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The Armed Elephant in the Room [1]

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Date: 2022-11-26

It might be uncivil to say it but the extremist right wing Republican Party is an authoritarian gun-worhsipping death cult.

While I haven’t checked in the last 5 minutes, the number of mass-shooting events in America are seemingly becoming a daily occurrence. Tom Sullivan over at Digby’s Place comments on the development of a new kind of press coverage:

..the “mass shooting correspondent.” Blood, victims, families, survivors. Career opportunities are built on growing piles of bodies.

And…

The NY Times editorial board has come out with:

How a Faction of the Republican Party Enables Political Violence

..In conflicts like this one — not all of them played out so publicly — there is a fight underway for the soul of the Republican Party. On one side are Mr. Trump and his followers, including extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. On the other side stand those in the party who remain committed to the principle that politics, even the most contentious politics, must operate within the constraints of peaceful democracy. It is vital that this pro-democracy faction win out over the extremists and push the fringes back to the fringes...

emphasis added

Good luck with that NY Times. As long as the rest of the party says nothing, silence counts as assent. As long as dark money and corporate contributions keep rolling in, the GOP will do nothing. They have nothing left but the fringe these days. They are not pro-democracy, just winning at any cost.

If that wasn’t enough to set off alarm bells, how about this?

Armed Americans, often pushing a right-wing agenda, are increasingly using open-carry laws to intimidate opponents and shut down debate.

Often pushing a right wing agenda? Try 77% Mike McIntire at The NY Times reports on what analysis found:

A New York Times analysis of more than 700 armed demonstrations found that, at about 77 percent of them, people openly carrying guns represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election. The records, from January 2020 to last week, were compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit that tracks political violence around the world. The Times also interviewed witnesses to other, smaller-scale incidents not captured by the data, including encounters with armed people at indoor public meetings. ...Republican politicians are generally more tolerant of openly armed supporters than are Democrats, who are more likely to be on the opposing side of people with guns, the records suggest. In July, for example, men wearing sidearms confronted Beto O’Rourke, then the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, at a campaign stop in Whitesboro and warned that he was “not welcome in this town.” ...Sometimes, the Republican officials carried weapons: Robert Sutherland, a Washington state representative, wore a pistol on his hip while protesting Covid-19 restrictions in Olympia in 2020. “Governor,” he said, speaking to a crowd, “you send men with guns after us for going fishing. We’ll see what a revolution looks like.”

This is not just about freedom of speech or the 2nd Amendment anymore. It’s about intimidation, plain and simple.

Max Fisher and Josh Keller at The NY Times ask a question:

Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings? Research Is Clear: Guns.

When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film. But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings? Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad. These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion. The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

emphasis added

The rest of the article lays out graphs and numbers that explain why the U.S. is exceptional. The conclusion lays out a chilling fact.

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society. That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart. “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

emphasis added

Do stricter gun laws make a difference? You bet they do. Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place has a plot that shows the difference across the 50 states with Every Picture Tells a Story.

Given the way the Republican Supreme Court keeps tossing out gun safety laws, things are not going to get better — but they could.

Mother Jones has an article by Mark Follman who has been tracking gun violence in the U.S. He’s put together a book on how to deal with mass shootings. Daniel King at Mother Jones has this to say about it:

It’s become all too common in media and politics to assume that we can’t stop mass shootings. But in his new book, Mother Jones National Affairs Editor Mark Follman demonstrates how many of these massacres are preventable, and traces the promising path and strategies to thwart them. Follman, who has maintained a first-of-its-kind open-source database of mass shootings since 2012, documents the latest in the emerging field of behavioral threat assessment. Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, published on Tuesday, walks us through the progress of forensic psychologists, FBI agents, and other experts and educators. My reading list is impossibly long, but I’m all in on this one. I suggest you join me, and if you want a teaser, catch his conversation at the Commonwealth Club of California with MoJo’s Monika Bauerlein. I’d already known the contours from having read his investigation in our upcoming print magazine, but each time Follman speaks or writes on it, I get a fresh look at the prevalence and prospects of stopping mass shootings. He delivers evidence and reasons for cautious hope.

emphasis added

Follman has an essay in Mother Jones that addresses what we can do:

The Epidemic of Mass Shootings Is Neither Inevitable Nor Unsolvable

We can start by rejecting the big politicized myths that stand in our way.

Which myths?

One is that mental illness is fundamentally to blame for these massacres. After the horror at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pushed that argument in his public comments. Pro-gun politicians and leaders of the NRA have long used it as a tactic for distracting from the national debate over gun laws—essentially dismissing each new mass shooting as an inexplicable “evil,” as Abbott described it, and implying that responsibility for change lies squarely with the mental health field. (Never mind that Abbott just cut $211 million in April from state mental health services.) Another major falsehood is continually reinforced through news reporting that quotes people who knew or came in contact with a shooter: “I never thought he could do something like this,” and, “No one could’ve seen this coming.” In many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. In the scores of threat investigations and mass shootings I studied, every case subject showed a mix of identifiable warning signs.

Solutions:

Diminishing this American nightmare is going to take many different forms of action: continuing a relentless, long-term effort to strengthen our nation’s gun laws. Quashing a surge in violent political extremism. Investing in a lackingmental health care system. And building community-based violence preventionprograms. In a society with 400 million firearms and where firearms are often easy to obtain, even all that may only be a start. But it will be a powerful rebuttal to the nihilism that mass shooters feed on—and to the hopelessness about this epidemic that so many Americans once again feel.

Follman has put together a book laying out the problems and the possible remedies: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to stop Mass Shootings in America.

We are not going to eliminate gun violence in America, not so long as the country is awash in firearms, but we can at least take steps to reduce mass shootings and stop accepting them as unavoidable.

It’s worth acknowledging that violence has always been part and parcel of America; Charles P. Pierce had a recent email that looks at just how integral violence has been shaping the country. An excerpt:

..Political violence, of course, is nothing new in this country. After all, it was born in political violence. The Sons of Liberty hereabouts were very much not into peaceable assembly to petition the government for a redress of grievances. They were, rather, very much into violently assembling to throw the tea into the harbor and running the government’s ass up to Halifax where it belonged. In the early years of the Republic, there was Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts (hometown, represent!) and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. The late Pauline Meier’s masterful Ratification recounts how the adoption of the Constitution took place as much in the streets as in Independence Hall. There was that conspicuous unpleasantness between settlers in Kansas and Missouri, which lead to the still more conspicuous unpleasantness between the years 1860–65. And then there is the long-running political violence from which Ronald DeSantis is so desperately trying to spare the delicate little children of Florida. The way that slavery gave way to Jim Crow gave way to lynching, all with the acquiescence (if not the overt approval) of the political classes. The continent-wide genocide of the Native people was an act of political violence the way that subjugation for profit of any people is. And there is also the violence of the anti-choice movement, which finally blew up enough clinics and killed enough doctors that it got its way last spring. That our history is not as deeply bloodstained as that of Europe is simply a matter of our not being as old as France or Spain...

Of course these days, neither France nor Spain is awash in guns the way America is, lacking a political party that has embraced guns as not just a constitutional right but a cultural signifier, coupled with a cultivated sense of imaginary grievance. As Pierce observes:

What was January 6 about? It was about nothing tangible, nothing real. It was about delusions and theories, carried over the air on waves of sound, or across the country in millions of pixels. It was about a rigged election that wasn’t. It was about imagined oppressions, podcast tyrannies of the twisted imagination. It was about mob violence as a getaway vehicle for a criminal president. There was an essential—and delusional—nihilism about it that made it all the more threatening, all the more terrifying, and less and less American. When we turn on ourselves, dammit, it’s for a reason.

Except the GOP doesn’t need any tangible reason to do what they are doing. They are effectively taking the country hostage — because they can.

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