Watch: "America's Gun Fetish"
Mass shootings are difficult to understand. Most of us resort to judgment and leave it there. But if you really want something to stop, you must seek to understand where it originated.
A video created by Sustainable Human and Chris Hedges.
Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting. Two decades as a reporter in war zones, however, resulted in a deep aversion to weapons. I saw what they did to human bodies. America’s gun fetish and culture of vigilante violence makes the U.S. very different from other industrialized nations. This is the reason there will never be serious gun control. It does not matter how many mass shootings take place, how many children are butchered in their classrooms, or how high the homicide rate climbs. There are nearly 400 million guns in the U.S., some 120 guns for every 100 Americans. Half of the privately-owned guns are owned by 3 percent of the population. Guns made lower working-class people feel powerful, even when they were not. Take away their guns and what was left? Decaying small towns, shuttered textile and paper mills, dead-end jobs, seedy bars where veterans drank away their trauma. Take away the guns, and the brute force of squalor, decline, and abandonment hit you in the face like a tidal wave.
Mass shooting are difficult to understand because they are always done by people with significant mental health problems and/or terrorists pursuing a goal to cause fear and chaos in the general population. Nobody can understand the motives of the insane... even the insane.
The interest in gun ownership is not hard to understand given the God given right to protect self and family and the fact that criminals are abundant and Democrats have clearly demonstrated that they will condone both mob violence and increases in violent crime to serve their political interests.
I have had the displeasure of being at the scene of three multi-fatality automobile accidents. I have witnessed first hand what a moving automobile can do to the human body. However, I am not at all for banning automobiles.
The New Deal brought meaningful work to craftsmen, laborers and artists, something this country needed then and desperately needs right now. Reagan ushered in the era of "grab all the money you can". Now we are a country that makes money with money. Usurers and money changers. There is no more meaningful work. Even farming is mechanized and computerized. As a result we are no longer stewards of the land but consumers of petrochemicals, industrial grade poison. and machinery debt.
Guns seem to provide some kind of security blanket for the masses. A way to lash out at a society that has lost it's humanity. I don't have a problem with guns. They're a tool made to kill things, if that's what you need to do.
They are not good for growing things or conserving water. America will run out water before it runs out of ammunition. We need to start making the tools we need to rebuild this broken country. We already have enough guns. We need more books and teachers and workplaces.