EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SUZANNE MOORE
IN THE GUARDIAN
British people think
they know America – but the gun control debate shows how little we do
The article is right about one thing, America does have a
special relationship with guns.
And I do think many Europeans do not fully understand it.
I don't really think it has anything to do with the Second
Amendment, as many conservative Americans claim that it has.
The very idea of modern day Patriots out on the streets,
dressed in camouflage with their rifles and shotguns and even other more
intimidating weapons, protecting the country from “tyranny” is almost the stuff
of Monty Python.
It is, after all, a country with some huge armed forces, a
huge National Guard in every state, many layers – from state to county to city
- of heavily armed police, plus seventeen national security organizations.
Patriots would have an easier time opposing tyranny in some of the world’s
dictatorships than in America.
I think the single biggest reason, generally unspoken, for
the gun culture has to do with America’s racial history. On the old
plantations, fear of slave revolt was a constant reality, even though there had
been only one revolt of any note. Planters went to bed typically with guns and
daggers under their pillows or at hand on a nightstand.
There is a massive residual fear which permeates much of
America, a fear not typically mentioned in the press. Thus, we have “gated
communities.” Thus, we have an endless sprawl of new “safe” communities built
on what were farmlands. Thus, I believe the first military-looking SUVs sold a
sense of commuter protection and not just transportation. Thus, we have the
widespread ownership of guns for personal protection. Thus, we have police
forces which set frightening standards for brutality with a “shoot first, ask
questions later” attitude.
Quite typically today, in the urban areas where most
Americans live, there are “inner city” areas where many white Americans from
suburbs will not set foot. Americans from suburbs who must commute to city jobs
avoid these areas. Many also carry a pistol in their car’s glove compartment. Indeed,
there used to be whispered advice about not stopping if you ever have an
accident with a car having black people in it.
These are just a few of the not-often-discussed realities of
America, fears which drive gun ownership. And it is not just white people. The
inner-cities are thick with guns, and the tales of the large-scale killings,
which do go on there, only further drives everyone’s fear.
In a city like Chicago, as many as fifty or sixty may be
shot on a long weekend. These are overwhelmingly young black men shooting other
young black men. Most do not die, but many do, hundreds each year. And you can
just imagine the tone of the local television news in reporting these events
and the fears and dread of those listening, even in distant suburbs.
_________________________
Response to another
reader’s comment comparing American past war deaths to domestic homicides:
Yes, your point is well made, but you overstate American
losses for WWII. They were just about 300,000, making the comparison with US
domestic killing even more dramatic.
In general, too, American war losses are miniscule compared
to what was experienced by other nations. For example, total losses in WWII
exceeded 50 million people, a number which makes American losses about one-half
of a percent of the world’s total.
You could say, Americans barely experienced WW II,
especially when compared to, say, Russia, which lost 27 million people. When
you haven’t experienced total war, you are almost certainly more cavalier about
starting wars, and that certainly seems to we what we observe with contemporary
America.
But there is another extremely important aspect to the American
war-loss totals, one generally overlooked, and that is the genuinely horrific
losses America inflicted on others. This is not widely understood, but it
reflects the use of truly terrible weapons on a scale few appreciate.
The mass bombing and fire-bombing of Japan was so intense it
was recorded that there were no secondary targets left standing in the entire
country. And then, along came the
nuclear bombing of non-military targets. If Japan had not unconditionally surrendered
after two cities were obliterated, the US had planned a total series of a dozen
nuclear attacks.
Later, there was the three years of carpet-bombing North
Korea, estimated to have wiped out 20% of the country’s entire civilian
population, a figure which if you applied it to today’s America would mean over
60 million deaths.
The carpet-bombing was repeated in Vietnam, along with many
other horrors such as napalm and early cluster bombs, and the US killed about 3
million people there.
The US also bombed neutral Cambodia and eventually succeeded
in destabilizing its government, allowing the Khmer Rouge to take power and
create the “Killing Fields,” a horror which America did nothing to stop.
There is also America's indifference to various horrors,
such as the genocide which occurred in Indonesia after Sukarno fell. Actually,
indifference is the wrong word since the American State Department was busy on
the phones submitting names of communists for the waves of killing that gripped
the country. At least half a million had their throats cut and their bodies
dumped into rivers.
We have America’s recent vast march across the Middle East –
otherwise known as the Neocon Wars - bombing in at least half a dozen lands, savaging
others with mercenaries, killing at least 2 million people, and driving many
millions of desperate refugees from their homes.
And over all those years, there has been a large number of
lesser but still murderous actions.
The truth is that America is an extremely brutal society. And
the brutality feeds both ways, too, from foreign to domestic, and vice-versa.
There are lots of brutal candidates on America’s streets for its armed forces’
imperial work abroad, and the many returning soldiers, trained to kill and
brutalized, add to the hazards of the streets. For example, America’s infamously
brutal police forces quite often select their candidates from the ranks of
returning veterans.
I just do not think you can have both a world empire, which
has been the main work of America since WWII, and a decent society.
And America certainly does not have a decent society.
