Anyone supposing that yet another gun-fueled massacre of innocents would prompt a re-examination of the tender relationship between Americans and their personal killing devices might be forgiven for some assumptions about the residents of the town where the massacre actually occurred. After all, it would seem the most rational of responses for the local townfolk to be gripped by alternating waves of grief, despair and resolve at the endlessly mounting pile of bodies caused by the proliferation of firearms, a pile that now included some of their most precious sons and daughters tossed onto the sacrificial pyre. Their anguished response, provoked by senseless violence, would seem predictable--to get guns away from the hands of these unbalanced monsters by any means necessary.
But this country is no longer a friendly place for the rational. This is America, where the killing never stops.
The deadliest mass killing in the state’s history had taken place a few miles away and to the staff and customers of the Roseburg Gun Shop it was clear they faced a grave threat – from Barack Obama.
Authorities had just discovered a cache of 13 weapons possessed by the shooter, Chris Harper Mercer, but the man they feared was thousands of miles away in the White House, plotting, as they saw it, to confiscate their weapons and leave them defenceless.
The Guardian interviewed residents of Roseburg, Oregon, where an emotionally disfigured young man named Chris Mercer had only hours before deliberately erased the collective pasts and futures of ten unsuspecting people in the prime of their lives whose only mistake--if it can be called that--was being born in a country that encourages pointing a weapon and pulling of a trigger as a legitimate solution to life's complexities and problems. Where having a gun --or better yet, thirteen of them--to gently stroke in the privacy and comfort of one's home is the highest measure of self-satisfaction. Where internet-inspired heroics and paranoid delusions of resistance to an imagined "tyranny" qualifies as civic responsibility. And where self-styled survivalists grimly pack to weather the coming Apocalypse with Chinese-made products bought from the Home Depot on their Capital One credit cards:
Interviews with almost a dozen residents on Friday yielded unanimity – even in the queue of people lining up to donate blood at a tent set up downtown. “Obama sucks, he’s stupid,” said Chris Allen, 43, a mill worker. “If criminals want to get guns they’ll get guns.” Allen had lost a brother to gun violence – a separate tragedy which only steeled his pro-gun resolve.
That's right--to a man, the residents of Roseburg opt for more guns, presumably carried at all times, loaded and pointed in every direction from dusk to dawn, with trigger fingers perpetually twitching at the ready. This is why the Roseburg shooting will remain the "worst in recent memory" only as long as memory itself remains recent, and in any event, for no longer than a day or two. Or more precisely, until a memory of a bigger, new and improved massacre is created.
The fact that this shooting had happened not in Aurora, or Columbine, or Sandy Hook, but up the road at Umpqua community college, leaving 10 dead and shocking this rural Oregon community, seemed all the more reason to stockpile and carry guns.
“They need to leave us our guns and go after the lunatics,” said Ray Lee, 61, a retired diesel mechanic cruising the aisles of rifles and handguns.
To fathom the mentality that responds to a mass shooting by calling for even more guns we need to acknowledge the environment of constant fear that's been ginned up by the media serving the vast swaths of small towns and rural spaces that lie between the nation's major cities. Roseburg is a
deep red Republican stronghold in a state that habitually votes Democratic. Romney beat Obama 62 to 35 percent here. Anti-government sentiment in Roseburg has run high ever since the town's sustaining industry--lumber--was curtailed during the "spotted owl" fights of the 1990's. Economic anxiety holds a grip on the entire county.
The Washington Post article linked above points out that the town's residents have grown up with a so-called "culture" of hunting where gun usage is a rite of passage. Shooting competitions are held and frozen turkeys are awarded as prizes. Trap shooting is a common pastime. Youngsters are encouraged to learn to shoot at an early age.
It's curious, then, that "hunting" or "sport" is never cited by those quoted in the Guardian article as justification for their pro-gun obsession. Instead they all point to fear of crime. But on closer inspection this fear makes no sense at all--the sleepy town surrounded by three million acres of forest falls squarely in the median of crime rates nationwide. Crime in Roseburg is nothing out of the ordinary, which suggests (at least to me--your deductions may vary) that what 's being labelled as "fear of crime" by its residents may actually be fear of something else.
I suspect that it's something quite distinct from "crime" that sets Roseburg residents on edge when gun control is discussed. To point to "crime" after an event like last week's shooting would mean you really have crime to be afraid about, and there is simply no reason for comparatively sleepy Roseburg to be afraid of crime. Rather than fear of crime itself it seems far more reasonable that the real fear at work in Roseburg is of people of color who they've been constantly taught by Fox News and their local news stations to associate with crime:
“Make this a gun-free zone and you paint a target on us,” said one elderly man, a laptop shopper at Staples who declined to give his name. “Criminals will come here because they’ll know no one will damn well shoot back at them.”
There is a
91% chance demographically that the unnamed, elderly "laptop shopper" quoted above is white. In this deep red county he is also highly likely to be a Republican. If he is a Republican he is almost certainly a Fox News viewer. Ergo, virtually every image or reference he sees of African-Americans or other ethnic minorities, including the President, is likely to be
some type of caricature filtered through the lens of the Republican Party, and specifically its propaganda arm, Fox News. And as more and more rural areas see influxes of Latino and Hispanic residents due to sheer demographics, the
same distorted impressions are manufactured and disseminated by the Right's favorite organ to create a constant undercurrent of threat and fear among white Americans. For Republicans it is racial fears--made even more personified by a Black President elected not once, but twice --that are prompting the desperation that leads to purchase of more and more guns. And an outgrowth of this carefully cultivated culture of fear is that the very idea of controlling the spread of guns becomes an even greater threat.
This (IMHO) is how the fear mongering used by the Republican Party to stoke the racism of its base also works to keep the gun lobby in business. The relationship between the gun industry and the GOP is symbiotic--each sustains the other. It's also noteworthy that while the NRA doesn't provide its demographic information,empirical experience suggests it is almost entirely white. While individual motivations may differ, one logical deduction from all of this is that it isn't any noble fealty to the "Second Amendment" that is making people to buy more and more guns. It's simply a way for people to maintain the capacity to act on their hate:
Gun proliferation is an enabler of racist terror. It is the difference between racist beliefs and racist violent action. While gun control cannot stop people from harboring bigoted attitudes, it can significantly curb their ability to kill those they hate. The mix of gun culture with racist culture today has created a toxic stew of terror in African-American communities.
It's the same reason why the stockpiling of weaponry by white Americans went through the roof when Barack Obama was elected:
Gun production has more than doubled over the course of the Obama administration, according to a new report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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The numbers paint a picture of gun owners who are concerned about new restrictions on their Second Amendment rights, activists say.
That supposed Constitutional concern attributed to these gun buyers and gun "enthusiasts" as they have come to be called might make sense if the Obama Administration had actually done anything to curb the proliferation of firearms or weaponry in this country. He hasn't, and he isn't capable of doing so. The NRA knows this better than anyone else. Ultimately I believe it's just as likely it isn't the "Second Amendment," or some contrived notion of patriotism or "rugged individualism" driving the spread of guns in this country. It's fear and racism, egged on by the NRA, enabled by a Supreme Court that took a dreadfully wrong turn interpreting the Constitution decades ago, and cynically fueled by a political party for its own interests, having nothing to do with gun ownership. The ten people killed in Roseburg are just the latest, "collateral" victims of this toxic alliance. There will be more. There always are.