The Sandy Hook massacre, a happening too grim and heart-rendering to allow ourselves to even fleetingly dwell on, is the 62nd multiple slaying since 1982 (Mother Jones). As the most tragic, it will replace all other massacres we have maintained in our memories.
For Sandy Hook, our reflexive question is how is it possible to murder innocent children? We want to blame someone, anyone, for our outrage and our anger. We all know, if we’ve been around very long and allow ourselves to ponder this question, that there has to be a climate that allows such obscene carnage.
Will our response be more security and more school lockdowns or will we seek causes and address those?
In tracking the last thirty years of mass murder, Mother Jones noted that seventy-five percent of the 139 guns possessed by the killers were obtained legally. The arsenal included assault weapons, semiautomatic handguns and handguns, not to speak of grenades. Half of the cases were schools or workplaces. Forty-three of the killers were white males, one a woman. The average age of the killers was 35.
Since such mass killings seem to be an American phenomena, we should try to determine what is peculiar about us and our culture.
Over the last thirty years, our focus has shifted from a society that supports the common good to one of self-interest. We have created a narcissistic climate of gun worship, self-worship, derision of the poor, demonization of a government that creates opportunity, unindicted fraud and thievery in high places, and an idolatry of celebrity and the self-made man.
Such conditions foster division, envy, spite, anger, hate, self-loathing, and desperation among the vulnerable, while lax gun laws give a growing army of malcontents, many mentally ill, the absolute legal means to act out their frustrations using deadly force, just like in the movies.
What leads to this change in vision? Let’s start with a manipulative presence with great power and money, which has the most widespread influence on our lives, the monolithic corporate sector. After all, Wall Street, whose fraud and greed led to the Great Recession, represented such giant corporations. Though doing great damage to our well-being, not one perpetrator of securities fraud was indicted.
All huge corporations wield a great deal of influence, with a goal of affecting all your cultural choices. Most in this sector want to control your mind and body by influencing your consumer and voting choices: principally, getting you to buy a certain product or service and getting you to vote for candidates that lower taxes for their top executives, open up resources for them to exploit, and provide freedom for them to maximize profits at the expense of everything and everyone else.
To achieve these ends, huge profits are used to herd consumers / voters into usually divisive categories, utilizing their media and their political puppets, Republicans.
You might naturally ask, “What does this have to do with massacre of innocent children?” The marketing focus puts the consumer in the individualistic mode. Spending for goods or services is geared to the individual, not the common good. The latter is the part to be derided, even denied. It is the realm of government. Thus the individual is everything. The gunslinger mentality overrides common good.
Republican politicians do not speak common good. Common good is socialism or worse yet, communism. This sets up a total focus for the American, a focus on yourself and toward narcissism. If you watch television programs of “kill and maim,” narcissism is a dominant characteristic of killers, especially serial killers. It is featured as a common attribute of killers in series like Criminal Minds, for example.
In addition, controlling you in the political realm is a priority. Did you notice during the last presidential primary, how Republican candidates tried to outdo one another in their derision of the needy, the vulnerable and the impoverished. Such a condition, they say, is the result of idleness and laziness and is not to be rewarded. There are racial overtones to the image they like to create. Their base actually gloried in such views displayed at Republican debates. Once again, this is individualism run amok, with empathy being mocked — Christianity turned on its head.
Worse yet, Republican campaigns, especially, tend to target proxy groups they harm, deflecting attention away from their economic and social programs that attack the poor, minorities, public schools, unions, and the middle class. The mentally ill can also transfer their blame to others, given this lesson.
Even worse, for radical Republicans, who rule the party now, a gun in the hand is the model for rough and ready individualism. Not to pack is akin to egghead elitism. In fact Republican states, with the NRA as a collaborator, have sanctioned gun laws which actually encourage shooting first. For Americans, guns are freedom, but specifically for men, a gun is akin to sexual potency.
Look at Florida. Using Florida’s Stand Your Ground law as a defense, George Zimmerman stalked and killed an unarmed black teenager last February. He was only arrested after intense national pressure. The most recent Florida shooter was Michael David Dunn, who is licensed for Concealed Carry. He murdered a black teenager, Jordan Davis, pumping 7 shots into his car because the radio was too loud.
According to a Mother Jones study, acute paranoia, delusions, and depression were rampant among the killers. Thirty-five of them committed suicide on or near the scene. Thirty-eight displayed signs of mental health problems before the killings. The policy that led to the release of most of the nation’s mentally ill patients from the hospital to the community is now widely regarded as a major failure. Politicians, civil libertarian lawyers, and psychiatrists have been faulted.
A cost-conscious policy saw politicians like Ronald Reagan relatively empty mental hospitals in California in the 1980s, and severely cut funding for federal mental health programs when president later on. Many of the homeless in US streets today are mentally ill, and many who aren’t homeless have the power to withhold pills that control errant behavior. It is common for police, for fear of their lives, to shoot the mentally ill when called to deter errant behavior.
According to Mother Jones’ study of gun violence, 2012 is the worst in its thirty years of record-keeping.
Can there be any doubt that today’s society, controlled by the rich, promotes personal gain over common good, and that’s not healthy for most of us.
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