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So, what do you make
of a country where a third grader brings a gun to school to ward off bullies?
In Inkster, Michigan
an 8-year old boy brought a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun to his elementary school two
days in a row for protection, and to scare off three girls who were bullying
him. The weapon was in the boy’s backpack and belonged to a relative. And
surely somewhere in this nation of unacceptable levels of violence and gun
worship, there are those who think that is a good thing, to arm children to
protect themselves. More guns will make us all safer, right?
After the recent
tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, America, it
seems, is waking up to the need to stem the tide of violence in this country. But
there is nothing new here. Whether we look at the shooting sprees and mass
murder of young white men in the affluent suburbs or rural areas, or the
epidemic of gun violence in communities of color in Chicago
and elsewhere, violence is part of the fabric of America.
From the beginning,
this country has used violence to solve its problems. Years of dehumanization
of others will do that to you. And this was always the case, from the
enslavement of Africans to the genocide of the indigenous population, and from
the regime of lynching in the Jim Crow South and elsewhere, to the acts of
terror waged against civil rights workers, antiwar protestors and organized
labor.
Speaking out against
the Vietnam War in 1967, Martin
Luther King said “I knew that
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the
ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today – my own government.” Dr. King’s words are even
more relevant today than when he spoke over four decades ago.
The U.S.
has the most powerful army, accounting for 58 percent of the military
expenditures made by the top 10 military powers. With high gun accessibility
and the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, America leads in deadly gun
violence. Nearly 70
percent of U.S. homicides
are committed with guns, and 70 percent of the weapons seized in drug
war-ravaged Mexico are
traced back to the U.S. Gun proliferation is bolstered by an anachronistic and
obsolete Second Amendment, and promoted by gun manufacturers, who bribe
lawmakers and hold the public hostage in the process.
Further, America’s
love affair with violence extends to its overly-punitive, disproportionate
system of justice. With one quarter of the world’s prisoners, the U.S.
is the largest jailer in the world. Prisons are the largest repository for the mentally ill, with more people receiving mental
health treatment behind bars than in hospitals or treatment centers. As budgets
for education and social services are slashed and jobs are scarce, the American
way is to lock up and even kill our perceived problems rather than to build up
people and rehabilitate them.
Moreover, our continued reliance on the death penalty in
the U.S.
is a prime example of what happens when a society perpetuates a vicious circle
of violence. While capital punishment was long cast aside in Europe, Canada, Australia
and elsewhere, the barbaric practice still finds a welcome home in America - at
least for now. The U.S. is
part of an unsavory alliance of nations who lead the world in
executions - including China, Iran,
Iraq, North Korea, Saudi
Arabia, Somalia
and Yemen.
But the winds of change are blowing.
For a nation conditioned by violence, it is hard to break
extremely old and equally bad habits. After all, people are comfortable with
what they know, comfortable with what they were raised on. America can
break the cycle of violence - however normalized it has become - and yet it
must if it wants to break from its troubling past and become better than it
was. |
