If there is one thing that is universal about governmental structures across the globe, be they Communist, Western-Style Democracy, Islamic or some other form, it is a 100% assuredness in Technocracy/Bureaucracy as the solution to any and all problems. Perhaps in Western countries where their Constitutions (or Common Law traditions) are supposedly sacred this tendency makes perfect sense. The Founding Fathers built America’s system to be bureaucratic as a defense against the excesses, abuses and whims of a single ruler or ruling party. So, we can be a bit forgiving to the West for falling into this logic trap, because it at least used to work in their favor and to an extent still does. But in Russia (where I reside) due to many historical events no one has any faith in the government, nor do they obey any laws they disagree with, and yet the answer to any tiny problem from Ivan Average is some vague government program. I have heard the same from those living in Italy, China and beyond – that all problems require a legal paperwork solution. But is this really an answer to anything? And why do all “problems” require a governmental solution?

Case in point, it would seem that over recent years numerous religious institutions have been threatened with violence, and some of the threats have become a reality including a hostage situation in Texas that Fox News describes in the following way…

“As Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was preparing to begin Saturday services on the morning of Jan. 15, 2022, he welcomed a man who had knocked on the window and looked cold inside his synagogue. Cytron-Walker made the man tea and then began his livestreamed Shabbat service. With his back turned to the man, the rabbi recalls hearing a click, turning around, and seeing a gun.

For over 10 hours, this man held Rabbi Cytron-Walker and three other congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.”

Fox also goes on to mention a few other instances in which those who were attending religious services were actually killed in their houses of worship. Of course, every time some tragedy happens on TV/YouTube our monkey brains impose themselves onto the situation, this tendency is especially true among women but men can and do fall prey to it as well. A sort of “what if this happened to me” reasoning makes the public want to demand action to “prevent this sort of thing from happening again”. We human beings may live in a secular world, yet our monkey brains are still filled with lots of magical thinking. Take a look at Hollywood, which is probably the least religious place on Earth, yet every celebrity’s home is filled with magic crystals and other trinkets of supernatural protection. Many of us, if not most of us, really believe that somehow hate, violence, and other bad parts of life can eventually be completely overcome. Our Medieval ancestors certainly prayed to God to intervene against all the awfulness of their brutal lives as only God could provide the utopia we desire, at the very least after we are dead.

The problem is that today, our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers. The state is supposed to provide an explanation to everything and an answer for everything to demonstrate its omnipotence as the justification for our worship and submission. The God of the Bible was okay with being a bit vague, allowing us to think that “everything happens for a reason” even those that we don’t like, and that there is an eternal battle of good vs. evil happening around us that will go on forever until the End Times.

This older version of God was just fine with having some things go unanswered and as the Father of humanity was, just like a human father, happy to let the kids work stuff out on their own. But our Divine Government that replaced the God of the Bible doesn’t have such a Chad attitude. This authority constantly has to take action and try to solve every issue like a nightmarish helicopter parent the only way it knows how… with legislation.

So the “solution” brought forth by Washington’s human-suit technocrats to the problem of violence (and threats of violence) at religious institutions is the “Pray Safe Act”. The details of which look something like this…

The Pray Safe Act, introduced to the U.S. Senate last week, represents a joint effort on the part of U.S. Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) to provide faith-based organizations and houses of worship with easy access to security best practices, federal grant programs, and training.

 Cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), the legislation would direct the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), working with the Department of Justice, the Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and others as deemed appropriate, to create and codify a federal clearinghouse on safety and security best practices for both faith-based organizations and houses of worship.

 That clearinghouse would be responsible for providing these organizations with safety and security recommendations, as well as providing information on federal resources and grant programs available to that end.

So by this logic, the hostage situation in Texas, if we could turn back time, would have been surely avoided thanks to “safety and security recommendations”, “information on federal resources” and corruption’s best friend “grant programs”. How utterly intellectually insulting this is. This is what spitting in the face to every victim of terrorism in U.S. history looks like. The exploitation of 9/11 for Foreign Policy goals was worse, but that does not excuse this fresh pile of madness.

Rather than accepting that horrific things happen from time to time and that overall, the rate of violence in America is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things, the senators listed above have chosen to exploit a tragedy to bloat the government even further and make grant money dance.

This is not a solution to this supposed “problem”, in fact there is no solution. If someone wants to randomly attack someone and kill them, and they are willing to go to jail or die to do it (possibly due to being insane) then they will do it. This is a fact of life, and the God-Government should really step down from its throne of self-assured omnipotence.

Absolutely nothing needs to be done about these acts of terror at religious institutions as murder is already illegal, as is hostage taking, the police in most nations generally blow the heads off of terrorists anyways immediately (“we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and the average person knows that if they try something like this, they will surely die. The government, in this case the U.S. government has had all the proper mechanisms in place for this sort of thing since the 1700s. Everyone in society knows that if you commit an act of terror, you’re done.

Perhaps there is that mental health crisis in America that bloggers talk about. Some say that Feminism has had a brutal affect on men, creating the incel culture that is often at the heart of mass shootings. So perhaps there are means by which we could turn back the clock to a time before the idea of random public mass murder was even fathomable. But this would never SOLVE the problem, only reduce it to an absolute bare minimum, to a level of extreme rarity. I don’t mean to say that truly nothing can be done to defuse these events before they happen, but it is truly impossible to make over 300,000,000 people never commit some form of Terrorism including making threats. You can only punish them afterwards or Judge Dredd them on the spot if they don’t surrender, both of which local, state and federal authorities have already been doing properly since the beginning.

Piling on new legislation, programs, packages, assistance and whatever other buzzwords you can think of onto the legal system as a response to acts of Terror is an insult to the intellect of the American populace and an exploitation of those who were the victims of it. Literally, doing nothing in response would be better than exploiting the dead for political masturbation. We are all trapped in an endless loop of demanding to have more and more bars put around the cage of technocratic imprisonment for “our safety”. If we begin to accept that life will never be a utopia, that it could be better, but will never be perfect, then we can finally be free of this truly universal “logic” that affects everyone, not just America.

A recent school shooting in the United States indicates that the judicial system and the U.S. media are fully prepared to forgive and apologize for acts of violence – if they are carried out by minority groups.

On October 6, Timothy Simpkins, 18, shot four people inside of Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas following a reported altercation with another student. The very next day Simpkins, at the very same time one of his victims was in a coma following surgery, was out of jail after his family posted a $75,000 bond. That was just the first phase of the young Black man’s smooth journey from being a school shooter to a freed man in less than 24 hours later.

After a lengthy manhunt across northern Texas, Simpkins was charged in court not with ‘attempted murder,’ as might be expected in such a case, but rather with three counts of ‘aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.’

The suspect has been taken into custody without incident and charged with multiple counts of Aggravated Assault with a gun. Most students have been safely evacuated from Timberview High School. Thank you for everyone’s help. pic.twitter.com/h9Zs8Zxpze

— Arlington Police, TX (@ArlingtonPD) October 6, 2021

Aside from the leniency shown by the courts (Simpkins faces up to 20 years in prison, however, given the clemency that the U.S. justice system has been showing towards the perpetrators of such acts of violence, it is likely Simpkins will serve a mere fraction of that time, if any), the mainstream media presented a sympathetic portrait of the shooter, saying Simpkins was the victim of “bullying” at school.

“Timothy Simpkins went to live with his grandmother in an Arlington neighborhood where he excelled in school, aspired to be an engineer and enjoyed driving his Dodge Charger around town,” the Dallas Morning News reported, quoting relatives and friends. “He fought back on Wednesday by pulling a handgun from his backpack and firing at his alleged attacker in an Arlington high school classroom. In addition to striking the 15-year-old who had just pummeled him, the bullets hit another student and a teacher who intervened to break up the fight, police said.”

So here we have the media endorsing the story of an 18-year old being “pummeled” by a 15-year old “attacker,” one Zacchaeus Selby, who was struck four times during the gunfire, and who was hospitalized in an induced coma.

When asked why he was being bullied at school, the family said because “he had nice things.” Like, for example, the .45 caliber handgun that Simpkins pulled from his schoolbag and shot Selby with? Those sorts of “nice things?” When police went to Simpkin’s home with a search warrant, they found more firearms. The media, however, never clarified what type of weapons and how many.

The question that must be asked after reading the media’s apologetic explanation for the shooter’s violent behavior is: ‘would the liberal mainstream media show the same sort of apologetic tone for a white student who had just shot four people in a school, leaving one in a coma’?

In these post-George Floyd, Black Lives Matter times, the answer to that question leans heavily towards ‘not a chance in hell.’ In fact, the story of Timothy Simpkins has already vanished from all mainstream media sites. Had this been the story of a white teenager firing a gun in school, allegedly to protect himself from a much younger “attacker,” the liberal media would never have given the shooter the benefit of the doubt. Instead, they’d have been running with the ‘white supremacist, let’s rewrite the Second Amendment’ narrative.

A very disturbing trend has emerged in the United States ever since Black Lives Matter and other activist organizations, flush with over one billion dollars in donations from Corporate America, commenced on a cross-country smash and burn campaign following the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer on May 25, 2020.

The activists, motivated to rage by the media script that asserts ‘all white people are racists (as opposed to the much more likely ‘police are overworked’ narrative), enjoyed more than just cart blanche support from the usual suspects. They enjoyed – and continue to enjoy – a judicial system that has been largely ‘radicalized’ by financiers like George Soros, who has been pay-rolling the elections of radical progressive attorney generals since at least 2016.

“Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system,” Politico reported back in 2016 when Black Lives Matter was just a flash in the pan. “The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.”

The result of that usurpation of the courts by radical leftists became painfully obvious last summer as progressive judges, in cahoots with Hollywood, which helped pay the bail of arrested BLM and Antifa activists, saw to it that criminals were released back onto the streets. This is what is known as “criminal reform” by the progressives and their lapdog media.

One such beneficiary of Soros cash is Kimberly Gardner, the prosecutor for the city of St. Louis, Missouri. The news program 60 Minutes summed up her work since entering office in 2017: “She went right to work. She stopped locking up non-violent offenders, dropped low level drug cases and ended cash bail – a system that hit Black citizens hardest. But less than a year into the job, her hopes of building trust in police suffered a setback…”

So how are those progressive reforms working out for the city of St. Louis? Basically the same as they are in liberal-run cities across the nation – horrendously.

In 2020, St. Louis recorded 262 murders, its worst rate in the past 50 years. Nationwide, 21,570 Americans lost their lives last year by homicide, the largest single-year increase in murders since the FBI began tracking crime statistics six decades ago.

The tragic reality is that with young Black men largely incentivized to carry out acts of violence by a defunct court system that is more interested in the rights of criminals than the victims, the United States can expect its current crime wave to continue unabated. And with the U.S. economy appearing to be headed for the abyss, this is news that will make any future economic downturn all the more unsightly and extremely dangerous. America must get its streets and courts back in order before it’s too late.

And when there is no obvious explanation — as in Las Vegas in 2017, when the mass murderer doesn’t leave a final message, doesn’t appear to have subscribed to extremist politics and was financially secure but drank a lot and may have bought into internet conspiracy theories — we shrug our shoulders and forget about it. But deep inside, we believe there is a simple answer. We just haven’t discovered it yet.

Gun control advocates want to ban assault rifles like the semi-automatic AR-15 used in so many mass shootings. But even if those guns disappeared overnight, gun-related massacres would still happen, albeit with lower body counts, which would be nice, but it wouldn’t address the big question, the one we secretly ask ourselves after such incidents: Where does the rage?

Flailing about in search of the enablers of personal mass violence (as opposed to state-ordered mass violence) is useful as far as it goes. The National Rifle Association and the gun lobby make money with every firearm purchase. Victims of mental illness go uninsured and thus undiagnosed and untreated. Hateful rhetoric, most common on the right and most recently epitomized by President Donald Trump, legitimize the dehumanization of future victims.

In the beginning, though, is rage.

The blind anger that, like the medieval image of a succubus insinuating itself into a previously healthy brain, suggests shooting a lot of people is either a solution or at least a satisfying way of venting, is the germ of the idea that leads to the first shot being fired at a military base, an elementary school, a country music concert.

The rage says, “I hate everybody.” It continues, “I wish everyone would die.” It concludes, “I will kill them all.”

I am mystified by the fact that so many people are mystified about rage.

I have been there. I have hated everyone. I have been so depressed that I didn’t care what happened to me. I was furious at how oblivious everyone was to my pain and how nobody cared about me. I wanted them to pay for it. Haven’t you ever felt that way?

Mostly, it was when I was younger. In junior high school, when I was relentlessly bullied and beaten up and neither my classmates nor my teachers interfered — to the contrary, they thought it was funny — I fantasized about going to school and shooting everyone there.

When I was a junior in college, I spent finals week at the hospital due to a freak injury.Several of my professors refused to allow me to take a make-up exam because they were lazy. I got F’s and landed on academic probation. The following semester, one mean teacher gave me a C-plus, and so I got expelled. I lost my job, my dorm room and thus a place to live and wound up homeless on the streets of New York. Watching people go about their day, smiling and laughing and exchanging pleasantries and buying luxuries while I was starving, I despised them. Of course, it wasn’t their fault. I knew that. What was their fault, in my view at the time, was their active decision to not engage in the struggle for a world that was fair and just, not just to me but to everybody.

I imagine that most if not all homeless people feel that way watching me stroll down the street on my stupid smartphone. They hate me, and they are right to hate me.

The NRA and the weapons business and Congress share responsibility, but what really causes mass shootings is the shooters’ alienation from society.

Why doesn’t America enforce mental health insurance parity? Because the American people don’t care enough to raise enough hell to force our elected officials to do so. If you have ever been broke and needed to see a therapist, you probably found out they charge at least $200 an hour and your insurance company probably won’t cover it — assuming you have insurance. American society’s message is loud and clear: We don’t care about you. Go ahead and be insane. Die. Returning society’s contempt for you is perfectly understandable.

The so-called incel (involuntarily celebate) movement of men who hate women because they won’t sleep with them is a perfect example of society’s refusal to try to understand a legitimate concern. In 2014, an incel killed six people near Santa Barbara, California. “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it,” the killer said in a video he posted before his rampage. In 2018, an incel killed 10 people in Toronto with his van.

Experts recommend writing laws to deny incels access to guns, shutting down their online forums so they don’t work each other up and improving their access to mental health care. Those may be good ideas. But they ignore the root of the problem.

Obviously, no one has to have sex with anyone. Incels don’t have a constitutional right to get laid. But anyone who has ever been young and sexually frustrated (or old and sexually frustrated) knows that sexlessness can literally drive you crazy. Glibly suggesting to awkward or clueless or physically unattractive men that they hit the gym and get their charm on is just as hopelessly naive as Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. Feeling condemned to a life without love or physical companionship really, truly sucks, and we could start by acknowledging that.

Rage, I think, comes less from having a problem that feels hopelessly unsolvable than from the belief that no one gives a damn about you or your issues. People need to feel heard. People need to be heard.

Given how callous and unfeeling we are about so much suffering around us and among us, the only thing surprising about mass shootings is that they don’t happen more frequently.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” He is on Twitter @TedRall. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.

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Gun ownership has prevented untold deaths, assaults and robberies over the years, yet that positive news rarely features high in the media. By comparison, the public is bombarded with endless days of non-stop reporting with every Columbine, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas and El Paso tragedy to the point that it seems only a matter of time when the pendulum of public opinion swings in favor of major anti-gun laws. Such a day would most likely herald in an epic showdown between US liberals and conservatives the likes of which the country has never seen.

The situation has escalated to the point when political leaders, not least of all the POTUS, are hamstrung from speaking out about specific problems affecting the country lest they actually be accused of aiding and abetting would-be psychopaths. For example, Donald Trump, speaking about the dire situation at the US-Mexico border, called the influx of illegals into the country an “invasion.” Which is exactly what it is.

Yet when Patrick Crusius, 21, who shot and killed 22 people at an El Paso shopping center in early August, penned a manifesto using the “invasion” description, the American leader was accused of fanning the flames of hate, as if he was the only person to have acknowledged the crisis. If anything, the partisan standoff demonstrates the dangerous crossroads at where the Democrats and Republicans now find themselves on so many issues, with gun rights front and center.

Like clockwork, with every mass shooting the Democrats demand stricter gun control laws without ever considering other possible roots to the problem. Americans, after all, have owned guns since the days of the nation’s founding yet only within the last several decades has the incident of mass shootings become a regularly occurring event. What has changed? For starters, how about the number of Americans who are using antidepressants? On average, a whopping 13 percent of the population has taken some sort of antidepressants “in the past month” (2017), while the percentage of people using and abusing this medication, according to the latest statistics, surged 64 percent between 1999 and 2014.

“A common thread amongst the most horrific school shootings of the past 25 years is that the majority of the shooters were taking a psychiatric medication,” wrote Hyla Cass, M.D., following the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

This glaringly neglected side of the argument has been exposed by numerous studies on the subject, yet politicians on the left, together with the left-leaning mainstream media, rarely inform the public about the link between gun violence and drug use. Instead, they go ‘nuclear,’ as it were, demanding that America’s millions of law-abiding gun owners submit to regulatory measures.

Here is just one Catch-22 scenario facing gun owners: as the prescription of antidepressant medication increases exponentially, together with the aggressive behavior linked to such drug use, it becomes increasingly easy for practically anyone to fall into the category of “medically dependent,” which may someday warrant a person losing their gun rights. The question is worth pondering considering the unprecedented amount of people now on antidepressants. Would some future universal gun ownership directory be matched up against medical records, depriving millions of their guns?

The Democrats have proposed expanding background checks for potential gun owners, as well as passing so-called red flag laws (otherwise known as Extreme Risk Protection Order Laws), which are intended to keep guns away from “high-risk” individuals. In reality, however, they are a cure worse than the disease, where we believe we can accost individuals to disrupt some future illegal activity. Such was the theme of the 2002 Tom Cruise film Minority Report where criminals are apprehended before a crime has been committed thanks to the psychic work of a special police unit. Such outlandish legislation is being touted not just by the perennial anti-gun Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, but from influential Republicans, including Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who seems to have alienated thousands of erstwhile supporters with just a single tweet.

The solutions aren’t obvious, even if we pretend they are. But we must try. Let’s start with the TAPS Act. Maybe also implement state “red flag” laws, or gun violence restraining orders. Stop them before they can hurt someone.https://t.co/2G2pZSWaF1

— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) August 4, 2019

At the same time, Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio is working to pass legislation that has been described as “red laws on steroids.”

“Rubio’s TAPS Act would encourage law enforcement to give EVERYONE a personal threat assessment (adults and children) and single out those they deem as future threats,” writes David Leach in The Strident Conservative. “That information would then be used as a kind of Precog substitute to “stop dangerous individuals before they can commit an act of violence.”

Such slippery-slope legislation would empower anyone – from an acquaintance to a family member to a police officer – to file a complaint with regards to a particular individual they may deem “suspicious.” Perhaps the person is not even mentally ill, but rather just very outspoken on social media about a particular issue, like illegal migrants arriving through the crack in the US-Mexico border, for example. Let’s be honest. What liberal would not jump at the chance of filing a report on some NRA member they despise on Twitter, for example? And judging from what we already know about social justice warriors and their uncanny ability to get legislation passed in their favor, it’s not difficult to imagine the authorities appearing at the crack of dawn at some gun owner’s residence with a court order to seize all weapons.

That is the intrinsic problem with these ref-flag laws. Once authority is granted to seize guns from suspected ‘high-risk’ individuals – on the face of it, not a bad-sounding proposal –the door for interpreting who should be deemed suspicious, and on what grounds, and by whom will challenge the US justice system, not to mention the US Constitution, in a million different ways.

In the end, it may be the law-abiding gun owner who loses his or her constitutional rights to not only the Second Amendment, but the Fourth as well, under every conceivable “perceived threat” excuse imaginable. We cannot allow the government to believe they can play psychic mind readers when it comes to our inalienable rights.

Two mass shootings have rocked the United States in less than 24 hours, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded. The first in El Paso, Texas was allegedly perpetrated by a white supremacist whose racist motives are outlined in a rambling “manifesto”, the second allegedly by a self-described “leftist” whose motives, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, are presently unknown. These incidents occurred a week after another mass shooting in Gilroy, California.

All the usual US gun control debates have of course reignited, which is understandable. Alongside this debate, however, we are seeing another, far more pernicious agenda being raised that I would like to address here.

Malcolm discusses the need for congress to pass domestic terrorism laws. @MalcolmNance #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/PWlH85IYF6

— La Femme Nikita (@LaF3mm3Nikita) 4 августа 2019 г.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, notorious liar and propagandist Malcolm Nance claimed that existing laws aren’t sufficient for prosecuting the El Paso shooter, because there are no laws designating his act of mass murder as “domestic terrorism”.

“I think that Congress needs to take up right away a series of domestic terrorism laws,” Nance said. “It’d be very simple: just match them to the words ‘international terrorism’, so that a member of al-Qaeda and a member of a white nationalist terrorist cell or a militia that thinks they’re going to carry out international acts of terrorism are equal all the way around. Right now there are no laws called ‘domestic terrorism law’. They can get you for firearms, they get you for hate crimes, but you are not treated as a terrorist. This act in El Paso was clearly by all definitions a terrorist attack in the United States, but of course by the nature of the person being white and American he can’t be treated like a member of ISIS or al-Qaeda. He can’t even be detained, he can only be treated as a murderer.”

(The accused, for the record, is in fact under arrest currently, and prosecutors say that they are treating it as a domestic terrorism case for which they are seeking the death penalty. This is in Texas; he’ll be dead before the next Fast & Furious movie. Nance’s notion that prosecutors’ hands are somehow tied here is silly.)

“But he’s a murderer with a political intent who is spreading an ideology,” Nance continued. “So Congress should take that up immediately. And let’s see if the White House won’t sign that legislation. That would be very revealing.”

In other words, shove the legislation through and call anyone who opposes it a Nazi lover.

Years of misguided alarmism over “Islamic terrorism” resulted in the erosion of civil liberties, militarization of police, and a host of other bad outcomes. Applying the same alarmist logic to “white nationalist terrorism” is likely to produce a host of similarly bad outcomes

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) 4 августа 2019 г.

Political commentary is flooded with the word “terrorism” today. People are demanding that the El Paso shooter in particular and white supremacists in general be labeled terrorists by the narrative-making commentariat, and you know what? I totally get it. The push since 9/11 to tar Muslims as “terrorists” has been extremely obnoxious and fueled by hate and bigotry, so it makes sense for progressive-minded people to push for the egalitarian usage of that term. But before doing so, please reflect on what lessons we learned from the post-9/11 “Islamic terrorism” scare.

“Years of misguided alarmism over ‘Islamic terrorism’ resulted in the erosion of civil liberties, militarization of police, and a host of other bad outcomes. Applying the same alarmist logic to ‘white nationalist terrorism’ is likely to produce a host of similarly bad outcomes,” tweeted independent journalist Michael Tracey in response to the chatter.

“I am telling you now that the government will use the violence that Trump himself has rallied as an excuse for more militarization, more surveillance, more violations of civil liberties — and a lot of people are going to welcome these things because they are afraid,” tweeted Truthout’s Kelly Hayes. “I’m not guessing or being creative here. This is about having a sense of history and a sense of how these systems function in the present. I would love to be wrong. I would celebrate being wrong. But I’m not.”

Indeed, it is an established fact that the US government will use the narrative about the need to fight terrorism to advance pre-existing agendas. The first draft of the massive USA Patriot Act was introduced a week after the 9/11 attacks, far too fast for anyone to have gathered the necessary information from all the relevant government bodies about what changes were necessary and typed out the hundreds of pages of the bill. Legislators later admitted that they didn’t even have time to read through the densely worded bill before passing it the next month, so to believe that it could have been written in a week would be childish.

High-altitude surveillance balloons have been deployed over America to “deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats” via “hi-tech radar”. To be clear, this is not something they’re considering or opening up for public debate. This has already happened. https://t.co/q7IKr5WMLN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) 3 августа 2019 г.

In 2011 then-Congressman Ron Paul told Politico that “the Patriot Act was written many, many years before 9/11,” adding that the attacks simply provided “an opportunity for some people to do what they wanted to do.” Paul was serving in Congress when the Patriot Act was passed. The Act has since been used to erode human rights at home and abroad by destroying Fourth Amendment protections and legalizing Orwellian surveillance, and it’s safe to assume that the opaque and unaccountable government agencies who were greatly empowered by it had already wanted this to happen.

I have no easy answers for America’s mass shooting epidemic, and as an Australian I see the gun control debate as outside my sovereign territory. I will simply suggest, as I so often do, that if Americans really want to address the problem then the best place to start is to do the first ever honest and in-depth study on the effects of domestic propaganda on the American mind, particularly war propaganda. There are only so many times a certain type of mind can be told violence-glorifying lies before it snaps; if anyone researches mass shootings in the light of the constant psychological abuse that Americans suffer at the hands of their mass media, I guarantee they’ll find a connection. Americans are the most propagandized people on earth because of their proximity to the most strategically crucial part of the empire; it’s not a coincidence that they’re also by far the most prone to mass shootings.

One thing I can tell you won’t fix your problems, America, and that’s listening to the propagandists who want you to hand over even more control to a government that has already begun floating high-altitude surveillance balloons over your country without your permission.

Don’t let them bully you with fear.

medium.com

Tragically, in America, mass shootings — in which murdering psychopaths go on rampages in public spaces — have claimed the lives of 339 people since 2015. While this number is certainly shocking and far too high, during this same time frame, police in America have claimed the lives of 4,355 citizens.

While some of these citizens were armed and dangerous, others were innocent, unarmed, and include small children. Daniel Shaver was one of these people whose life was brought to a screeching halt as he begged on his knees for police not to shoot him. Despite being innocent and unarmed, this father of three was murdered in cold blood by Philip Brailsford who was never held accountable and allowed to retire from the police force with his pension.

Jeremy Mardis was another one of these citizens who was gunned down in cold blood by two killer cops. Mardis was just 6-years-old when he was murdered by these killer cops — one of whom was released last month after serving less than two years for his role in this innocent child’s death. 

The list goes on. Yet despite its increasing length, most American citizens think that reining in America’s deadly police problem is somehow “unpatriotic” or “un-American.” Instead of the right realizing the threat to freedom caused by cops who can kill thousands with impunity, they blame the left. Instead of the left realizing the threat to freedom caused by cops who kill with impunity, most of them blame guns.

The result of this complacency and failure to address the problem has been less freedom and more gun grabs. 

Sadly, most people who call for gun control fail to realize what that actually means—only the government has the guns. And, if the above numbers are any indicator of what that would mean, this would be a horrific scenario.

Every time a lunatic, who is usually on some form mind-altering pharmaceutical, goes on a shooting rampage, the do-gooders in Washington, with the aid of their citizen flocks, take to the TV and the internet to call for disarming the American people.

The citizens who call for themselves and their neighbors to be disarmed, likely think no deeper than the shallow speeches given by the political blowhards, designed to appeal to emotion only. They do not think of what happens during and after the government attempts to remove guns from society. They also completely ignore the fact that criminals do not obey laws and making guns illegal would have zero effect on criminals possessing guns.

In the perfect statist world in which only the government has guns, we’re told that crime rates would plummet, people wouldn’t be murdered, gun violence would be brought to its knees, and a disarmed heaven on Earth would ensue. But how effective would disarming the citizens actually be at preventing gun violence, while at the same time keeping guns in the hands of government?

One simple way to determine the outcome to look at the above numbers and compare mass shootings in America with those killed by police. It is entirely too easy to compare all senseless murders carried out by the state to those carried out by citizens, so we will zoom in with a microscope.

However, just as a point of reference, in the 20th Century alone, governments were responsible for 260,000,000 deaths worldwide. That number is greater than all deaths from illicit drug use, STD’s, Homicides, and Traffic Accidents — combined.

Now, on to the micro-comparison.

According to a comprehensive database of all American mass shootings that have taken place since 2015, constructed by Mother Jones, there have been exactly 339 deaths attributed to mass shootings that have taken place on American soil.

As Mother Jones notes, in their database, they exclude shootings stemming from more conventional crimes such as armed robbery or gang violence. Other news outlets and researchers have published larger tallies that include a wide range of gun crimes in which four or more people have been either wounded or killed. While those larger datasets of multiple-victim shootings may be useful for studying the broader problem of gun violence, our investigation provides an in-depth look at the distinct phenomenon of mass shootings—from the firearms used to mental health factors and the growing copycat problem.

If we compare the 339 citizens killed in mass shootings to citizens killed by police in the same time frame, the comparison is off the charts. We are talking about a 1,280 percent difference.

Already, in 2019, American police have killed 488 people. This number is set to increase by one, on average, every 8 hours. 

Since 2015, cops in America have killed 4,355 citizens. And most people are not saying anything about it.

As Truth Out recently reported:

The institutional racism rooted in American policing prevents the public from categorizing police shootings as gun violence, Natacia Knapper with Stop Police Terror Project DC explained to Truthout via email. “A large swath of people in our nation — white people in particular, but many others as well — don’t want to reckon with the horrors police have caused in communities of color because to do this would call into question the entire way we have viewed these systems and their roles in our society.” News media consumption, television shows and movies constantly reinforce the belief that policing is an irreplaceable institution keeping society safe and stable. Unlearning this “truth” is akin to unlearning that the Earth is round. Knapper continued, “For many Americans, I think it’s easier to compartmentalize the type of gun violence that comes from the police as “other” and incidents that result in the brutalizing and death of American citizens — Black, Brown or otherwise — are treated as individual instances that are not connected to a larger, overarching problem.” Police and the media exploit this divide when they describe the police violence victims’ unrelated criminal history or the victims’ possession of a gun or pocket knife, regardless of whether it was a factor during the killing. The underlying message is that the deceased deserved to die in order to keep everyone else safe.

As the blowhards spew their nonsense about grabbing guns from law-abiding citizens and those in government demand action, all of these people conveniently ignore the giant pink elephant in the living room — cops in America are killing citizens at an alarming rate.

Ironically enough, those calling for taking guns from citizens are often times the ones most critical of police killings. How, exactly, they rationalize disarming the citizens and having only police, who kill far more people than mass shooters, be the sole possessors of guns, is a mystery.

Indeed, Radley Balko sums up the mental gymnastics of both parties perfectly in regard to the distorted realities held as “truth.”

Red: “We need guns to protect us from the government. Also, it is unpatriotic to second-guess when armed government employees kill people.”

Blue: “The government has a history of racism and oppression. Guns are instruments of death. Only government employees should have guns.”

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) November 9, 2017

In the United States, the overall homicide rate is 4.9 per 100,000 among the citizens.

Thanks to independent watchdog groups who have decided to document this number on their own, we have a total number of citizens killed by police. Given that America has roughly 765,000 sworn police officers, that means the police-against-citizen kill rate is more than 145 per 100,000.

The police kill rate is nearly 30 times that of the average citizen, yet somehow people still call for disarming citizens and say nothing about the police. And no, the citizens are not becoming more violent. In fact, humanity is at its safest time in history—ever—and, in spite of the lunatic terrorists shooting up public places, violent crimes as well as all crime continues to drop, significantly.

The next time your friends try to tell you that citizens should be disarmed, tell them what that really means; they only want government, who has a history of racism and violence, who kill indiscriminately, with zero accountability, and far more often, to be the ones with guns.

thefreethoughtproject.com

Mass shootings in the US – involving four or more persons – occur on an almost daily basis. The most recent major atrocity was in Virginia Beach last month in which 12 people were killed. The shooter was reportedly a military veteran.

Turns out that US military veterans are disproportionately responsible for violent gun deaths among American civilians. Investigative journalist David Swanson has recently found that some 35 per cent of mass shootings in the US have involved an ex-serviceman. Swanson studied a database sample of 97 recent deadly incidents, and found that, from publicly available information, more than a third of the perpetrators were listed at some time in the past as having served in the military. The journalist cautions that the actual proportion could be much higher due to lack of publicly available information on the other shooters.

Swanson emphasizes an obvious point that the vast majority of US military veterans are not mass shooters. Nevertheless, the factor of having served in the armed forces and the frequency of mass shootings does appear to be a highly significant correlation. What’s more, he says that it is strangely conspicuous how US corporate news media have not delved into what seems to be an urgent issue concerning gun violence in American society.

The reluctance by news media and politicians to acknowledge such a factor is no doubt because it would open up a Pandora’s Box of self-indictment. It raises painful questions about a host of issues that Americans take for granted as normal: the militarization of US culture and society, where young children are compelled to salute the stars and stripes and sing paeans to American “greatness”; the obscene expenditure of over $700 billion a year on military instead of on public services and social development; the near-permanent deployment of US military forces all around the world in countless illegal wars; the blasé indifference to war crimes committed by US servicemen, whereby even President Donald Trump wants to grant amnesty to killers in uniforms.

On the latter issue, it should be deplored, but isn’t, how a congressman and former veteran recently went on a mainstream news channel and appeared to brush off mass killings and other war crimes committed by US forces as being a routine occurrence, and therefore in his view no big deal. His chillingly nonchalant views were aired with barely a murmur of public reaction, never mind condemnation.

America’s criminal overseas military rampaging over several decades is bound to take a grim toll on society at home. Veterans return home traumatized in body and mind from the horror of mass violence they have participated in or witnessed. The American public pay the price from ballooning budgets for veterans’ medical care. They also pay a price from broken families and myriad pathological problems, ranging from drug abuse to suicides. It is reckoned that more US veterans have lost their lives by suicide than were killed in action during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American ex-military personnel turning guns on themselves. Why is that?

Put starkly, it cannot be expected that US military forces inflict millions of casualties in foreign countries and for that slaughter not to be manifest at home in some pathological way or another.

Millions of young Americans, mostly from poor, deprived backgrounds, are trained to use lethal weaponry funded by billions of dollars at public expense. After they are sent to shoot up foreign countries while loaded up on paranoid propaganda that often dehumanizes, these professional killers are then unceremoniously dumped back in their home country, often without jobs or a future, and often with haunting memories of crimes conducted in the service of “American greatness” – whose “greatness” does not extend to treating them as human beings.

This brutalizing subject needs a lot more research. What is the definitive number of US military veterans involved in American society mass shootings? Swanson, the journalist, seems to have tapped a very significant causal factor. But a bigger database of mass shooting incidents should be studied and the military history of all the shooters disclosed. As Swanson surmises, the proportion of ex-servicemen involved in mass killings is likely to be a lot more than 35 per cent.

It should also be studied how many of the veterans involved in mass shootings were deployed overseas.

Another interesting aspect is to track the incidents of gun violence in the US as a function of time, decade by decade, over the past century. We might expect that as the number of illegal American wars have multiplied in the past two decades, so too have the number of violent gun deaths at home.

Last week, US President Trump and other Western leaders paid tribute to the sacrifices of American veterans during the Second World War. That war is commonly thought of as a “good war”, meaning that the soldiers went into battle motivated by a noble conviction to defeat Nazi tyranny.

In the seven decades after WWII, American forces have been deployed in dozens of wars overseas, from Korea (1950-53) to presently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria among several other countries. Arguably, not one of those American wars since WWII was, or is, justified by any genuine noble cause, despite official Washington and US media propaganda claims. They were all waged by American rulers with imperialistic calculations for strategic objectives benefiting elite interests. In short, criminal wars systematically perpetrated and repeated non-stop with impunity, without ever there being a critical accounting or prosecution.

However, inevitably if there is such a thing as natural justice, the crimes that American rulers commit through illegal wars are eventually repatriated back to American society. The foreign bodies mutilated in foreign lands by US military eventually appear in the form of blood-splattered American civilians.

That’s an excruciating heavy price which American citizens are not even permitted to learn or talk about by their corporate media. The acceptability of horrific violence abroad is supposed to be acceptable at home, according to the comfortably numb US mass media.

Indeed, it can be deduced, the dutiful, apathetic US corporate-controlled media are part of the mass-killing machine that is American imperial power. Cue “Russia-gate”, celebrity gossip, political trivia, sports and weather news. Anything but the appalling, bloody reality of American state terrorism.

What is without question the worst mass shooting in New Zealand’s history took place on Friday when shooters, 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant among them, opened fire at two Christchurch mosques. Four, including Tarrant, have been arrested for the heinous act, which claimed at least 49 innocent lives. Tarrant was responsible for killing more than 40 victims, among them several children, in a rampage he live-streamed on Facebook, sending chills throughout the Muslim community, particularly Muslims living in Western countries.

Tarrant’s motives and ideology, laid bare in a 74-page manifesto, show a concern over the fertility rates of non-white groups as well as the immigration of non-whites to countries like New Zealand and Australia, which he likened to an “invasion” that threatened the white majority in those countries. However, Tarrant — in his ignorance — failed to grasp that many of the Muslim immigrants he targeted had come to New Zealand after fleeing Western-backed invasions, occupations, or persecution in their home countries.

Notable among Tarrant’s views is the fact that he is a clear ethno-nationalist, promoting his view that different ethnic groups must be kept “separate, unique, undiluted in [sic] unrestrained in cultural or ethnic expression and autonomy.” Tarrant also claimed that he doesn’t necessarily hate Muslims and only targeted those Muslims {i.e., immigrants) that chose “to invade our lands, live on our soil and replace our people.”

He also stated that he chose to target Muslims because “Islamic nations, in particular, have high birth rates, regardless of race or ethnicity” and to satiate “a want for revenge against Islam for the 1,300 years of war and devastation that it has brought upon the people of the West and other peoples of the world.” His views are remarkably similar to those of Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, which is unsurprising given that Tarrant named him as an inspiration for the shooting.

Though many — in the hours after the shooting — have sought to place blame and point fingers at notable demagogues like President Donald Trump or “counter-jihad” alt-right figures like Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl, it is important to place Tarrant’s motivations in context.

It is a classic “divide and conquer” scam aimed at keeping Westerners divided from Muslims in their own countries and abroad. The horrific shooting in Christchurch is a testament to its unfortunate success and pervasiveness, as well as a potent reminder that it must be stopped. Indeed, this manufactured Islamophobia has made it so that Muslims in their home countries are in danger of dying from Western-backed wars and, if they flee to the “safer” West, they have targets on their backs painted by the very war propaganda used to justify Western military adventurism in Muslim-majority nations.

Islam, the media and “Forever Wars”: Who’s the “real” terrorist?

Since September 11th and the advent of the “War on Terror,” mass media reporting increasingly began to conflate Muslims and Muslim-majority nations with war, terrorism and violence in general. Indeed, 9 out of 10 mainstream news reports on Muslims, Islam, and Islamic organizations are related to violence and Muslims who are named on mainstream media are all-too-frequently warlords or terrorist leaders.

This near-constant association of Islam and violence has created the false perception that the religion of Islam, by its very nature, is violent and that Muslims too must then be violent and thus dangerous. This media-driven association has had very real and troubling consequences. For instance, a 2010 study by the University of Exeter found “empirical evidence to demonstrate that assailants of Muslims are invariably motivated by a negative view of Muslims they have acquired from either mainstream or extremist nationalist reports or commentaries in the media.” In other words, Islamophobic media reports are directly related to hate crimes targeting Muslims.

This is no accident, as such biased reporting on Muslim-majority nations also began as Western-backed wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan sought to put these countries’ natural resources, namely their oil and mineral wealth, into the hands of American corporations. It should be no surprise then that top funders of media outlets that have routinely promoted Islamophobic narratives are also those who have profited considerably from the “War on Terror” and Western-backed regime-change wars in other countries.

This concerted effort to vilify Muslims has had the potent effect, likely by design, of reducing empathy among Westerners for the largely Muslim victims of Western military adventurism in Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, while mainstream news outlets often trumpet the imminent dangers Americans face from “radical Islamic terror,” the death toll of innocent people — most of them Muslim — that have been killed by the U.S.-led “War on Terror” is several orders of magnitude greater than the number of Americans who have died from all terror attacks over that same period.

For instance, from 2001 to 2013, an estimated 3,380 Americans died from domestic and foreign terrorism, including the September 11 attacks as well as acts of domestic terrorism carried out by white nationalists and supremacists. If one excludes the September 11 death toll, the number of American deaths over that same period stands at around 400, most of them victims of mass-killers who were not Muslim.

By comparison, an estimated 8 million innocent people in Muslim-majority nations died as a result of U.S. policies and wars in the Middle East and North Africa from 2001 to 2015. Yet, the magnitude of this loss of life of these “unworthy victims” is minimized by media and government silence, and the creation of a climate of Islamophobia in the West has only served to deepen the ease with which mass murder is accepted by the aggressor countries’ populations.

Beyond the staggering disparity in the death tolls caused by terror groups and Western-backed imperialist wars is the fact that many of these very Western governments that purport to be so concerned with “radical Islamic terror” have often created and funded the most notorious terror groups of all. Indeed, the U.S. government helped to create Al Qaeda and continues to protectits Syrian branch — Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — in Syria’s Idlib province to this day. In addition, the CIA was just recently revealed to be helping the Islamic State regroup in Syrian refugee camps. Furthermore, the U.S. has long turned a blind eye to the funding of terror groups by allied states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The role of Western money, arms and policy in the creation and maintenance of radical Wahhabi terrorist groups is often entirely ignored by Western media portrayals of Muslim-majority nations, thereby creating a false image that such violence is endemic to these nations when, in fact, it is often imported state-sponsored terror.

These nuances of the situation are rarely heard in the narratives parroted out on mainstream media and those who regularly consume mainstream news sources are more likely than not to support those narratives. For that reason, it is easy to see how someone like Donald Trump — who is said to watch television for eight hours every day, much of it Fox News — has espoused the views that he has. Thanks to the manufacturing of Islamophobia of mainstream media, racist policies like the so-called “Muslim ban” have found wide support, as this false narrative has conflated Islam with violence so often that many have come to believe that only by banning Islam can violence and terrorism in the U.S. be reduced.

However, the recent shooting in Christchurch, as well as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting and other recent acts of domestic terrorism, should alert us to the fact that it is the hate manufactured by this false narrative that is itself endangering American lives while also covering up the mass murder that has been perpetrated by the U.S. and other governments around the world for decades.

Israel’s leading role in stoking ethnonationalism

While the realities of post-9/11 America, as well as the rise in visibility of white ethnonationalism during the Trump Era, have done much to normalize attacks on immigrants, the country that has done the most to normalize anti-Muslim terrorism over this same time frame has been the state of Israel.

Israel, from its founding days, has long been steeped in neocolonialist ideology that is remarkably similar to the ideological basis behind other settler states like the United States, Australia and New Zealand. This system of beliefs holds that the native inhabitants of the land — whether the Palestinians, the Sioux or the Maori — are “primitive” and incompetent and that the land would have remained “wild” and undeveloped were it not for the “fortunate” appearance of European settlers. As MintPressnoted in a previous report on the subject, such narratives cast these settlers as both superior and normal while the natives become inferior and abnormal, thus obfuscating the settler’s status as foreigner and conqueror.

In Israel’s case, this ideology has promoted the idea that all Arabs are “sons of the desert” while the desert simultaneously represents a barbaric obstacle to “progress” and development. However, the state of Israel, under the lengthy tenure of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has seen these long-standing and somewhat hidden underpinnings of the Zionist state burst out into the open.

The result has been the overt expression of ethnonationalism in such a way that Israel has become an inspiration to white nationalists in the United States, like Richard Spencer, and far-right ethno-fascist leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi. The inspiration has been mutual, according to reports and testimonials published by Jewish newspaper The Forward.

For years, through its military occupation of Palestine, Israel’s government and military have sought to paint all Palestinians, including children, as “terrorists” or “terrorist sympathizers.” Take, for example, current Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who wrote in 2014, “This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people …”

A more recent example came from former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who asserted just last year that “no innocent people” live in the Gaza Strip and that every inhabitant in the enclave is somehow connected to Hamas, even though nearly half of Gaza’s population are children and teenagers. Such rhetoric has become par for the course and numerous examples show that Shaked and Lieberman’s views are increasingly accepted and “normal” in today’s Israel.

Yet, the clearest indication of anti-Muslim terror’s normalization in Israel is the recent rise of Otzma Yehudit, or the “Jewish Power” Party. This party, founded by devotees of radical American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, has now merged — at Netanyahu’s urging — with the Jewish Home Party and stands to become part of Israel’s ruling coalition if Netanyahu manages to win in the country’s upcoming elections.

Despite official condemnation, Goldstein’s atrocious act has been the subject of praise and inspiration for subsequent extremists who, under Netanyahu’s government, have become increasingly normalized. Goldstein’s gravestone reads “He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land” and continues to be used as a site of pilgrimage and homage by the very extremists that Netanyahu is openly courting for political gain.

While the followers of Kahane are making a comeback in Israel, several notable Arab political parties have been banned from participating Israel’s upcoming elections, with some being accused of “supporting terrorism” owing to their opposition to Israel’s decades-long military occupation of Palestine. Yet, by elevating clear terror supporters among the ranks of the Jewish Power Party, it has become increasingly clear that openly supporting and advocating anti-Muslim terrorism is no bar to legitimacy and political power in today’s Israel.

No ‘clash of civilizations,’ only manipulation and exploitation of differences

The tragic and barbaric shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand is yet another horrific and glaring reminder that the “divide and conquer” war propaganda that has sought to promote the so-called “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, West and East, has not only been monstrously effective but continues to be monstrously destructive to people on both sides.

However, the media’s manufacture of Islamophobia, in seeking to Wite-out Muslim suffering and reduce Western empathy for innocent Muslim civilians, has increasingly placed targets on the back of Muslims everywhere — in the West and the East — making it increasingly difficult for practitioners of the Islamic faith to feel safe regardless of where they live.

With most Muslim-majority countries now killing fields in Western-backed wars, ruled by oppressive, Western-backed dictatorships, or under threat of Western-backed regime change, even those Muslims who have sought a safer, quieter life in the “civilized” West have now found themselves targets thanks to the very war propaganda used to justify the destruction of their home countries.

While the murderer Tarrant had stated that he hoped his horrific crime would help stoke “civil war” in Western countries, this tragedy should and must serve as a wake up call for people everywhere that the real forces responsible for the destruction of many Muslim-majority countries and the current chaos present in many Western countries are not generated by civilian populations or religions but instead by the global oligarchy that engineers and profits from this chaos. These oligarchs loot from the people of the West just as they do from the people of the East and it is time to recognize that they are the real threats to a more peaceful world — not regular people praying, whether it be in a church, a synagogue or a mosque.

mintpressnews.com

Another week, another mass shooting and still the discourse remains primarily about individual violence. The goal is to inject a fear into the populist. The goal is to divide us. The goal is to make us afraid of each other. The goal is to justify further control of the people and to continue to obliterate civil liberties. The old phrase “If You See Something Say Something” has popped up again. This is the phrase that came out of 9/11. It enlists each one of us in the war on terror, the war on crime, the war on guns. The other phrase now is  ____ Strong. Plug in any name. No matter where the shooting happens we must become “stronger”. Not more peaceful. We must become stronger. We remain at war with somebody. And like the war on terror and the war on crime, the villain is both everywhere and nowhere. One of those Middle East countries, forget which one. One of those kids with a hood, forget which one.

As wretched as Donald Trump may be this paranoid autocratic form of American fascism is a post-9/11 phenomenon. And in large part should be laid at the feet of Bill Clinton and his pivot towards mass incarceration. The hysteria around gun shooters is not entirely different from the talk around Muslim terrorists, immigrant rapists or black super predators. The difference of course is that white male violence is often excused as issues of mental health. Which brings us to the necessary point that there is a false hope in our law enforcement when we advocate gun control laws without discussing criminal justice reform. If gun control laws are employed anything like anti-terrorism or anti-crime laws there will be supreme racial profiling, a collapse of individual rights and mass incarceration.

This is not to say that gun control wouldn’t be helpful in reducing deaths. There is good reason for activists to advocate for guns not to be put into the hands of those who practice domestic violence or animal cruelty, for example. But this response also subjugates these forms of violence to secondary, as the lack of access to a semi-automatic will only save the rest of us. It is not surprising that violence against women in the home has not become a serious issue, even though it remains far more damaging than gun violence. Who would care about these victims? Their cases are isolated. The implication of terrorism is that it could happen to anyone at any time. So further crackdown of military like forces to save us becomes necessary. This violence is only mentioned because it can justify more violence. This is why terrorism in the Middle East is mentioned. This is why violence against women in the Middle East is mentioned.  It is worth noting that police are wholly inadequate when it comes to domestic violence, with a 2015 Hotline survey indicating that eighty percent of victims believed police would do nothing about domestic violence.  And why would they? These guys are the most violent people in the country. The police are highly militarized themselves. They shoot first and ask questions later. This Atlantic article details how police are actually the worst perpetrators of domestic violence.  It compares them to NFL players, who do less domestic violence than the general public but are consistently seen as the most violent—this is highly racial too. Donald Trump wanting to kick NFL players who kneel for the national anthem out of the country is a sign of the new fascism highly related to Clinton’s mass incarceration, and Bush and Obama’s war on terror and civil liberties. Misbehavior in regards to the military, police and immigration officers are taken much more seriously than any real violence that occurs.

Now we are all supposed to be police. Look at George Zimmerman. Look at Charlottesville. Look at the purposed policy of arming teachers. What we must recognize is that this strain of reactionary paranoid vigilante intervention that is advocated will always be employed against the poor and the Othered people in our society. There will always be a mass of people deemed too suspicious to exist. This hysteria is consistent with the high number of people who actually do feel the need to solve any of their problems with violence. The mass shooters are echoing the way our leaders solve their problems.

Both the right to bear arms and the right to incarcerate, search and jail are highly linked to white supremacy. This is why the issue is so complex. Because as much as the implications of further gun control implicitly marks the dark body it remains fairly middle class white men who do the shootings. Both tactics echo the supreme white supremacy of Donald Trump, who is at once the greatest predator and the most paranoid.

The highly militarized police state, the 800 plus military bases around the world, the belligerent and arrogant foreign policy by our leaders and the assault on the environment by our corporate masters are all systematic forms of violence that are too big to condemn. Likewise, the horrific nativist agenda of Republicans is equated with an alt-right populism that is gripping the nation from the bottom up. This narrative ignores that Trump voters were richer than Hillary voters. Self-interest, while often associated with the state-dependent poor, is a privileged position. If one lives on the margins of society they simply cannot afford to act as Trump and his ilk do and get away with it.

The culture of Trump—one of resentment, individualism and lawlessness does come from somewhere. But it is not leaking through the cracks of some anti-establishment plot of persecuted people. It comes from the most entitled and simple minded people within our established culture. This latest shooter, a pathetic nerd from Santa Fe, fits the cultural profile of America. But there is a difference between him and people like Scott Pruitt or Dick Cheney. He cannot kill and get away with it. But he is at least a child of the American Empire.

This shooter was another “lonely misunderstood” guy. Boo hoo. Sorry, no love lost here. But it should be noted that neoliberal America is deeply infected with a culture of isolation. Remember, Donald Trump said he doesn’t have friends. Like literally doesn’t have them. While Trump’s lack of friendship may be treated as a strength, the completely isolated school shooters are seen with a disgusting amount of sentimentality. The lone cowboy image highly linked to Manifest Destiny. He is pensive. He is misunderstood. He hasn’t been given everything he wanted. Because he acted on these feelings, he is now a hero.

In America, we are told we can have whatever we want. If we don’t get it, we can take it. This is how our foreign policy works. Everything is unknown, everything is scary. Restraint and thoughtfulness is a weakness. Bigger is always better. There is a profound innocence to our culture that is projected onto the bodies of these young men who are not seen as the psychopaths they are. Rather we see them as another misunderstood soul on the quest for his dream.

Trace this story to our latest shooter who shot up the school because he was rejected by a girl. This comes from a culture soaking in narratives of self-interest. This comes from a culture that is supremely superficial and judgmental. This comes from a culture that has expectations of wealth and conquest that are always too high to achieve. This comes from a culture that runs on shame. What lessons are we teaching to our children? What are the implications of a society that says you can have whatever you want? What happens when one’s innocence is crushed? How do we expect people to respond?

Trace this anywhere you want but to me this is most found in American films. The lone wolf rejected nerds are a common trope now. Like Trump, they are endlessly persecuted and must get revenge. What Trump is ultimately is a snob. An uncurious, arrogant snob. Who would rather be alone in his own fantasy world than deal with other people.

This is the increasing way of the American people in the digital age. How many of these school shooters spend their days alone on their laptops and Xboxs playing their games in alternative universes where they rape princesses and conquer castles? Log on to Facebook then and see impossible and artificial beauty standards. Turn on a Judd Apatow movie of smug nerd conquest. Turn on a Quentin Tarintino movie for artsy nerd violence.

Despite our profound ignorance, America remains an elite and snobbish country. We are snobs about everything. About our subcultures, about our political ideologies and even, absurdly, about our ignorance. I mean seriously, Donald Trump is a snob about being ignorant. And this culture runs on resentment. We are promised so much and given so little. We will bleed you out and expect more. The American Dream has always relied on pillaging of some people, whether that be Native Americans, Blacks or countries around the globe.

What lies at the heart of American culture is an inability to accept difference and to accept truth. Why are we the last holdouts on climate change? Why do we continue to elect stupid, I mean really stupid leaders?

But this is not a culture that starts at the bottom. It is a culture that starts at the top. And it is most concentrated there. This arrogance and ignorance and lawlessness is a privileged position. Without our richness, our nation would not be able to pillage the entire world. Most people simply cannot afford to be blind to truth. They cannot afford to fight and bully every person they know. Only the richest can do such a thing and get away with it. Only a man like Donald Trump could bankrupt himself four times and get away with it.

Americans, especially the well to do Americans, are all at the end of the day children. Dark and twisted children, yes, but still some form of a child. No one is more sheltered, delusional and angry. There are temper tantrums everywhere. Outrage, meanness and violence everywhere. But we also adults. Pessimistic, stressed, self-righteous adults.

What remains astounding about America is the persecution complex we have. We still play the victim. And amazingly we believe it. These school shooters are no different. We believe we can take whatever we want. We believe that this world does not contain differences to be negotiated, but foes to be defeated. These are the stories of killer cops who shoot young black boys. It is the story of men who shoot women that reject them. It is the story of Donald Trump when negotiating with other world leaders.

The fact that the Democrats can only advocate for gun control shows both their lack of moral imagination as well as their deep ties to the financial institutions that permeate violence throughout our lives. The Republicans meanwhile can advocate for anything but gun control, but they only seem to be able to come up with strength and God. Therefore the Democrats maintain the only merit they have left: they are not Republicans. How many deaths will prove that this is simply not enough?

counterpunch.org