~~ recommended by collectivist action ~~
“The anger k[eeps] twisting….Abortion and guns and God and Whiteness and women and ci
“The anger k[eeps] twisting….Abortion and guns and God and Whiteness and women and cities and borders and then guns again. The intersectionality of fascism…”
- Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
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“As Americans We’re Used to This…a Familiar Scene as Gunfire Erupted”
Speaking of political violence – a key them in my diagnosis of American fascism in Part 1 of this series – there have been 200 mass shootings – well more than one per day – so far this year in Armed Madhouse USA, which purports to be the world’s most civilized nation. Mass shootings – defined as firearms incidents in which at least four people not including the trigger-puller are shot – are now a regular, normalized occurrence in the nation that former US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Rf-TX) once called “the beacon to the world of how life should be.”
I can hardly keep up with the mass shooting digest. Off the top of my head I can think of three this spring: a downtown Louisville bank slaughter last month; a school shooting that killed seven, including three children in Nashville, two weeks before that; the killing of at least nine people in a mall in Allen Texas, outside Dallas last Saturday. In the New York Times coverage of this last bit of firearms carnage, soon to superseded by some assault weapon-toting maniac somewhere in the US, there was “a particularly deadly spate of large-scale shootings this past week.” As the Times elaborated:
“Last weekend, a gunman killed five people in Cleveland, Texas, near Houston, after he was asked by neighbors to stop shooting in his yard. He was captured after a multiday manhunt. On Monday, a registered sex offender fatally shot six people, including his wife and three of her children, near Tulsa, Okla., before turning the gun on himself. On Wednesday, a gunman opened fire at a medical office building in Atlanta, killing one and injuring four others. That, too, led to a manhunt before the suspect was caught…In Allen, Texas, witnesses described a familiar scene of pandemonium as gunfire erupted. Geoffrey Keaton was having lunch with his 16-year-old daughter at Fatburger in the outlet mall when they heard gunshots. ‘I immediately knew,’ Mr. Keaton said. ‘I got my baby girl under the counter to shield her, and then they got louder, like he was right there.’ Mr. Keaton said the restaurant’s manager allowed customers to hide in the back, where they were able to exit through a rear door and run to their cars. ‘You could see bodies of people he had shot on the sidewalk,’ Mr. Keaton said. ..A livestream from a local Fox television affiliate showed scores of shoppers being evacuated in an orderly fashion from shops like H&M, Michael Kors, American Eagle and Kay Jewelers. Kaleo Palakiko, 36, was shopping with his parents for an upcoming vacation when they saw people running outside. ‘It was just kind of chaotic for a second. Then when someone said, <shooter,> we all ran to the back of the store,’ Mr. Palakiko said. ‘As Americans, we’re used to this, because everyone knew exactly what to do.’”
Think about that statement for a moment: as Americans, we’re used to this. Here is a partial list of the US mass shootings so far this year: https://www.nytimes.com/article/mass-shootings-2023.html?
Let’s be honest: new stories about shootings and mass shootings are no big deal in the US anymore. They’ve been normalized, like high gas prices. They have been banalized. They’re part of the chilling background of US life now, an almost routine aspect of our “condition,” like climate change. I half expect to learn about a new mass shooting somewhere in the US every time I turn on cable news. I wonder if there’s a shooter waiting in or outside every large retail outlet I enter. .
I predicted a single mass shooting and 28 shootings in the US on Easter Sunday this year. I was borne-out on the first prediction, but I fell short on the second prediction. The United States, once described by former US Senator Kay Baily Hutchinson as “the beacon to the world of the way life should be,” celebrated the alleged resurrection of Jesus with no less than 90 shootings. I’m not what I was thinking with just 28. A quick glance at the Gun Violence Archives shows that that would have been very far below the norm.
The Easter mass shooting came late in the day, in Orlando, Florida. Louisville followed the next morning.
Familiar scenes.
No surprise. As Americans, we’re used to this.
“Trivial” Shootings and Racially Tinged Panic Arming
Mere shootings of just 1 to 3 individuals are barely even a story anymore. And of course that’s most of the shootings in the US, where 13,900 people have already died from gun violence this year. There has to be some kind of a perverse twist now for a non-mass shooting to make the national news.
Recently we’ve seen four examples of such a twist: shootings over seemingly trivial matters:
· A Black teenager was shot by a racially paranoid 84-year-old white man in north Kansas City after the adolescent rang the octogenarian’s doorbell in a case of mistaken address
· A 20-year-old white woman was shot to death in upstate New York by a crazed 65-year-old white male lunatic after her boyfriend mistakenly pulled his car into the shooter’s driveway.
· Two white female cheerleaders were shot in Texas after one of them mistakenly started to open a demented freak’s car.
· A deranged North Carolina man shot a 6-year-old girl and her parents after children went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into his yard.
By the way, gun violence is now the leading killer of US children.
Some commentators find the shootings over “trivial” matters unsurprising. What’s the mystery about sch shootings in a nation awash with weapons, fear, paranoia, and mental illness, all exacerbated by the pandemic, when USAers purchased 60 million firearms? As The Hill reported in the wake of the Louisville killings:
“One-fifth of U.S. households purchased guns during the pandemic, a national arming that exposed more than 15 million Americans to firearms in the home for the first time…Americans purchased nearly 60 million guns between 2020 and 2022…. Yearly gun sales are running at roughly twice the level of 15 or 20 years ago. All the new weapons may be fueling a historic surge in gun deaths, which reached record highs during the same period….The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a run on gun shops, part of a larger national spasm of panic-buying that gripped the country at a moment when many Americans thought society might collapse…. Between March 2020 and March 2022, 18 percent of households bought guns…”
“May be fueling a historic surge in gun deaths”? Sorry but there’s no maybe about. It is supremely dangerous for the US to have 121 firearms loose for every 100 people in the country. The next closest ratio is the Falkland Islands at 62 per 100! This kind of gun saturation means that lethal weapons are readily available for millions and millions of Americans caught up on in conflict with each other and themselves.
The paranoid creep who might earlier just have thrown a rock at a car that mistakenly pulled into his driveway way now has a Glock pistol or an AR-15 to use to try to obliterate the car’s driver and passengers.
Flip somebody off after they cut you off on the Interstate and they’ve got a high magazine pistol to aim at you further down the road.
The depressed divorced man agitated over his ex-wife finding a new love has a military assault weapon at the ready to pretend to solve the problem.
The frightened old racist who has been egged into terror about supposed marauding Black people by Fatherland/FOX News and the neofascist National Rifle Association (the second entity ran commercials counseling Americans to stock up on weapons, not just food, during the pandemic) has a gun to reach for the second he spies a young Black man at his front door.
This last example reminds me of something likely missing from The Hill’s reporting. The historic George Floyd Rebellion against racist police brutality, which led to dozens of lethal assaults on the protesters, undoubtedly contributed heavily to escalated arms purchases by racially fearful white folk.
The Tiresome Guns v. Mental Health Debate
The “it’s guns” (say Democrats) vs. “it’s mental health” (say Republicans, ironically enough given their opposition to the public funding of serious mental health programs) has become tiresome, no? Of course it’s insanely reckless to let guns – including many millions of military-style assault weapons – proliferate to the degree they have in the United States. But it’s also supremely mentally ill to take an AR-15 or any other weapon to murder your fellow human beings in bars, schools, banks, concerts, movie theaters, parking lots, stores, dance studios, churches, and so on. Isn’t the real problem that this sick, savagely unequal, atomizing, anomie-inducing and violence-worshipping capitalist-imperialist society and fascising political culture have produced intersecting, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing crises of over-arming and mental and moral madness leading to a frankly predictable consequence --- chronic mass gun carnage? 121 firearms for every 100 people (double the next highest gun-to-populace ratio anywhere else in the world) is itself mental illness on a societal scale.
“14 Acres of Guns and Gear”
The Republi-fascist Party and the neofascist (see below) National Rifle Association (NRA) have an interesting response to such madness: More please. More bloodshed, more carnage, please. More bodies piled up on sidewalks, blood pouring out of the bodies of people taking their last breaths at young ages, please. More slaughter, please!
As the nation’s gun carnage peaks this spring, the dark red Missouri House has recently passed an NRA-sponsored bill that would permit guns in the state’s churches, synagogues, and buses. Two weeks ago, Florida governor Ron DeFascist signed an NRA-sponsored bill that lets anyone who can legally own a gun in his state carry without a permit. It means training and background checks are no longer required for people to carry concealed guns in public in Florida. And so it goes in other states, consistent with a Supreme Court’s ruling last summer that shot down a New York law requiring a license to carry concealed weapons in public places was unconstitutional.
The mayor of Louisville and a Democratic Congressman from Louisville responded to the bank mass shooting (which killed a CEO friend of theirs) in their city last month by begging the Kentucky state government and the crippled US Congress to implement sane gun policies. Everybody knew that their pleas were futile because of the Republi-fascists’ cringing captivity to the fascist NRA. The mayor also asked Louisville residents to give blood to help the survival chances of future gun violence – a request far more likely to elicit positive action.
When two young Black male representatives and one white female representative in the super-majority Republi-fascist Tennessee state legislature led protests in the state Capitol for gun reform following the Nashville shootings last March, the NRA-allegiant Tennessee House expelled the two Black lawmakers and came within one vote of expelling the white one.
The NRA recently held its annual convention in Indianapolis, where the latest in mass-kill assault and home slaughter weaponry was on display in a massive exhibition hall and politicos held forth on how to get yet more guns into Americans’ hands, workplaces, schools, and residences. An online NRA advertisement for the display was titled – no joke – “14 Acres of Guns and Gear.”
The NRA hosted Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump, the king of carnage. Mr. “I am your Retribution” explained that the nation’s gun violence has nothing to with its insane firearms saturation and everything to do with urban “thugs” (a clear dog whistle for Black and brown people) who are “coddled” by the supposedly “radical Left” Democrats and against whom “real Americans” (meaning white heartland volk and suburbanites) need to arm themselves….like, you know, Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry (see below) and the McCloskeys, the right-wing lawyer couple that met George Floyd marchers with an assault weapon and an automatic pistol on their front lawn in St. Louis and who were subsequently invited to spread armed racist paranoia as speakers at the 2020 Republifascist National Convention.
During the pandemic, the Neofascist Rifle Association it tweeted a video showing a woman holding a rifle and upholding guns as a pandemic safety measure. “You might be stockpiling up on food right now to get through this current crisis,” the woman says. “But if you aren’t preparing to defend your property when everything goes wrong, you’re really just stockpiling for somebody else.”
Fascism and Guns
Even before the newest mass shooting corpses are buried, the right wing reflexively denounces the standard liberal calls for “common sense” gun control as the unseemly interjection of “politics” into human tragedy. But the nation’s insane firearms saturation is very much about “politics:” fascist politics.
Let’s acknowledge something unpleasant about why the NRA-allied Republi-fascist Party steadfastly oppose elementary gun control measures even as the nation experiences one mass shooting after another. Let’s say what we know or ought to know out loud: the nation’s rightmost major party is now a socially, racially, and politically eliminationist, neofascist formation that embraces the rule of men over the rule of law. It channels and contains white-supremacist genocidal tendencies and sensibilities. As such, it leaders are happy about the fact that its adherents possess a wildly disproportionate share of the insane number of firearms and especially of the military style weaponry that is out and about in the US-American Armed Madhouse. The further right you go on the American political spectrum, the more heavily armed the populace is. Two thirds (66%) of Republican households are armed, as opposed to less than a third (31%) of Democratic households and 42% of Independent households. Among the more militantly Trumpist cohort of Republicans, the percentage is certainly 80% or more. Among the hard-core right, it would be nearly 100%.
The Republi-fascist Party is certainly pleased with the private arms status quo as it applauds demented politicos including a putschist ex-president who fascistically and absurdly calls his corporate Democratic opponents and those who legally investigate him “radical Left Soros-backed animals” and “lunatics” who “hate our country.” Trump speaks in openly violence-provoking terms about bloody vengeance and “Civil War.”’ He warns Black prosecutors who dare to indict and prosecute him for some few of his many crimes that “death and destruction” will result from their determination to subject him to the rule of law. Trump strikes back wielding the rule of force, the rule of angry white men with guns. His fascistic rhetoric has helped elicit hundreds of death threats directed at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor Fanni Willis has had to request considerable extra security to protect her and her staff as she prepares to roll out charges related to Herr Donald’s effort to interfere with the counting and recording of Georgia ballots in the 2020 election. The maniacal Republi-fascist-affiliated NRA has aimed not-so veiled assassination threats at liberal politicians, journalists, and celebrities.
Never forget where the orange-hued Nazi Trump went on the very last night of the 2020 presidential campaign. He stopped off in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the town notorious for the teen fascist and militia member Kyle Rittenhouse’s August 2020 murder of two Black Lives protesters with an illegally owned AR-15. Think that might have been a message about Trumpist-fascist havoc to come? One year later, Trump invited the freshly and absurdly exonerated Rittenhouse for a sit down at Mar-a-Lago, proclaiming the racist slayer “ a nice young man” who shouldn’t have had to go through a trial for, you know, using an illegally owned assault weapon to kill two people at a march against racist police brutality.
Never forget that Donald “Take the F’ng Mags Away” Trump had a tantrum calling for government metal detectors to be taken down so that fascist paramilitaries could bring their AR-15s to the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol. “They don’t want to hurt me,” Trump explained. Imagine the carnage that might have ensued if Trump had had his way.
A year and a half after Rittenhouse walked, we learned that Texas’ Republi-fascist governor Greg Abbott intends to pardon a fascist killer named Daniel Perry after Perry’s jury conviction for having shot to death a BLM protester in Austin, Texas in July of 2020. How despicable. It’s not just the pardon itself. It’s the advance promise of a pardon before the killer’s lawyers even appealed – a pledge to pardon as soon as possible without even reviewing the evidence. Abbott’s purported legal basis for pardoning Perry is Texas’ NRA-sponsored “Stand Your Ground” bill, which permits the no-retreat use of deadly force if one is attacked. The killer claimed that his victim raised a weapon at him before he shot but the racist Perry, who “previously considered killing people involved with racial justice protests” (Texas Observer) instigated the confrontation. That’s not “standing your ground.”
Of course, as the Right certainly knows very well, it doesn’t take a big paramilitary army of black and brown-shirted fascists to shut down liberal, left, and centrist public assembly and deliberation. One, two or three “lone wolf” fascists with assault weapons – the types of sociopaths who are regularly groomed on the psycho-fascistic dark web, where young far right maniacs sometimes livestream their mass gun assaults – are more than enough to spread fear of the kind that suppresses public dissent and protest.
Loving the Carnage They Purport to Clamp Down On
There’s another sense or way in which the Republi-fascists secretly love the firearms saturation and death they fuel. A central part of the Trumpist promise to the nation is that it will clamp down on the lawless “carnage” – a, perhaps the keyword in Trump’s infamous 2017 Inaugural Address – that afflicts America. Never mind that the fascist “law and order” pledge includes lawless methods (the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley noted years ago that “lawlessness in the name of law and order” is a key “calling card of fascism”). The point is that the mass bloodshed serves their fascist purpose. The Republikaners aren’t against Big Government. They are only against what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdeiu called “the left hand of the state” – the parts of government that reduce poverty and inequality, support working people, advance inclusion and decency and the common good, and place regulations on business and the rich – the policies and programs that were won by past popular movements and struggle. They love the right hand of the state, including above all the military, police, and prison state, the repressive and war apparatus. And the police state thrives on the perception and indeed the reality of chaos and carnage in the populace – the Hobbesian images of disorder and bedlam that require a strong authoritarian state and Leader to bring, well, order.
Police chiefs regularly complain about all the guns loose in the country, but the dark truth is that the police state loves the regular parade of firearms slaughter. It helps legitimize their ever-escalating high-tech militarization and helps grant them gives them recurrent excuses for killing a shocking number of Americans every year. Mass shootings fuel cops’ adrenaline, giving them great opportunities to rise to hero status. The gun madness gives their lives meaning and helps pay their salaries.
We might want to get serious about what we’re up against in this country. In the meantime, the notion that the Armed Madhouse USA has anything to say to any other nations or people on how to organize and live their lives is laughable and not just because of the insane level of gun violence.
Not About the Babies: Putting Women Back in “Their Place”
Also internationally disgraceful is the ongoing Republi-fascist assault on abortion rights in the US today. Since the far-right Trump- and Mitch McConnell-appointed Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision last summer, 18 US states have banned or severely restricted abortion. It’s been a rolling nightmare for women and girls across the country. In cold defiance of majority national opinion, as Jessica Valenti notes, “pregnant women are being left bleeding for days. Raped girls are being denied treatment. Doctors [are being] forced to choose between giving patients adequate care or going to jail! Twenty state Attorneys General [have] threatened retail pharmacies to keep [abortion] medication out of their states, even though these medicines are standard treatment for miscarriages.”
We recently learned about a Texas case where a women denied proper medical care under her state’s draconian abortion laws nearly died from sepsis brought about up by her being forced to carry a dead fetus. Her doctors were afraid to treat her until her condition became potentially fatal.
A similar story played out recently in Oklahoma, where a woman who was happy to have a third child nearly died from complications resulting from a partial molar pregnancy her doctors were unable to properly treat because doing so might violate the state’s extreme anti-abortion laws.
Meanwhile we await the right wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then the Christian fascist Supreme Court’s rulings on mifepristone, the safe and effective medical abortion pill that the Right is trying to ban nationwide – a reminder of what Ruse Up for Abortion Rights said from day one: the fascists want abortion outlawed from coast to coast.
Note the telling contrast, consistent with the fascist Handmaids Tale dystopia that the party of Trump is trying to bring to real life. When it comes to weapons of mass slaughter that are used to wreak bodily havoc and death from coast to coast, the Republi-Christian-Fascist Right is militantly opposed to government regulation. But when it comes to procedures and medications meant to enable women and girls to be in control of their own bodies and protect their own health, the Republi-Christian-Fascist Right is for militant state control. Regulate uteruses, de-regulate guns. Freedom for AR-15s, the slavery of forced motherhood for women and girls.
It's all part of the same fascist pathology. It’s no accident that the people attacking trans folks and pushing guns and suppressing votes and criminalizing history and banning books and expelling Black legislators are the same vicious assholes trying to end women’s reproductive freedom. Fascism is devoted to the restoration and enforcement of traditional social hierarchy, and the blunt enforcement of gender hierarchy is a critical part of that project. Every fascist movement past and present has been centrally dedicated to imposing militant patriarchy. Every fascist movement past and present has been fiercely determined to keep women “in their place,” that is out of careers, out of the workplace, out of school, out of politics, out of the public square, back in the home pregnant, powerless, burdened with childcare and housework “duties.” And that’s what the war on abortion is all about. It’s not about “the babies.” It’s not about life. It’s not about life. If it was about the babies these wouldn’t be the same fascist assholes going after early childhood education, under-funding K-12 education and tearing up what’s left of the welfare state in the neoliberal nightmare that is 21st Century America. If they cared about the babies, they wouldn’t be the same fascist assholes who are doing so much to turn this nation into a chaotic shooting gallery where school shooting drills are now routine and where kids get shot for chasing a ball into a neighbor’s yard. It's about controlling, oppressing, and exploiting women. It's about controlling, oppressing, and exploiting women.
It might seem like a contradiction: for libertarian deregulation and bodily endangerment when it comes to guns vs. for Big Brother state regulation and bodily endangerment and slavery when it comes to the womb. That’s because it is a contradiction from a morally consistent and humanist perspective. In the arch-patriarchal Christian white nationalist neofascist world view, however, there’s no contradiction. The rule of men (and fascistic women like Lauren Boebert and onetime NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch) with guns over society is richly consistent with the rule of men (and patriarchy-backing women) over women in the fascist mindset past and present.
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