Violence is a part of America’s culture. Violence is as American as cherry pie. – H. Rap Brown, Leader of the Student Nonviolent Organizing Committee, 1972
This observation of H. Rap Brown not only accurately depicted our nation’s violent culture, but it essentially forecast the mass shootings that were to come. Throughout our nation’s history, most of that violence has been directed at Blacks. But in recent decades, even school children – many of them just first- and second-graders — have been targeted by madmen wielding AR-15 rifles, which they supposedly needed for “self-defense.”
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Epidemic Levels Of Violent Crime
Violent crime has been at epidemic levels for decades, but two recent mass shootings have certainly captured the nation’s attention. One shooter killed ten Black shoppers and employees in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 16th. Then, on May 25th, another shooter killed nineteen children and two teachers in an elementary school located in Uvalde, a Texas town of 15,000 about 80 miles west of San Antonio.
These were not isolated incidents. Mass shootings have become almost the norm to such a degree that they have lost much of their shock value. The shooter in Buffalo proudly proclaimed that he hoped to kill as many Black people as he possibly could. It is still unknown why the shooter in Uvalde wanted to kill young children and their teachers.The massacre at Uvalde echoed a similar mass murder of children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut in 2013.
In both schools a demented young man opened fire on students and teachers, aiming to kill as many as possible. The Uvalde killings put even the National Rifle Association on the spot, especially since its annual convention was scheduled to be held just a few days later in Houston.
But ex-president Donald Trump really came through for them. Politically correct to the core – a truly uncharacteristic stance for this man – he recited the names of each of the twenty-two victims. And miraculously, no one in the audience even booed.
But Trump wanted to back up his words this time by proposing a very practical solution to the nagging problem of having folks with semi-automatic rifles showing up at schools and killing lots of students. Why not make every school in the nation a “hard target?” That would require posting armed guards at each unlocked door.
Think about it! We acquiesce to having maniacs walking around with high-caliber rifles, while making every school into a well-protected fortress. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to just take the weapons out of the hands of these aspiring killers?
Enough Is Enough
When will Americans finally declare: “Enough is enough!” and do whatever it takes to make our nation at least relatively safe again? The obvious solution would be to pass very stringent federal and state gun control laws. Those, of course, would be vociferously opposed by the National Rifle Association, arms manufacturers, gun-sellers, and, of course, the hunters and the tens of millions of other Americans who own guns for what they perceive as self-protection. After all, if most of the bad guys have guns, then why should the good guys be unarmed?
Nearly all of our Trump-supporting super patriots, of course, very strongly support the Second Amendment to the Constitution: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of the State, the right to bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The Second Amendment pays homage to the local militias that bravely confronted the British invaders in Lexington and Concord at the outbreak of the American Revolution. They defended their villages with their own hunting rifles. Our Second Amendment rights provided a defense insurance policy just in case there was another British invasion. Indeed, there was another invasion during the War of 1812.
Surely the founding fathers would not have approved of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, who attacked the Capitol Police in an effort to disrupt Congress from certifying the presidential electoral vote count on January 6, 2021. And they would also have looked askance at the self-appointed vigilantes who take it upon themselves to patrol our border with Mexico or to harass Black men walking through white neighborhoods.
Even most Americans today – let alone the Founding Fathers – would not have described these groups as “well-organized militias.” In fact, you can bet your bottom Continental Dollar that George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, as well as all their colleagues would have called them “rabble, human excrement or whatever term was used in the late eighteenth century for “complete schmucks.”
The rationale for owning not just a pistol, but a wide array of high-caliber assault rifles, is ostensibly self-defense. With so many guns in circulation, some people feel unsafe without being armed themselves. So, the more people carrying around guns, the more others feel the need to buy guns to carry around to protect themselves.
Now, let’s shift gears and look more closely at two especially disturbing developments of the mass shooting epidemic – the targeting of religious worshipers. Two fairly recent mass murders stand out. In each, the killer entered a house of worship and shot several people. In 2015, a young man killed ten Black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. And in 2018, another man shot and killed eleven Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in a heavilyJewish neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
On March 17, 2015, a twenty-one -year -old man walked into the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, joined a bible study group, and then shot to death nine Black worshipers including the pastor. Dylann Roof, a very proud white supremacist. expressed his hatred of Blacks on his website. As he was aiming his gun, one of the congregants begged him not to pull the trigger and asked him why he was doing this. His reply: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Then, in 2018, forty-eight-year-old Robert Bowers entered the Tree Of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Armed with an assault rifle and three handguns, he killed eleven congregants for committing genocide against his people. Shot to death by a police officer, Bowers left behind social media posts filled with antisemitic slurs and references to Jewish conspiracy theories. Among them were, “Jews are the children of Satan,” and “It’s the Evil jews Bringing the Filthy muslims into the Country.”
There would be one more killing at a synagogue in Southern California the following year, and then, perhaps because police patrol cars were often parked in front of synagogues across the nation during the Jewish sabbath each week, countless deaths may have been averted. Still, although Jews constitute less than three percent of our nation’s population, according to FBI data, fifty-five percent of all hate crimes are committed against Jews.
What is especially interesting is how mass-murdering white supremacists have singled out Blacks and Jews for causing their perceived downfall of American whites. Some of them have been spouting this same old shit for decades, but increasingly, all of their suspicions have been combined into what has been termed “the great replacement theory.” This attempts to explain how and why our great white nation is being mongrelized by inferior population groups. Let’s save that for another time.
