law with whoever is holding a gun. The simple truth is, in civilized countries, that freedom is the right to swing your arm, but not hit anyone else with it … and certainly not with an AR-15 bullet traveling at 3,251 feet per second.