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Gun Culture, Drugs and Poverty: The Connection [1]

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Date: 2023-01-25

There are an estimated 434 million guns in America!

Gun Culture promoter Rep. Marjorie Greene.

There was a total of 45,222 firearm deaths in the US in 2020, an increase of 14% or 5,155 more firearm deaths than 2019. A truly staggering one year total nearly equaling the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam during a 10+ years long war, which is estimated to be around 58,000. In Great Britain and Wales, there were 570 homicides in 2020, whether by guns or other means. In Japan in 2021, one person in a country of 125 million, was killed by guns. One! Sweden saw 47 homicides in 2020.

In the U.S. there are estimated to be more guns than there are people, which would put the figure at an estimated 434 million. Enough to stretch an estimated 4000 miles, from New York to London, if lined up end to end. In the first few weeks of 2023, we’ve already had 33 mass shootings. In doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that there is a direct connection between gun availability and gun deaths. Simply put, and aside from target practice, the purpose of guns is to kill, maim and conquer.

Guns as Religion

John Wayne Movie Poster as an Army officer assigned to fight Native Americans in “Fort Apache.”

America is unique in the world given the religious reverence some worshipers assign to their guns and the distorted way in which some modern Courts have ruled as to the meaning of the U.S. Constitutional right to bear arms written more than 200 years ago. It’s a manifestation of a national militarist pathology rooted in justifying colonial expansion, first across the American continent, then involving the rest of the world.

America’s history is replete with mythical gun toting “John Wayne” type heroes who “tamed” the West of the bad guys and were used to imprison on reservations or assist in carrying out systematic genocides against our native peoples. “With guns in our hands, and god on our side.”

In more modern times we used guns, bombs and even nuclear weapons to help win two World Wars and many more interventions on foreign soil. The movies and T.V. are flooded with violent programing and cop/crime series. Serial killer biographies are among the highest rated shows. The most successful video games involve killing or destroying someone or something.

Guns and the Poorest Americans

Gun control legislation rarely passes.

The corporate media and most politicians have virtually ignored one of the worst manifestations of gun violence and its connections to poverty. Which has interacted with the ready availability of guns to fuel an epidemic of shootings and murders which plague both poor communities of color and to a lesser extent poor white communities throughout the nation.

Racism has led to much higher poverty rates and not surprisingly, significantly higher firearm homicide rates. The communities affected are so burdened with long term poverty conditions that they become markedly destabilized. And also suffer from political neglect, family disintegration, red-lining, substandard schools and services, rampant drug dealing and substance abuse and the development of gang and gun cultures.

While school killings and other horrible mass shootings get the most concern and publicity, the daily deaths from community level gun violence are reported in the news in a much more matter of fact way, if reported at all. Black Americans experience 10 times the gun homicides of white Americans and are nearly three times more likely to be shot and killed by police as white Americans.

Gun Culture, Poverty and Drugs as Vehicles of Social Control

Gun culture has also infected Black youth.

The CIA, a secretive and unelected government agency, has been charged with being involved in numerous schemes over the years to help bring heroin into black and other poor communities. They serve a dual purpose along with deliberately lax gun sale/gun control laws. One is to flood the poorest areas of America with guns brought in or smuggled from Republican dominated states, feeding a demoralizing youth gang gun culture on one hand, and arming criminal elements and drug dealers on the other hand.

Black youth in the poorest areas are often alienated from society, poorly educated in prison-like schools which require metal detectors and face a dim future with little chance to one day earn a living wage. On these mean streets in the poorest neighborhoods street gangs form and access to guns brings a false sense of power, security and control over their lives. Even minor disputes sometimes end in homicides because immature youths have easy access to guns.

The resulting mayhem and violence combined with readily available drugs helps further reduce the chances of these communities developing effective and mature/radicalized social movements. Which historically is the desired outcome for many in high and powerful places, which have few jobs or places for them in the larger white society anyway. Poverty is mainly viewed, although no politician will dare admit it, as something to be contained, managed and neutralized as a potential threat.

Another Side of Gun Culture

White gangs will also form in the poorest

areas as they did in the 50s.

Gun culture also infects better off Americans by feeding them the same illusion that guns provide a sense of freedom, self-esteem, political power and control over their lives. There are also working-class and poor white gangs that frequently morph into criminal and sometimes even white supremacist gangs.

The latter are actually being used by Republican operatives in their plans to make America a fascist, white supremacist dictatorship. Born into a racist environment, they are vulnerable to racial pandering and are often more than willing to accept leaders who spout familiar racist and fascist concepts.

Added motives for the Republicans to support the Gun Culture are 1: To manipulate the gun issue so that the guns are aimed at Democrats and other political opponents and not at them and 2: To encourage gun companies to make huge campaign contributions.

Why Reforms Often Fail

Reform successes can be elusive.

There have been many reform measures and much anti-poverty legislation passed by the Democrats, but most were rarely successful long term. One well known Senator once described such policies as “benign neglect.” Meaning the lack of success had to do with the temporary nature of the aid, which was mostly limited to cash type aid and benefits. No substitute for a job that can support a family, and many are needed to break the back of poverty in any community. So, poverty remains mostly unchanged.

In no way was there ever a systematic commitment to address the root causes of poverty, and certainly nothing has made much of a dent in the gun culture on a level that the problem requires. These problems are now viewed by many as unsolvable in a system dominated by market capitalism. Why?? Because the overriding purpose and goal of capitalism is profit for the owners, not full employment at a living wage for the workers. Profit is maximized by paying the lowest wages possible. Such a system that is in control of society creates poverty and therefore cannot be trusted to address a workable solution.

Required: Synergistic Solutions

We can see that the solution to gun violence requires a lot more than restricting or banning automatic weapons and is intertwined with many other problems in America. Any efforts at gun control and denting Gun Culture must also include economic measures to address other critical issues. I would also argue that numerous homicides also occur outside of poor communities, and are also related to mental health issues, various other biases and phobias, misogyny, social alienation and easy access to firearms.

Available statistics end with 2013.

In my studies on nutrition and vitamins, I discovered that they are infinitely more effective if used synergistically. Which means each nutrient often acts best in concert with a certain balance of other nutrients.

How it Works

Now I’m not trying to push alternative medicine here, but honest and credible advocates use such an approach, which can apply to solving any type of problem. Western Medicine is brilliantly amazing in some ways, and dramatically backward in other ways. It often disregards the health benefits of nutrition because it looks at the essential vitamins the body needs in a singular way, not realizing that many are of very limited benefit when not being taken in concert with others. Physicians often mistakenly, in the rare instance that they prescribe supplements at all, prescribe them in a non-synergistic fashion.

Which Way is Progress?

Which way forward?

The same principle holds true with gun violence or resolving any other social or economic problem. To resolve it you must understand how one problem interacts with and may depend on another.

Since economics seems to be involved with almost every problem in some manner, we must also see how it relates to market capitalism, since economic commitment is required behind solving most major issues and the capitalist class has the most influence in government policy.

A commitment that is completely incompatible with the goals and purposes of market capitalism.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/25/2148804/-Gun-Culture-Drugs-and-Poverty-The-Connection

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