“Fact checkers? Who believes them?” We no longer share a common reality. My assertions come from a habit of seeking credible sources and statistics, trying to connect the dots.
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Gun Death
In a long quest for power, cynical wealth manipulates the discourse, and games the political and electoral structures. The doctrine enables angry rhetoric and violence.
US statute considers an incident of three or more dead a mass killing. Part of that is thugs taking care of business, but they shoot innocent bystanders too. Gun death is the leading cause of childhood fatalities. Making up over half of US gun death, most suicides kill only themselves. Some kill others too in a scenario, placing their self-annihilation in the mass shooting column. Some shooters have purpose, however deluded, to shape the world.
The Clinton assault weapon ban correlated with a notable decline in mass shooting death. Background checks, waiting periods, red flags and other sensible restrictions can limit the hardware available for mayhem. Politics limits this common sense approach. Further, the mass shooter usually has “tells” before he acts, if only we paid attention to them.
But mental health is in the same bag as the rest of health care. Health is a profit center. In a humanist culture, health is a public good, an investment in societal success. Care for the mentally ill has been mentally ill since Reagan.
The homeless crisis is another clue. Regulations restrict affordable housing supply. Investor-owned housing becomes short-term accommodations, the rentals pool shrinks, prices rise. The financialized economy maximized net returns, sending jobs overseas to low wages and less regulation. The trend of wealth transfer to the upper 1% is shocking, especially as concerns the working poor. Strip-mined of equity, about 1/3 of Americans could not cover a $400 cash emergency. The streets are home to those squeezed out. Research shows a correlation of income inequality to mass shootings.
Those challenges to sanity and security worsen in our milieu of celebrity, image, influencers and ubiquitous sex. False expectations become failure and trauma. Data and history show the incels, the involuntary celibate subculture, is not just the old story of frustration vented in new media. Murky digital currents bring insidious material, grievance and disinformation to the dysadapted. Isolation and emotional trauma are a common thread among mass shooters.
Wealth is inherently a good and natural thing. But today’s great wealth gives power to shape the tax code and promote deeply unpopular and undemocratic schemes. And so, some 50 years ago a loose cabal set out to capture policy levers. Politicians and editorialists get talking points from ostensibly non-profit think tanks. These outfits, and the appalling Citizens United decision giving flesh-and-blood rights to immortal corporations, allow unlimited anonymous funding to promote the agenda. Buying up media is part of the game, exampled by Murdoch, Sinclair and Musk.
With gun culture as a key overlapping demographic, religion, race, gender and ideology arouse authoritarian and extremist voters. Tell them what they want to hear, they will come out to vote against their own interests. Capture the city council, school board, local judiciary, flood primaries and elections with cash, get the state legislature and the governor. From there, gerrymandering and targeted voter restrictions perpetuate the grip on power. The Electoral College is the grand prize.
This is not a feverish conspiracy theory. Energetic journalists name the participants and reveal their program, as documented exhaustively in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. Long-game strategy hijacked the Republican Party to subvert the Supreme Court, to elect ignorant hacks, wingnuts, racists and outright jackals, and to support insurrection.
Random mass shootings are a collateral damage of heartless war on humanism. People come unstuck. Terrorists of whatever stripe dip into a pool of angry people, groom those who carry a purpose, and loose them on a target. Right wing ideologies motivate the largest number of political killings in the US.
We are at the crux. The January 6 insurrection was just a rehearsal. Gun manufacturers and wealthy players feed the ecosystem of interest groups, lobbyists and politicians promoting adamant gun culture. University of Chicago research shows about 12 million voters think violence is justified to put Trump in the White House again. This is more than enough support to run a classic insurgency. Whoever influences the gun polity wields a credible threat of violence, a political ace-in-the-hole. Death threats have become common currency in our political discourse.
Democracy is weak where the majority avoids ugly topics, tolerates abuse and oppression, and ignores fundamental issues of fact. Get informed. Get involved. Donate now to progressive candidates across the country. Organize, inform and mobilize. Join up with the Indivisible Project. Volunteer to write post cards. Speak with your family and neighbors. For God’s sake, before it’s too late, do something, anything, to make the majority’s voice and will into our national project. Before it’s too late.