We have today remembered one of America’s most horrific and revealing anniversaries, eleven years after the Sandy Hook massacre forever changed our nation’s ideas about guns from talismans of security and power to signs of our helplessness before the rapacity and amoral terror of our subjugation and commodification by elites, for whom the occasional murdered child is an acceptable cost of doing business, and our worthlessness in the eyes of our political leadership which require a vast and unregulated market for guns as a strategic resource in imperial conquest and dominion and the readiness to fight global wars.

    Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to reduce all human interactions to a kill/no kill decision, and by our failure to prevent them from doing so have been authorized to bear death among us with powers of extrajudicial summary execution as a subversion of democracy.

    We have granted such permission now for over two centuries under the immunity of a misinterpreted Second Amendment which we must abolish along with police who are allowed to carry guns.

     Before all else in this question of the power of death and who the state authorizes to bear it, we must recognize the underlying causes and purposes of the right to bear arms in white supremacist terror and the repression of dissent, subversions of our principles of liberty, equality, and justice.

     True democracy and a free society of equals is not possible when some of us have to power and right to kill the rest of us without cause.

     As written by Robin Levinson-King for the BBC, in an article entitled Sandy Hook 10 years on: How many have died in school shootings?: “It has been a decade since a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, killing 20 children and six school staff.

     In a written statement declaring Wednesday, the anniversary, a day of remembrance, US President Joe Biden said the tragedy forced everyone to re-examine their “core values and whether this can be a country that protects the most innocent.”

     In the wake of the massacre, many demanded tighter gun restrictions.

     Yet the death toll from school shootings keeps climbing as debates over gun control continue ten years on.

     According to research compiled by the independent K-12 School Shooting Database research group, there have been 189 shootings at schools around the US since Sandy Hook that have resulted in at least one fatality.

     The shootings counted include everything from suicides and domestic violence.

     Seventeen were “active shooter situations” – defined as “when the shooter killed and/or wounded victims, either targeted or random, within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence”.

     While those events count for a small portion of total shooting incidents, they account for more than a third of all casualties.

    In total, 279 have died from being shot on a school property during, before or after school hours, including weekends.

     In November, a memorial for the victims of Sandy Hook was opened to the public, not far from the school grounds.

     Victims’ names were carved into a wall that circled a sycamore tree.

     Nelba Marquez-Greene’s six-year old daughter, Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, was among the victims.

     “Ten years. A lifetime and a blink,” she wrote on Twitter. “Ana Grace, we used to wait for you to come home. Now you wait for us. Hold on, little one. Hold on.”

     “We’re not in a place to have polite discourse in this country on that issue,” she said.

     In the aftermath of what was at the time the worst school shooting in US history, then-President Barack Obama vowed to push forward sweeping legislation to reduce gun violence by addressing everything from gun magazine sizes to mental health.

     But he left office without being able to pass his hoped-for laws.

     Ten years on, Mr Biden has renewed a promise to pass a ban on semi-automatic rifles.

     In June, he signed a landmark gun bill into law, but if fell short of reinstating the so-called assault-weapons ban that had been in effect before 2004.

     However, a debate over this and other gun control measures that have been proposed continues, with evidence being put forward on both sides over their effectiveness at stopping school shootings.

     Gun control advocates argue that tighter restrictions to access is key, while others argue that failures of the mental health system and better security on school campuses are more pressing concerns.

     Nicole Hockley, the co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, a charity, lost her son Dylan in the massacre.

     “All shootings reopen wounds,” she told the BBC earlier this year.

     Her other son, who survived, graduated from high school this year and will be able to vote. It is his generation, she said, who will enact change.”

      As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal, Letters from an American; “Today, survivors of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Club Q is an LGBTQ club in the city of about 500,000 people. The shooter opened fire there on the night of November 19-20, during a dance party. He used an AR-15 style rifle, murdering five people and wounding 19 more. Six others were hurt in the chaos.

     Pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that calls LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and abusers,” survivors of the mass shooting said that Republican rhetoric was “the direct cause” of the massacre. Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drew a wider lens: “The attack on Club Q and the LGBTQI community is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader trend of violence and intimidation across our country.”

     James Comer (R-KY), who will likely chair the committee in the upcoming Republican-controlled House, disagreed. Blaming Democratic policies that he claims are soft on crime, he said that “Republicans condemn violence in all forms,” and that the survivors have his “thoughts and prayers.”

     But Comer’s insistence that Republicans do not celebrate guns is not entirely honest. Just last year, four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Michigan that killed four students and wounded seven other people, Comer’s colleague Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on Twitter a Christmas photo of him, his wife, and five children holding assault weapons in front of a Christmas tree. The caption read: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) immediately posted her own family photo with her four sons all posing with firearms.

     In 2020, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.”

     Democrats do not do this. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 but, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, that was the last time a Democrat used a gun in an ad.

     The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan.

     Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.

     In the 1960s, leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. They emphasized individualism, the idea that a man should take care of his own family, defending it with weapons, if need be, and fighting off a dangerous government and those who wanted to use the government for “socialism” or “Marxism.”

     In 1972, the Republicans still embraced the idea that the government had a role to play in making the country safer for everyone, and their platform called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns.” But in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun safety. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms.

     In 1980 the National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan. This was the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate, and showed an abrupt change in what had, until 1977, been a sporting organization that emphasized gun safety and rejected the idea of working with manufacturers of guns and ammunition.

     In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.

     But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

     Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

     After a gunman trying to kill Reagan in 1981 paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases.

     The NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike the law down, and in 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.

     Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

     The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shootings as one in which four people are shot, not including the shooter: in 2021 alone, we had 692 of them.

     While gun ownership has actually declined since the 1970s, there are far more guns in fewer hands: a study in 2017 showed that about half of US guns are owned by about 3% of the population, and that was before Americans launched a new gun-buying spree after 2020. 

     Ten years ago today, a 20-year-old in Newtown, Connecticut, shot and killed 20 children between the ages of six and seven, and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the wake of those horrific murders, Congress tried to pass a bipartisan bill requiring background checks for gun purchases, but even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—supported background checks, and even though 55 senators voted for the measure, it died with a filibuster.

     Dave Cullen, who writes about school shootings, argued yesterday in a New York Times op-ed that there is reason to hope we will finally address our gun problem. The Sandy Hook Massacre galvanized Americans into pushing back to reclaim our safety, as Shannon Watts and congressional representative Gabrielle Giffords—herself a survivor of gun violence–—organized the gun safety movement. That movement, in turn, got a dramatic boost from the activism of the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which a 19-year-old gunman murdered 17 people and injured 17 others.

     This June, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to acknowledge that support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was “off the charts, overwhelming,” and 15 Republican senators bucked the NRA to vote for basic gun safety legislation.

     But, also in June, the Supreme Court handed down the sweeping New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision requiring those trying to place restrictions on gun ownership to prove similar restrictions were in place when the Framers wrote the Constitution. Already, a Texas judge has struck down a rule preventing domestic abusers from possessing firearms on the grounds that domestic violence was permissible in the 1700s.

     The decision is being appealed.”

     As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost, in an article entitled Obama Reflects On ‘Darkest Day Of My Presidency’: Nearly 10 Years After Sandy Hook

Former President Barack Obama spoke at an event marking the anniversary of the 2012 school shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead.; “Former President Barack Obama said he still considers the deadly school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in 2012 the “darkest day of my presidency” as the 10th anniversary of the shooting approaches.

     “I consider Dec. 14, 2012, the single darkest day of my presidency,” Obama said Tuesday night at the Sandy Hook Promise “10-Year Remembrance” benefit in New York City. “Like so many other people, I felt not just sorrow, but I felt angry, fury in a world that could allow such a thing.”

     Sandy Hook Promise, started by several families who lost loved ones in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting, is a nonprofit that aims to protect children from gun violence while teaching empathy in classrooms.

     During his speech at the benefit, Obama praised Sandy Hook Promise for preventing possible acts of gun violence.

     “You’ve made meaning where there was none,” Obama said. “Back when we were together in 2012, I said that Newtown would be remembered for the way that you looked out for each other, the way that you cared for one another and the way that you loved one another.”

    While gun violence continues to run rampant in the U.S., there have been glimmers of positive change in the last 10 years. Sandy Hook families won $73 million in a lawsuit settlement this year against Remington Arms, which made the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used by the gunman during the massacre. It was the first time a gun manufacturer had been held liable for a shooting.

     And the National Rifle Association (NRA), which saw its membership surge at the start of 2013 following the Sandy Hook shooting, has seen its leadership and political power crumble under the weight of mismanagement and greed over the last few years.

     Then there’s Alex Jones, the conspiracy host of “Infowars,” who used his platform to mock the parents of dead children for years, falsely claiming they were actors and that their loved ones never died. This year he was finally held accountable for the torrent of abuse he leveled on the Sandy Hook families when he was ordered to pay more than $1 billion for his dangerous lies.

     Earlier this year, 19 students and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, in a shooting sickeningly similar to that of Newtown. The following month, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan gun safety bill into law that enhances background checks, addresses mental health care, and places curbs on buying guns.

     Obama attempted a similar push for gun violence prevention in 2016 with a bill that would have enhanced background checks. He spoke through tears the day he implored Congress to act.

     “Somehow, we become numb to it, and we start thinking, ‘This is normal,’” Obama said.

     Instead, the former president was roundly mocked by conservatives for his emotional plea. The bill ultimately failed, thanks in part to pressure from the NRA and a handful of Democrats who voted against the bill to cater to gun-loving voters in their states.

     In his speech Tuesday, Obama said the work to curb gun violence isn’t done.

    “In 2022, there has not been a single week — not one — without a mass shooting somewhere in America,” he said. “We pretend that the best we can do for the families of Sandy Hook, Parkland and Virginia Tech and so many other communities is to tinker around the edges and then offer rote recitations of our thoughts and our prayers when violence explodes once again.”

      Obama admits he still gets angry when he hears about the latest senseless shooting.

     “Whether it is in a church or a synagogue, in a grocery store or on a college campus or in a home or on a city street … I still feel anger,” he said. “And I hope you do too.”

     As I wrote in my post of February 16 2022, Victory For the People Over Profiteers of Gun Violence and White Supremacist Terror; “ We celebrate a victory for the people over profiteers of gun violence and white supremacist terror in the case of the Sandy Hook families against Remington, manufacturer of the gun that was used to murder twenty children and six adults in a few minutes. Guns are weapons of terror and mass destruction, and should be legislated as such.

     As written by Sarah Jorgensen, Jason Hanna and Erica Hill at CNN; “Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah was killed in the shooting, said in the news release that their loss is “irreversible, and in that sense, this outcome is neither redemptive nor restorative.”

“One moment we had this dazzling, energetic 6-year-old little boy, and the next all we had left were echoes of the past, photographs of a lost boy who will never grow older, calendars marking a horrifying new anniversary, a lonely grave, and pieces of Noah’s life stored in a backpack and boxes.”

“What is lost remains lost. However, the resolution does provide a measure of accountability in an industry that has thus far operated with impunity. For this, we are grateful.”

      As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost; “Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son was killed in the shooting, said she hopes the settlement will push gun companies to operate differently.

     “My beautiful butterfly, Dylan, is gone because Remington prioritized its profit over my son’s safety,” Hockley said in a statement. “Marketing weapons of war directly to young people known to have a strong fascination with firearms is reckless and, as too many families know, deadly conduct. Using marketing to convey that a person is more powerful or more masculine by using a particular type or brand of firearm is deeply irresponsible. My hope is that by facing and finally being penalized for the impact of their work, gun companies, along with the insurance and banking industries that enable them, will be forced to make their business practices safer than they have ever been.”

     Hope is a fine and noble thing, final gift or curse of Pandora to humankind, a tenuous and frangible thing, ambiguous in meaning and its power to bring change, like love and faith, and like its confreres among our passions which are also Ideals perhaps not very bankable without action to make it real. The praxis of hope is struggle.

     Here I must digress, for I believe the future evolution of humankind and the history of the next millennium will be defined by the struggle between two forces; the renunciation of the use of social force and violence as democracy and peace and the universalization of force and violence as tyranny and terror, and what we do with our hope in the face of hopeless imposed conditions of struggle and unanswerable force will decide our fate.

     Camus interrogated this best and directly in The Myth of Sisyphus and constructed his Absurdism on his interpretation of the uses of hope in resistance to fascist tyranny, and nothing has superseded his insight. 

     Why is this relevant to the issue of gun violence? Because we face enormous systemic and structural forces in opposition to freeing ourselves from constant threat of death, and our choices here will shape our response.

      When teaching Camus’ essay and his novel The Stranger, I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, “the difference between us is, you have hope.”

      Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora’s Box both a gift and a curse.

     How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?

     As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut of 1982, moments before we expected to be burned alive by Israeli soldiers who had set fire to our house after we refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” It is a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty-nine years now.

     Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante’s Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”

     Always go through the Forbidden Door.

    As Lenin asked; “What is to be done?”

     Let us repeal the Second Amendment, disarm and demilitarize the police, end immunity from prosecution of gun manufacturers for the crimes which they enable and promote, disband the National Rifle Association as an organization of terror, break the link between arms manufacture as a business of empire and the carceral state which floods the market with cheap guns to shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest as a pretext for the imposition of a police state, and abandon the valorization and fetishization of violence as toxic masculinity, misogyny, and patriarchal terror. 

     This may be the work of centuries, but in a world wherein the national and imperial ambitions and whims of its nuclear powers, currently America, China, Russia, Britain, France, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and NATO nuclear weapons sharing partners Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, can exterminate our species and annihilate much of our planet, can we afford not to act now to begin disarmament?

      Today we have taken a first step as a nation toward freeing ourselves from the existential threat of gun violence and from patriarchal and white supremacist terror. This we justly celebrate, but let us also unite in solidarity of action to liberate ourselves and humankind from the use of social force.

      As written by Priya Satia, author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, in Time; “Those in favor of firearms control in the United States today often point in exasperated envy at laws in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom. Why can’t the United States behave like these civilized countries?, they ask.

     The reality is that these countries were able to pass their strict laws partly because American laws are so lax. At just 4.4% of the world’s population, Americans own roughly a third of all the firearms in the world. According to a 2007 survey, American civilians own about 275 million of the world’s 875 million firearms. For the world’s gun manufacturers, this fraction of the world’s population is their largest single market. As long as it stays open, they can count on business, and governments around the world can feel secure about the health of an industry they rely on for defense.

     Since firearms became central to warfare, governments have faced a structural and logistics problem: They need gun manufacturers but do not generate enough demand themselves to keep those manufacturers in good health by serving the military alone. Peace, in particular, is bad for gunmakers.”

     “The Glorious Revolution of 1689 established a new regime in Britain. It had to defend itself against rebels at home and abroad who wanted to restore the ousted king. To that end, the new government set about developing a new hub of firearms manufacturing in Birmingham, to ensure an alternate source for guns in case rebels captured London’s firearms manufacturing capacity.

     For the next century, Britain was almost always at war, and Birmingham’s gunmakers thrived: from an initial annual production of tens of thousands of arms, they could produce millions by 1815. The government also launched its own factory, at Enfield, to further diffuse the industry.

     To keep this industry healthy during interludes of peace—in an era in which firearms possession was largely an entitlement of the upper classes—the government helped it find other outlets. British gunmakers sold firearms all over the world: in West Africa, as part of the slave trade; in North America, to Native Americans and colonial settlers; in South Asia, as part of trade and conquest. Occasionally, British officials worried about arming their own enemies. But inevitably, the logic prevailed that not selling guns to potential enemies would merely send those enemies to a rival supplier, like the French, and the British would forfeit both profit and influence.

     The government also encouraged gunmakers to diversify into products that could be sold to British civilians: buttons, buckles, harpoons, swords, bells. Diversification became more necessary in the 19th century as the empire’s fear of armed colonial rebellion increased. The Birmingham Small Arms company (BSA), the largest privately owned rifle manufactory in Europe until the 1890s and the largest in the U.K. through World War I, also made bicycles, motorcycles and cars. The government’s machine-gun supplier, Vickers, made various civilian goods, too.

     This strategy freed the government from worrying overly about the health of its firearms industry. In 1934, it selected a Czech design for the new army light machine gun, over protests from BSA and Vickers. After World War II, the Ministry of Defense stopped maintaining an R&D team for small arms design. BSA ceased military rifle production in 1961 after a government decision to let them go. They turned out other metal goods and motorcycles until they were edged out of those businesses in the early 1970s.

     The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, meanwhile, did develop and supply the SA80, the standard postwar military firearm. In 1985, it and other government arms factories were made into a public corporation, Royal Ordnance, which, in 1987, was bought by British Aerospace, the then-reprivatized company in which Vickers had merged during the 1960 nationalization of the aircraft industry.

     That year, 1987, was also the year of the mass shooting known as the Hungerford massacre. Gun control in the U.K. got tighter as the gun industry shrank to vanishing point. The next year saw both the closure of the Enfield unit and amendments tightening existing firearms controls. After the Dunblane shooting in 1996, private possession of handguns was banned almost entirely; thousands of guns were surrendered. By that point there was essentially no firearms industry to put up a protest; U.K. military arms were mostly sourced abroad. In Australia, too, passage of tight gun control laws in 1996 was eased by the absence of a major Australian gun industry.

     The United States followed a different path.

     To be sure, American gunmakers also diversified to cope with whimsical government demand. Most famously, Remington, the country’s oldest rifle maker, turned out sewing machines and typewriters during the slump in firearm demand after the Civil War. But, for the most part, American manufacturers could rely on sales to civilians to cope with lulls in government demand.

     Between the world wars, the federal government and the American gun industry both opposed suggestions for controls on sales to civilians, out of fear that they would endanger an industry essential to national defense. During the Cold War, the U.S. became the new firearms depot of the world. When the Swedish firearms manufacturer Interdynamic AB could not find a civilian market for its TEC-9 submachine gun at home, its Miami subsidiary Intratec sold it to Americans, who made it a notorious instrument of mass shootings.

     If gun-control advocates focus on the NRA and politicians who take money from the group as the sole obstacles to sensible gun control laws in the U.S., they’ll be missing a larger structural reality: selling arms to American civilians has become crucial to an industry on which both the United States government and governments around the world depend. Indeed, it is the American public’s very division over gun control that keeps the industry healthy, given the saturation of the civilian market: without panic buying triggered by recurring fear of impending controls, companies like Remington and Smith & Wesson face dismal prospects. (Remington has now filed for bankruptcy, though its operations remain unaffected.)

     The more the rest of the world limits gun possession, the more American civilians keep the world’s firearms makers in business. The NRA and gun manufacturers benefit from promoting intense cultural and ideological commitment to their reading of the Second Amendment, but so does every government that needs firearms for its military and law enforcement services. Studies have shown that the presence of astronomical numbers of guns in the United States is a specific cause of the high rate of mass shootings, but the presence of those guns has become a matter of global security. This vision of global security has thus perversely come to depend on continual insecurity about mass shootings in the United States.”

      As I wrote in my post of June 12 2019, Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act; Those who manufacture, sell, or trade guns must be held responsible for the harm that they do, and we must support this important legislation which ends their immunity from being sued by the victims in whose suffering they are complicit. This industry of death must be pursued to its utter destruction.

     As Gabrielle Giffords said, “The gun lobby convinced politicians that an entire industry deserved to operate without fear of ever being held responsible in a courtroom. Today, we stand up and fight again to restore the fundamentally American principle that no industry, including the gun industry, is above the law.”

      Surely a least-restrictive policy of gun ownership would say, demonstrate that we can trust you with our lives, that you have earned the right to bear arms through a history of honorable conduct and self-discipline, that you are able to make kill/no kill decisions rationally and with a judgement free of racism, rage, jealousy, vengeance, the need to dominate and control and the desire to subjugate and inflict pain and terror, or other mental illness or impairment, and unclouded by drugs or alcohol, and you are free to openly carry a weapon except in areas otherwise restricted.

     Who could pass such a test? Who can be trusted to bear death among us, with de facto powers of summary execution?

     Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Possession of a gun proves intent to kill. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.

     Choose life.

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, by Priya Satia

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63911172

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/school-shooting-survivors-on-how-it-affects-them-today_l_628d4eece4b0b1d9844e3d1e

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/15/historic-funding-gun-violence-prevention-smaller-groups

                  Camus and Absurdism, a reading list

The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/

https://aeon.co/videos/albert-camus-built-a-philosophy-of-humanity-on-a-foundation-of-absurdity

https://www.themarginalian.org/tag/albert-camus/

Here are some of my previous essays of 2021 on gun violence:

December 3 2021 Who Bears Arms Bears Death: the Cases of the Oxford High School Mass Murders and the Police Murder of a Disabled Senior Citizen in a Wheelchair Shot Nine Times in the Back While Trying to Escape

     A police officer murders Richard Lee Richards, a disabled senior citizen in a wheelchair, shooting him in the back nine times.

     A disturbed fifteen years old steals a gun from his parents and commits mass murder and terror, killing four fellow students, 16-year-old Tate Myre, 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana, 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin and 17-year-old Justin Shilling, and injuring eight others.

     What do these crimes have in common?

      Guns; a precondition of force and violence is the ability to inflict it, and our nation protects the arms market as the business of empire and accepts the random deaths of citizens as a cost of that business.

     President and General Eisenhower long ago warned us of the consequences of a military-industrial complex for tyranny and state terror and the centralization of power to a carceral state and subversion of democracy, and of imperialism and colonial wars of dominion to control global markets, resources, and profits at the cost of our universal human rights and the principle of self-determination for all peoples.

     We have ignored his warning and the direct effects of the use of social force in the dehumanization and commodification of humankind and the theft of our souls, and in the erosion of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, in the fall of America as a guarantor of liberty and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.

     Let us bring a reckoning for our systemic inequalities and the legacies of our historical injustices, and begin to forge a true free society of equals, built not on death but on life, not on force but on love, not on fear but on hope.

June 23 2021, Who Bears Arms Bears Death

      Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror or its direct employees carrying badges and acting with the authority of the government in the repression of dissent and the elite hegemony of white supremacy.

     Here in America I refer to Homeland Security as well as all police, whom we must disarm and abolish as pervasive inherent evils which threaten our Liberty and Equality.

      I believe it wise and just to hold gun manufacturers legally responsible for the harm they cause within federal guidelines of reparations, and that this must include among their victims the entire Black community for the redress of historic evils; hate crime must have no immunity.

      So also with the National Rifle Association as an organization of white supremacist terror and fascist tyranny, whose mission is to disfigure the souls of some of us with fear, power, hate, and violence as monsters to terrorize the rest of us into submission with learned helplessness.

     We must end open carry as political theatre and macho posturing or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and conditions violence.

April 18 2021, Costs of the Business of Empire and Tyranny: An Epidemic of Mass Gun Violence

      An MSNBC report by Rachel Maddow that New York Attorney General Letitia James will bring suit to dissolve the National Rifle Association offers a glimmer of hope that we may yet see an end to the epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings which have seized and shaken America.

     I commented on the story with satire as follows; Apparently, a Nazi Racist Association which is the primary enabler of domestic terrorism has been operating openly for some while. Why not hold its entire membership list responsible as co-conspirators in every shooting which was perpetrated during its existence? Surely all its members can be charged with racketeering and possession of weapons of death and mass destruction as well.

    To this I received a question; “Are you implying that the NRA is a terrorist organization?”

    Here is my reply; I am directly saying the NRA is an organization of terror, of death for corporate profit and the tyranny and terror of the carceral state and its force and control in service to hegemonic elites. Every victim of gun violence in America is a victim of its agenda and influence, though the broader cause is the cycle of fear, power, and force which begets violence, and to which our society is addicted.

     Yes, I advocate repeal of the Second Amendment, abolition of the NRA as an organization of white supremacist terror, disarmament of the police, abolition of police and of prisons, borders, surveillance, and other authoritarian and totalitarian instruments of force and control. But these are structural and institutional reforms within the scope of electoral politics, and our issues are systemic in nature and resilient to legislation of change.

    One cannot reform such a system. Only a revolution which equalizes power and liberates us from elites can bring justice to this world of tyranny and state terror.

     Though the links between the National Rifle Association and the perpetrators of white supremacist terror and gun violence are by now well known, a 2019 Senate report exposed the long history of NRA collaboration with Russian espionage against America. 

    As written in NRP; “The National Rifle Association acted as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the period leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new investigation unveiled Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

     Drawing on contemporaneous emails and private interviews, an 18-month probe by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin more than previously known — even though the two had declared their ties to the Kremlin.”

     We may now consider the NRA not only a terrorist organization and the main private enabler of white supremacist violence and racially motivated crime in America, but also of treason and foreign subversion.

      Of course the issues are not as simple as this, the legitimacy of the Second Amendment, the use of force and violence in service to elite wealth and power, and the multilayered objectives of the state, the NRA, and the arms industry must also be interrogated, and to these threats to our free society of equals we must bring a reckoning.

March 22 2021 Guns Death Terror Madness

    A rogue Colorado judge overturns a law forbidding open carry, and a terrorist uses his new right to casually walk into a supermarket with a military rifle and commit mass murder.

    Who so ever bears arms bears death, and has chosen to bring death among us and degrades every human relationship and interaction to a kill/no kill decision. Who can be trusted with such power? Choose life.

     We must question how we imagine and implement our right to bear arms, a right whose intention to guarantee the freedom and independence of individuals from government force and control I fully endorse. This does not mean we must allow terrorists and madmen to commit murder and mayhem, nor that access to guns and other instruments of mass destruction should be free to all; we must sift very fine in choosing who if anyone can be trusted with the power of death. For this is exactly what the right to bear arms authorized; the power to bear death among us. It is a dreadful power, which bears a weight of responsibility like no other.

     I would begin the restoration of balance in our society by disarming the police, not our citizens. But we need not foster madness nor enable violence.

     Here is my rebuttal to the objection that gun control abrogates our right to bear arms:     

     Forbidding things does not align with my ideology; my ideal state is a world free of violence and the social use of force. Here I mean police, prisons, laws and the authorization of identity, state terror and military imperialism. These we must resist, by any means necessary.

     But we must also resist the pathology of violence and power on which our unequal society is constructed, and the drive to dominate which is written into every cell of our bodies and the epigenetic history of our form. Ours is a culture of death, of the fetishization of guns as masculine jewelry and symbols of patriarchal power. Power, like the beauty of weapons, is seductive and a force of degradation and dehumanization.

     Where force is the only means of seizing power to restore balance and ensure liberty and equality, it is positive. That same force is negative when used to subjugate others. This is the line of division between revolution and tyranny; who holds power? In the words of Walter Rodney; “By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?” America today remains the same nation won by conquest and theft from indigenous people, built by African slave labor, and become an empire through military and economic imperialism.

     We must abandon the social use of force if we are to become a free society of equals and of autonomous individuals. In a nation of Liberty, we send no police or armies to enforce virtue. This does not mean we surrender our power of self determination or our own safety and freedom from the ideas of other people.

     To be free is to be free from compulsion by force, and from control through surveillance and propaganda. It also means that we must be free from each other.

 February 20 2021, Who Bears Arms Bears Death

     President Biden has once again seized an intractable problem by its horns, speaking on laws he intends to pass to limit gun violence and free us from the spectre of death, fear, and vote suppression by fascists and white supremacist terrorists.

     This is no longer only an issue of racist gun violence, but of the survival of democracy from political intimidation and terror. We can never permit another January 6 Insurrection, nor revival of the historical legacy of the KKK’s reign of terror on which it was based.

      But we must not only limit access to guns for the insane and members of criminal organizations of racist terror, but for the police as well. Disarm the police and they cannot murder nonwhite people with impunity as they do now. These are the two halves of a whole, state and civilian terror and gun violence.

     As reported by Nikki Carvajal, Devan Cole, and Ali Zaslav on CNN; “Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” Biden said in a statement.

     “This administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call,” the statement reads. “We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer.”

     The call from Biden comes three years after a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, leaving 17 people dead. The tragedy led many of the survivors to speak out against gun violence and confront lawmakers about gun safety reform.”

    President Biden concluded his message by underscoring the urgency of action, and by placing the issue in a human frame of suffering, loss, fear, and grief; “We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change,” he said. “The time to act is now.”

     These are good words, even glorious ones, which resound with history and the reimagination of America and all humankind, as we now expect from our President. But if we are to eradicate the origins of gun violence as a pervasive and endemic threat both to democracy and to public safety, we must go further, to the true reason governments refuse to abolish guns.

    Analysis of the structural relationships between government needs for massive industrial war production and the commercial arms sales required to keep it in full readiness reveal the real reason America provides an unrestricted  market for guns, indeed energetically promotes it; to be prepared at all times to fight multiple and vast wars. This is the business of empire, and the random deaths of schoolchildren and other innocent citizens to gun violence is considered an acceptable cost of doing that business.

     This must change, but it cannot change without also changing the profit driven motives of the military – industrial complex, as President Eisenhower warned us so long ago.

     As written by Priya Satia, author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, in Time; “Those in favor of firearms control in the United States today often point in exasperated envy at laws in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom. Why can’t the United States behave like these civilized countries?, they ask.

     The reality is that these countries were able to pass their strict laws partly because American laws are so lax. At just 4.4% of the world’s population, Americans own roughly a third of all the firearms in the world. According to a 2007 survey, American civilians own about 275 million of the world’s 875 million firearms. For the world’s gun manufacturers, this fraction of the world’s population is their largest single market. As long as it stays open, they can count on business, and governments around the world can feel secure about the health of an industry they rely on for defense.

     Since firearms became central to warfare, governments have faced a structural and logistics problem: They need gun manufacturers but do not generate enough demand themselves to keep those manufacturers in good health by serving the military alone. Peace, in particular, is bad for gunmakers.”

     “The Glorious Revolution of 1689 established a new regime in Britain. It had to defend itself against rebels at home and abroad who wanted to restore the ousted king. To that end, the new government set about developing a new hub of firearms manufacturing in Birmingham, to ensure an alternate source for guns in case rebels captured London’s firearms manufacturing capacity.

     For the next century, Britain was almost always at war, and Birmingham’s gunmakers thrived: from an initial annual production of tens of thousands of arms, they could produce millions by 1815. The government also launched its own factory, at Enfield, to further diffuse the industry.

     To keep this industry healthy during interludes of peace—in an era in which firearms possession was largely an entitlement of the upper classes—the government helped it find other outlets. British gunmakers sold firearms all over the world: in West Africa, as part of the slave trade; in North America, to Native Americans and colonial settlers; in South Asia, as part of trade and conquest. Occasionally, British officials worried about arming their own enemies. But inevitably, the logic prevailed that not selling guns to potential enemies would merely send those enemies to a rival supplier, like the French, and the British would forfeit both profit and influence.

     The government also encouraged gunmakers to diversify into products that could be sold to British civilians: buttons, buckles, harpoons, swords, bells. Diversification became more necessary in the 19th century as the empire’s fear of armed colonial rebellion increased. The Birmingham Small Arms company (BSA), the largest privately owned rifle manufactory in Europe until the 1890s and the largest in the U.K. through World War I, also made bicycles, motorcycles and cars. The government’s machine-gun supplier, Vickers, made various civilian goods, too.

     This strategy freed the government from worrying overly about the health of its firearms industry. In 1934, it selected a Czech design for the new army light machine gun, over protests from BSA and Vickers. After World War II, the Ministry of Defense stopped maintaining an R&D team for small arms design. BSA ceased military rifle production in 1961 after a government decision to let them go. They turned out other metal goods and motorcycles until they were edged out of those businesses in the early 1970s.

     The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, meanwhile, did develop and supply the SA80, the standard postwar military firearm. In 1985, it and other government arms factories were made into a public corporation, Royal Ordnance, which, in 1987, was bought by British Aerospace, the then-reprivatized company in which Vickers had merged during the 1960 nationalization of the aircraft industry.

     That year, 1987, was also the year of the mass shooting known as the Hungerford massacre. Gun control in the U.K. got tighter as the gun industry shrank to vanishing point. The next year saw both the closure of the Enfield unit and amendments tightening existing firearms controls. After the Dunblane shooting in 1996, private possession of handguns was banned almost entirely; thousands of guns were surrendered. By that point there was essentially no firearms industry to put up a protest; U.K. military arms were mostly sourced abroad. In Australia, too, passage of tight gun control laws in 1996 was eased by the absence of a major Australian gun industry.

     The United States followed a different path.

     To be sure, American gunmakers also diversified to cope with whimsical government demand. Most famously, Remington, the country’s oldest rifle maker, turned out sewing machines and typewriters during the slump in firearm demand after the Civil War. But, for the most part, American manufacturers could rely on sales to civilians to cope with lulls in government demand.

     Between the world wars, the federal government and the American gun industry both opposed suggestions for controls on sales to civilians, out of fear that they would endanger an industry essential to national defense. During the Cold War, the U.S. became the new firearms depot of the world. When the Swedish firearms manufacturer Interdynamic AB could not find a civilian market for its TEC-9 submachine gun at home, its Miami subsidiary Intratec sold it to Americans, who made it a notorious instrument of mass shootings.

     If gun-control advocates focus on the NRA and politicians who take money from the group as the sole obstacles to sensible gun control laws in the U.S., they’ll be missing a larger structural reality: selling arms to American civilians has become crucial to an industry on which both the United States government and governments around the world depend. Indeed, it is the American public’s very division over gun control that keeps the industry healthy, given the saturation of the civilian market: without panic buying triggered by recurring fear of impending controls, companies like Remington and Smith & Wesson face dismal prospects. (Remington has now filed for bankruptcy, though its operations remain unaffected.)

     The more the rest of the world limits gun possession, the more American civilians keep the world’s firearms makers in business. The NRA and gun manufacturers benefit from promoting intense cultural and ideological commitment to their reading of the Second Amendment, but so does every government that needs firearms for its military and law enforcement services. Studies have shown that the presence of astronomical numbers of guns in the United States is a specific cause of the high rate of mass shootings, but the presence of those guns has become a matter of global security. This vision of global security has thus perversely come to depend on continual insecurity about mass shootings in the United States.”

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, by Priya Satia

notes:

December 2 2020, Of Liberty, Force, and Freedom From Violence: Our Right to Bear Arms

      Today we witnessed a glorious triumph in the midst of terrible crises of political, economic, and environmental collapse and devastation; the swearing in of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a victory for freedom from gun violence and a public renunciation of our nation’s most powerful organization of terror, the National Rifle Association.

     As reported by Sunlen Serfaty and Clare Foran for CNN; “The special election victory marks a moment of triumph for Kelly, a retired Navy captain and NASA astronaut, that comes in the aftermath of tragedy.

     Kelly was thrust into the national spotlight in 2011 when his wife, Arizona’s then-US Rep. Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and nearly killed, an event that sent shock waves throughout the nation.

     He later turned into a political activist, launching a group called Americans for Responsible Solutions alongside his wife and fighting for gun control policies like universal background checks and so-called red flag laws.

     “I learned a lot from being an astronaut. I learned a lot from being a pilot in the Navy, ” Kelly said in his campaign announcement video. “But what I learned from my wife is how you use policy to improve people’s lives.”

    My response to this joyous news is as follows:

    Who so ever bears arms bears death, and has chosen to bring death among us and degrades every human relationship and interaction to a kill/no kill decision. Who can be trusted with such power? Choose life.

      This declaration was met with replies from friends in support of our right to bear arms, a right whose intention to guarantee the freedom and independence of individuals from government force and control I fully endorse. This does not mean we must allow terrorists and madmen to commit murder and mayhem, nor  that access to guns and other instruments of mass destruction should be free to all; we must sift very fine in choosing who if anyone can be trusted with the power of death. For this is exactly what the right to bear arms authorized; the power to bear death among us. It is a dreadful power, which bears a weight of responsibility like no other.

     I would begin the restoration of balance in our society by disarming the police, not our citizens. But we need not foster madness nor enable violence.

     Here is my rebuttal to the objection that gun control abrogates our right to bear arms:     

     Forbidding things does not align with my ideology; my ideal state is a world free of violence and the social use of force. Here I mean police, prisons, laws and the authorization of identity, state terror and military imperialism. These we must resist, by any means necessary.

     But we must also resist the pathology of dominance and control which is written into the history of our form. Ours is a culture of death, of the fetishization of guns as masculine jewelry and symbols of patriarchal power. Power, like the beauty of weapons, is seductive and a force of degradation and dehumanization.

     Where force is the only means of seizing power to restore balance and ensure liberty and equality, it is positive. That same force is negative when used to subjugate others. This is the line of division between revolution and tyranny; who holds power? In the words of Walter Rodney; “By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?” America today remains the same nation won by conquest and theft from indigenous people, built by African slave labor, and become an empire through military and economic imperialism.

     We must abandon the social use of force if we are to become a free society of equals and of autonomous individuals. In a nation of Liberty, we send no police or armies to enforce virtue. This does not mean we surrender our power of self determination or our own safety and freedom from the ideas of other people.

     To be free is to be free from compulsion by force, and from control through surveillance and propaganda. It also means that we must be free from each other.

January 22 2020 Liberty versus Tyranny: Guns and the Role of Social Force in a Democracy

      As the pro-gun rally in Richmond Virginia this week was deluged by fringe elements including white supremacist terrorists, lunatic conspiracy theorists,  militias and other organizations of racism and fearmongering, and other criminals and enemies of America, though somewhere in the crowd must have been a lone gentleman who just wanted to hunt ducks, I had an interesting conversation with a woman who carries a gun for personal defense and is fanatically devoted to the idea of an armed citizenry as a last resort against tyranny.

     Where ideology and beliefs are interdependent with identity we have a bounded realm in which we will react to factual counter-argumentation as a threat, so I set these differences aside and redirected to finding common ground. For an excellent new text in engaging people in constructive dialog across oppositional ideological lines, I recommend How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay.

     What gave me pause was that she was using a version of an argument for the justification of social force that I had once used, and I realized I was having a conversation with my younger self.

     As I framed the argument for putting out the fire with gasoline in the days of my youth, it goes like this; Ever wonder why there was no general resistance to the Holocaust by the Jews? The old German republic had gun registration, so when Hitler took power all the Nazis had to do was run the list and ask everyone to surrender their guns, and if they refused they were executed on the spot. Our founders feared Britain doing the same to them, which is why we have a second amendment right to bear arms. An armed citizenry can defend themselves from a rogue government. Giving up our guns means giving up control of our own security to the government. Do you trust the government that much? Because I don’t.

      While this argument is historically factual, there are several levels on which it will no longer work, the first of which is force parity. These may be good rules for a nation with a standing army of 600 men who are expected to show up for duty with their own rifles, but military technology has obsolesced the function of the second amendment.

      But this obscures the real question, which is the balance of values underlying the false dichotomy of the gun debate.

     To me, the issue of private gun ownership is not a question of security versus freedom. Security ranks third in my values hierarchy in this matter; first is the question of freedom from authority and the social force and control of tyranny. Gun violence is being used by our government to terrify us into accepting the transfer of our power of autonomy to the state as a subversion of democracy; to create a totalitarian regime of force, surveillance, and control through the counterinsurgency model of policing. Driven by overwhelming and generalized fear, we have been deceived and manipulated toward our enslavement.

     Gun violence also poses a threat to our value of equality, as it has become a primary weapon of white supremacist terror and the Fourth Reich.

     With freedom and equality as primary values, this leaves security as a tertiary value; guns as a last resort of personal safety in defense. Of course we all have a right to defend ourselves; my objection is to guns and other means of force and violence as instruments of tyranny and terror used by governments and other political and religious organizations, and the madmen who are shaped by them as deniable assets.

     Consider also; why respond to threats with a tool which can only speak with deadly force? Why choose death? And what of the guns of others; how can we be safe from them?

August 31 2019 Guns Death Terror Greed

    Guns, Death, Terror, Greed; unfortunately this can be said of any day in  America.

       When will we seize control of our own safety as citizens and enact laws to defend our lives and those of our children? I say, prove to us that we can trust you with our lives, and you may bear death among us. Who can pass such a test?

     I would say that anyone who wants access to guns and other weapons of terror and mass destruction must pass the same tests as our police, military, and other security servicepersons, meaning regular federal background checks and psychological screening, but some of the worst atrocities have been committed by those we have entrusted with our safety, especially racially motivated crimes, so we must disarm the police first.

     Second, anyone who owns a gun has motives which must be suspect, for they have chosen death and changed every human interaction into a kill/no kill decision. A civilian gun owner has all of the responsibility and none of the training in making such choices that a military or police sniper, air marshal, or  SWAT/CQB team member has, who are also highly screened people of exceptional character. By what means can we vouchsafe the bearers of death?

     Would it not be simpler to abandon the social use of force, and embrace nonviolence?   

      Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.

     Choose life.

August 12 2019 the NRA is a White Supremacist Terrorist Organization Which Uses Fear of Nonwhite Peoples & Immigrants to Sell Guns

     The National Rifle Association has long used fear of nonwhite people and immigrants and the racist conspiracy theory of White Replacement to sell guns; as a lobby for the firearms industry it defends the market and profits of the manufacturers and distributors of weapons of white supremacist terror and mass destruction, but that is not its true goal.

    While needing a vast and unregulated arms market to ensure that our government has a fully operational manufacture and supply capability, what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, to support imperialistic wars and other acts of force and violence against our enemies real or imagined, that is also not its true goal.

    The true and primary goal of the NRA is to defend the hegemony of white patriarchal power and privilege, to shape some of us into monsters as deniable assets with which to terrify the rest of us into supporting the abandonment of democracy and of our equality and freedoms, to drive us like frightened cattle into an autocratic and totalitarian state. This is the true goal of the emerging global Fourth Reich; an all-powerful government of surveillance and force, a police state of secret power, covert armies, concentration camps, and the re-enslavement of nonwhite labor.

     So we have a pyramid of three parts in the goals of the NRA and the corrupt politicians who have seized our government; to subvert democracy and build a fascist totalitarian state through gun violence and racist terror, to support the business of empire by keeping us in a state of constant readiness for war, and to incite fear of others in the public to create a market for guns.

August 9 2019 Racism is at the Heart of America’s Gun Violence

     Why does America resist commonsense legislation to protect us from gun violence and white supremacist terror? This has little to do with guns and everything to do with race, otherness, and the social and structural hegemony of white power and privilege.

     Racism is the context within which American gun violence, and our lack of political will to do anything about it, occurs. This is a problem of cultural, social, historical, political, and psychological dimensions, a network of mutually reinforcing issues which must be addressed as an interconnected whole.

    At root, racism and white supremacist terror are a failure of our founding ideal of equality and of the concept of citizenship as co ownership of our government and full and inclusive membership in America as a free society of equals.

     In the words of Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, as quoted in The Guardian; “The country’s refusal to pass new gun control laws has everything to do with defending racial hierarchy. Who gets to carry a gun in public? Who is coded as a patriot? Who is coded as a threat, or a terrorist or a gangster? What it means to carry a gun or own a gun or buy a gun – those questions are not neutral. We have 200 years of history, or more, defining that in very racial terms.”

August 6 2019 Trump’s Death Squads: How Some of Us are Shaped into Monsters to Subjugate the Rest of Us Through Terror and Gun Violence

     That Trump is the chief conspirator and leader of a global Fourth Reich which has seized the government of our nation, who rose to power on a wave of fear and hate as he forged the alliance between white supremacists and Christian Identity fundamentalists which hijacked first the Republican Party and then America, is by now nothing new.

      We have seen the true enemy of America and of freedom and equality leering at underage girls while inspecting the dressing rooms at the Miss America Pageant, smiling in servile photo-op diplomacy with tyrants whose brutal regimes he admires, contorted with rage as he whips up his supporters at fascist rallies.

     But it has now become undeniable that he also directs and operates a covert network of deniable assets and death squads; so many of the terrorists who commit mass murder quote him in their manifestoes that it is beyond coincidence. America must as a nation confront two truths which are unavoidable; white supremacy and racist-fascist gun violence are now our greatest terrorist threats, and the President of the United States is the kingpin of that terrorism.

    His messages of hate shape some of us into monsters to subjugate the rest of us through fear; to drive us into the false security of an authoritarian police state of terror, surveillance, and the subversion of democracy.