#guns

posuwaegeh@diasp.org

US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority

By Rebecca Solnit (Reprinted from Facebook)

"Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power."

Mon 30 May 2022 09.03 EDT

The dots are easy to connect, because they’re so close together, and because they’re the entry and exit wounds inflicted on US society by the subculture whose sacrament is the gun. Texas, while tightening restrictions on abortion, has steadily loosened them on guns. These weapons are symbols of a peculiar version of masculinity made up of unlimited freedom, power, domination, of a soldier identity in which every gunslinger is the commander and anyone is a potential target, in which fear drives belligerence, and the gun owner’s rights extend so far no one has the right to be safe from him. Right now it’s part of a white-supremacist war cult.

Anyplace its weapons are wielded is a war zone, and so this can be racked up as another way the United States is in the grip of a war that hardly deserves to be called civil. The rest of us are supposed to accommodate more and more high-powered weapons of war never intended for civilian use but used over and over against civilians in mass shootings across the country, including earlier this week when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, were murdered by someone whose 18th birthday made him eligible to buy the semiautomatic and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he used

At the time the second amendment was added to the constitution, reload time for the guns was about a minute and all of them were single-shot weapons. By contrast, the Las Vegas killer in 2017 sprayed more than a thousand bullets out his hotel window to kill 60 people in a 10-minute period. The teenager in Buffalo who killed 10 Black shoppers and an armed security guard was not a well-regulated militia, and neither was the anti-semite who killed 11 in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, or the homophobe who killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, or the anti-immigration butcher in El Paso who killed 23 and wounded 23 or the child-killer who took 26 lives in Newtown, Connecticut, 20 of them six and seven-year-old children.

To accommodate the cult of guns and the series of massacres, teachers and children practice school drills that remind them over and over that they could be murdered. To accommodate them, schools spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security, building reinforcements, trainings and drills, and the federal government spends more millions for campus officers. To accommodate them, municipalities across the country spend a fortune on police and equipment, in a sort of arms race that has also justified militarizing the police. To little avail, and in Uvalde the heavily armed and armored police seem to have essentially protected the shooter, by doing crowd control of parents as their children died, rather than rushing in as they had trained and rehearsed and been paid and equipped to do. All this is a sort of tax on the rest of us, in money and wellbeing, so that the gunslingers can sling their guns.

One of the staggeringly disturbing things about the American right wing is that it is a cult manipulated by corporations and vested interests profiting mightily off its obsessions. In no respect is this more true than of guns. Less than two decades ago, the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers decided to shift from promoting the culture and equipment of hunting and rural life to hawking high-powered weapons of war and the armor and outfits that go with it, turning conservative white men into amateur commandos cosplaying war wherever they liked and the US into a war zone. Fear and hatred increase the profits, and so both crops are cultivated avidly, by the gun industry, the rightwing news organizations, the various pundits and demagogues and militia leaders and neo-Nazis.

As former gun executive turned critic Ryan Busse wrote in the Guardian, “As the increasing vitriol of the National Rifle Association (NRA) proved politically effective, some in the gun business realized this messaging could be adopted by the firearms industry to sell more guns. All that was required for success was a dedication to frighteningly dangerous rhetoric and increasingly powerful weaponry.” Republican politicians gobbled up the industry donations and passed laws making gun sales boom, profits skyrocket, and guns start to show up in new ways. The rage that led to the guns was whetted with racism, anti-immigration hatred, misogyny, war imagery, neo-Confederate fantasies, and cartoonishly vile versions of masculinity, and the guns made it all dangerous. Minority rule perpetrates it, because just as the majority of Americans want abortion rights to stand, so do they want limits on access to guns.

Gun culture reminds me of rape culture, specifically the conventions that hold the victims rather than the perpetrators responsible for limiting the violence. For women this means being told to radically rearrange our lives to avoid sexual assault rather than to expect that society will protect our rights and freedoms. We are told to limit where we go and when, to be careful about solitude, crowds, bars, drinks, drugs, naps, parties, public spaces, public transit, strangers, cities, wilderness, to see our clothing and even our appearance as potential provocation, a sort of asking for it. To wither away our freedom and confidence to accommodate a culture of violence. In the same way, we are now supposed to adapt to a culture of guns.

The idea of unlimited rights is meant to apply to a limited number of us. Open-carry laws, it’s often noted, wouldn’t allow Black people to wander through the supermarket with huge guns slung over them and the confidence they could impose on others this way; Philando Castile was shot point-blank just for telling a policeman he had a gun in the car in 2016; 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot for holding a toy rifle in Cleveland in 2014. And the spate of new abortion laws being passed and the likely overrule of Roe v Wade means that those who can get pregnant are being denied even jurisdiction over their own bodies while gun owners assert their rights over the bodies of others.

In Oklahoma, anyone who gets pregnant has fewer rights than a cluster of a few cells visible only under a microscope. Any pregnant woman may face prosecution as a murderer if she doesn’t bring a baby to term. They also face grotesque intrusiveness – criminal investigation for a miscarriage, having to try to prove to an unsympathetic legal system that a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, the sense that their pregnancy is supervised and they are potential suspects. There’s a gruesome symmetry to this expansion of patriarchal violence and withering away of reproductive rights.

Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, Black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years. This is the same party that sought to overturn an election through violence whipped up from on high, by the cult leaders, including the former president and various pundits and demagogues. “Trial by combat,” wheezed Rudy Giuliani as he incited the crowd to rampage through Congress. If guns are icons it’s because violence is a sacrament defended as a right and an identity.

Semiautomatic weapons are instruments of death perpetrated by a death cult. And the carnage will continue until the majority can overrule the minority in power that profits from and perpetrates it.

#guns #republicans #violence #politics #Texas #Oklahoma #Solnit #NRA #rightwing #Uvalde #unlimitedrights #toxicmasculinity #rapeculture #trauma

anubis2814@friendica.myportal.social

#NRA : Hitler took away people's #guns !
Reality: Hitler radically loosened the gun restrictions for white people but banned minorites from having them, much like the south under slavery #NRA

psych@diasp.org

OK.... "What's wrong with this picture?"
Just another day.... No gun epidemic or societal meltdown happening here folks, nothing to see, move along...

Individual Open Carrying AR-15 Gets Robbed at Gunpoint in St. Louis

Another pandemic turned endemic, sadly. So if everybody in America carries assault weapons, it's all good, eh?

It's not a pretty picture of events and responses, in the past 20+ years. Children bear the brunt of it, for lifetimes & generations.

My reference (begun 9/11, through Columbine and several other school massacres): Children and Violence

#guns #epidemic #violence #crime #assaultweapons #AR15 #society #sociology #psychology

dredmorbius@diaspora.glasswings.com

May You Suffer for Your Crimes

We all know who did this.

Bob promised good faith arguments. He promised never to become “a spasm of id.”

Then they massacred the children. Again.

Bob channels his anger. There's plenty to go 'round. And plenty needed.

https://bullypulpit.substack.com/p/may-you-suffer-for-your-crimes

#BullyPulpit #BobGarfield #UvaldeTX #BabyKillers #Guns #USNews #NRA #Podcast

psych@diasp.org

And now it's on to "What are we going to do about it?" #Congress, #WeThePeople, #voters?

How to end the mass violence and super-spreading of unforced deaths and violence, from #TrumpVirus and #GQP and #Fox hater and lie machine. Isn't it time to at least TRY, while we still have a (fragile) democracy and children not yet mowed down by #guns?

Outside today's NRA unlimited-guns-for-all conference...

cranston@diasp.de

#guns

"GUNS AND CONTROL

Turkey established gun control in 1911. Soon after, 1.5 million Armenians unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

The Soviet Union established gun control in 1929. Soon after, about 20 million dissidents unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

China established gun control in 1935. Soon after, 20 million political dissidents unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

Germany established gun control in 1938. Soon after, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

Cambodia established gun control in 1956. Soon after, one million people unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

Guatemala established gun control in 1964. Soon after, 100,000 Mayan Indians unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

Uganda established gun control in 1970. Soon after, 300,000 Christians unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

Austrellia established gun control in 1996. Right now, Australian citizens are being brutalized and terrorized by their tyrannical government.

Venezuela established Desarma La Violencia to disarm citizens in 2010. Once one of the richest countries in Latin America, Venezuela is currently free falling into violent unrest and extreme poverty.

New Zealand expanded gun control in 2019. Right now, New Zealand citizens are being brutalized and terrorized by their tyrannical government.

Canada expanded gun control in 2020. Right now, Canadian citizens are being brutalized and terrorized by their tyrannical government. " --anon

psych@diasp.org

Jimmy Kimmel on Elementary School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas

"Not a time for moments of silence" (by itself, again and again) - Jimmy Kimmel tonight, tears in his eyes

So tonight I saw this and compelled to come out of web retirement and update my resource on Children and Violence in order to share this video, mostly. Because nothing much has changed since Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, one after another. (Yes, "woke", there are many mindful Americans who are equally baffled by the religion of guns before human life, and why we've just let the thoughts & prayers be the only result time after time.

So I updated that page, which - let me check if it's more than zero... yes, 101 people (or bots) visited today, not bad for a 21-year old page, unpublicized or promoted. I put it up in the immediate days following the attack, while working with children who witnessed it, teachers, and counselors. With PTSD like everyone else. Auto-pilot for a long while, right brain hazy and horrified and driven to do SOMETHING. In the next days I saw children's drawings and heard how they brought cookies to the firemen at the pit barricades.

Everyone can do something. besides sending thoughts and prayers. (Not that these are bad. But things much change! No?)

--

[wonder if anyone reads past the new normal 7secs attention span? If so, congratulations, thanks, and this is 7th-inning stretch]

Fast forward, Columbine. Got me back to pursuing reasons and solutions for violence. (Spoiler: It's exponentially worse now)
But I worked with APA (psychology) and MTV (media/teen audience) giving talks on "Warning Signs" of suicide/depression etc..

A few years of calm between mass shootings. Fast forward again, it's now a near-weekly event. Four years of #TrumpVirus added to existing PTSD amplified by COVID & a division and tribalism plus a big cult of conspiracy & alternative facts. Thank you #Fox/ #GQP)

Here we are. A depleted and tribal Congress ministering to NRA and #TrumpVirus, deadlocked and gone for va-cay ...
Anything at all - pressure on OUR employees, supposedly working for WE the PEOPLE - "representatives". (scary thought too)

#StaySafe #Violence #guns #massacres #psychology #Children #PTSD #Fenichel #USCongress #culture

psych@diasp.org

Hm
 the biggest hypocrisy/reversal in NRA history! Apparently this one time it’s OK to ban guns

What? No unrestricted open carry? No AK-47’s? What kind of #NRA or #TrumpVirus convention is this?

Guns are banned during Trump’s upcoming speech at the NRA conference

So: it IS possible to rationally restrict weaponry- at least for the benefit of a rabid seditionist who preaches guns 24/7 for everyone,
everywhere.

#GQP way: more guns in schools, wild misinterpretation of 2nd Amendment, and guns forbidden at NRA cult rallies if Dark Lord StableGenius is around preaching hate & violence.

#guns #gunlove #violence #NRA #GQP #hypocrisy #MakeAmericaSaneAgain #childrenandviolence
[ Reference on Children and Violence, circa the days of 9/11 and into the schools: http://www.fenichel.com/violence ]