Why Are We Used To Violence But Caught Off Guard By The Existence of Hurt?

We’ve gotten used to violence as background hum, yet we are unprepared to recognize and live alongside people who have been hurt.

flickr/Brian. R

W hen ardent defenders of gun rights don’t want to talk about what’s wrong with guns, they talk about what they think is wrong with the people who make the news for using guns the way they’re made to be used. Often there’s a quietly intense litany of curses — “crazy,” “nuts” — meaning the individuals in question do not count among the “normal.” During this part, they always spit the word “sick” as though there is nothing more wretched and strange than being mentally unwell. Being me. Being among what is actually an enormous and ordinary population.

A disdain for those deemed abnormal is animating the conversation. After the massacres in Las Vegas and Parkland, the idea of bringing back asylums has found new support, in thoughtless one-offs but also in serious proposals in trustworthy outlets. A few Parkland survivors, too, suggested targeting the mentally ill for increased surveillance by law enforcement. There is a troubling desire to deal with the disorder that is gun violence by putting people on notice for their diagnoses.

It can be hard to define disorder, both in the clinic and in talking about what we will and will not put up with as a society. It takes nuance to distinguish disorder from wellbeing on a continuum of possibilities and amid the deep inflections of culture and social context. (Are you depressed, or going through a rough patch? Are you fasting because of anorexia or a religious observance? Is an unlivable minimum wage a spur to betterment or a sign of breakdown?)

But carefully defining disorder is core to grappling with the U.S. gun problem — and envisioning a less disordered, more just world. What do we admit into the fold of normal? What do we map to the edges? And what are we seeing all upside down?

For all the people who marched and spoke out for gun control, there may remain as many with a stoic, fatalist understanding that tragedies like gun violence are to be expected. But this understanding coexists with the idea that the various kinds of hurt seen as the causes and effects of gun violence — mental illness as well as the wounds that follow the path of a rifle round — are not a part of ordinary life. We’ve gotten used to violence as background hum, yet we are unprepared to recognize and live alongside people who have been hurt. We’re caught in a chilling dynamic of hurt disseminated and then obscured.

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It must be said again up front that the link from mental illness to gun violence is far from straightforward. So entwined are our ideas of mental illness and shocking violence that the question of whether a violent individual is mentally ill is often answered by the fact of their behavior. It is true that reports of mental illness are common among those who carry out some of the most devastating mass shootings. But there remain many mass shooters who do not have an established diagnosis; and among perpetrators of smaller-scale violence, who far outnumber mass shooters, rates of mental illness are unusually low. Even severe mental illness is not enough to explain the pronounced patterns of gun violence unique to the U.S., because concomitant disadvantages are part of the picture. Using the single variable of mental health as a net for identifying danger captures far too many people who were never going to violate the social contract.

The wrongful dread of mental illness as this seed of unthinkable acts makes it difficult to conceive of mental illness as an ordinary characteristic, found abundantly among friends and neighbors and maybe even in ourselves. When I was struggling to get a handle on my major depressive disorder, I understood the concept of “needing help” to mean possessing shortcomings terrible enough to require professional intervention. I shrank from crucial medical care because accepting it would have felt like admitting monstrosity. I did not realize how common my illness was. Nor did I realize that monstrous tendencies inhabit every human being, not just the ones we would make outcasts.

The unseen ordinariness of mental illness, and other illness, can explain gaps in care. Sickness is implicitly seen by too many lawmakers as what happens when you have done something wrong, not a quotidian fact of numerous lives regardless of how they have been lived. If serious illness were seen as truly ordinary, it would not be so hard to afford. Nor would disability be so often a sentence of poverty. Workers would have the right to get sick yet stay employed. Swaths of public life would not still be inaccessible to people with disabilities, and the Americans with Disabilities Act would not be at risk of getting fundamentally undercut.

The people who survive gunshot wounds are no exception to this neglect. The tens of thousands who die every year in the U.S. because of guns are staggering enough, but these dead represent only 20% of those who have gone through the trauma of being shot. Many of the survivors deal with chronic pain and posttraumatic stress combined with health-care insecurity, as detailed by sociologist Jooyoung Lee. Many are uninsured or underinsured and struggle to control their pain, and some may become desperate to find relief; one leapt into traffic in order to be admitted to a hospital for pain treatment. “In addition to feeling victimized by their shooters, gunshot victims also felt victimized by a health care system that did not continue to care for them,” Lee writes.

Even more numerous than the dead and wounded are those who care about them. Some time ago, a rare dear friend to me gained access to a gun, and left us. They were 17, I was also 17. I still dream about it. Impossible to trace the immense shape of the loss. But here is a fragment of it: Not long afterward, I sought out a doctor and asked for a new prescription for an antidepressant. I am trying to say a gunshot has a long echo.

Each of these hurts is elided by inaction. Despite a richness of resources we are at least adjacent to, the threshold at which our current leaders begin to pretend to want to address the health and safety of the hurting, including those with mental illness or physical wounds, is a critical mass of tragic headlines and town hall callouts where constituents beg for access to medicine or for protections from weapons that will continue to inflict injury. The rest of the time, the everyday fact of hurt is, it seems, too atypical to acknowledge through meaningful action at high levels.

Dear Congress: I Don’t Need An Effing Gun, I Need Health Care

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” wrote Susan Sontag. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” If only Sontag’s view were more widespread.

Next to the refusal to see illness as ordinary is the reluctance, especially among those whose foremost sympathies lie with a couple lines on a centuries-old document, to see current levels of gun violence as disordered. Gun deaths in the U.S. have been repeatedly excused as the price of our exceptional freedom. These deaths now threaten to outpace those from car crashes. Few of the records of people shooting each other are defensive or can be in any way justified; far more incidents are murders or suicides. The violence is absolutely beyond a passing side effect of patriotic or honorable necessity.

Yet the prevailing understanding has been that this violence is impenetrable and inevitable. This violence is not to be challenged, but accommodated. For all the dismay felt across the ideological spectrum after every tragedy, there remains a current of deference. There is a greater willingness to carve out gun-shaped spaces across the lives of the potentially vulnerable than to, say, reinstate the ban on assault weapons. School shootings are to be met with backpacks that are bulletproof or see-through, behemoth panic rooms wedged beside students’ desks, something something CPR, calls for more empathy not from potential shooters but from potential victims, and buckets of river rocks in every classroom for dispatching threats by stoning. Believing violence to be inevitable also looks like increasing the presence of police in schools, which brings further risks of violence toward and criminalization of students of color and students with disabilities.

These measures are sometimes called hardening the target. They amount to a crouch that braces against onslaughts of our own making as against the uncontrollable weather. It is imaginatively flat.

There is a greater willingness to carve out gun-shaped spaces across the lives of the potentially vulnerable than to, say, reinstate the ban on assault weapons.

All these imaginative shortfalls converge in the worst way. The costs of gun violence, from physical to financial, are immense, yet numerically murky. These wounds not only are seen as inconvenient outliers but also have not been adequately quantified, thanks to the ongoing inability of federal agencies to research gun violence. This lack of clarity on consequences muffles the urgency of acting on the problem.

The rhythm of violence inflicted while its effects are obscured is often wielded by the privileged and powerful. We see this with sexual predators. We see this in the increasing permanence of war and the failure to care for veterans, or to reckon with the damage left behind. We see this as the right of the police to freely execute black people, made normal every time yet another officer responsible is released without charges.

And it’s in privilege and power that we might begin to find an explanation for the seeming inability of a nation to connect the dots from gunshot to wound. Gun laws in the U.S. have long operated in service of white supremacy. The majority of mass shooters are white men, and about half are domestic abusers; and men constitute the vast majority of shooters overall. But the group most vulnerable to gun violence is young, working-class black men.

Many noted the contrast between the widely cheered protests spurred by the well-off white neighborhood of Parkland and the less-popular movement for black lives, rooted in Ferguson. Gun violence as it most often occurs elicits so little material response because the aggressor or the injured can often be subsumed into structures of oppression. If those who remain in that imaginative crouch shifted the landscape of their sympathy, perhaps the violence we have come to know as everyday would seem more strange. The people who have been hurting the most could finally make their way from the periphery to the focus.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/inventors-of-killing-machines-like-the-ak-47-often-regret-their-creations-2bcba570376/ Sat, 03 Mar 2018 18:31:01 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3165 Read more]]> It’s hard to know precisely how a tool of destruction will be used.

By Kali Holloway

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, died in 2013 at the age of 94. Though he often shrugged off criticisms that he’d given the world a tool that has helped murder millions (he once compared himself to a “woman who bears children,” declaring himself “always proud” of his creation), months before his death, he revealed intense remorse. In an April 2013 letter to Russia’s Orthodox church, Kalashnikov said a profound sadness had dogged him in the final years of his life. “My spiritual pain is unbearable,” the gun inventor wrote. “I keep asking the same insoluble question. If my rifle deprived people of life then can it be that I…a Christian and an orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?”

The letter was made public in 2014, after being published in the Russian newspaper Izvestia and later picked up by Western outlets. The missive offers an unvarnished look at a man who, taking stock of his life, came to regret what he once considered his greatest achievement and contribution. “The longer I live,” Kalashnikov continued, “the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.”

The Russian church — like its American Christian counterpart and religious entities since the beginning of time — reassured Kalashnikov that it was totally okay with murder as long as the act was committed in the name of the state. (“If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it,” a spokesperson noted.) This is not surprising, unfortunately; religion is gonna be religion. What’s more interesting is Kalashnikov’s lamentation about his part in making a killing machine, a sadness that seems to have gradually overtaken him across the years. While the letter contained Kalashnikov’s most intense expression of remorse, it was not his first sign of regret. A decade earlier, Kalashnikov admitted in an interview that he “would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example, a lawnmower.”

5 Places Hypocritical Republicans Ban Guns For Their Own Personal Safety
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As Rebecca J. Rosen noted in the Atlantic, “that’s the thing about building weapons-grade technologies: You can’t control their use.” Einstein regretted signing a letter to President Roosevelt warning of Germany’s potential to produce atomic weapons — a letter that ultimately led to the creation of the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein, a pacifist, never worked directly on the effort, but regretted even tangential involvement in the project. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he later said, “I would have done nothing.”

Similarly, Alfred Nobel is said to have willed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes, particularly the peace prize, as a sort of penance for creating the deadly explosive dynamite. Arthur Galston, whose research led to the development of Agent Orange, “was deeply troubled by the part his work played in extending war into environmental destruction, spoke often about his sense of guilt and responsibility, and became an extraordinarily articulate antiwar activist who made many trips to Vietnam and China, focusing always on the dangers of Agent Orange.” Weapons-grade pepper spray inventor Kamran Loghman appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss aggressive and abusive police use of his invention on peaceful protesters around the country during the time of Occupy Wall Street. “I saw it, and the first thing that came to my mind wasn’t police or students, was my own children sitting down, having an opinion, and their being shot and forced by chemical agents,” Loghman said. “The use was just absolutely out of ordinary, and it was not in accordance with any training or policy of any department that I know of…I feel it’s my civic duty to explain to the public that this is not what pepper spray was developed for.”

‘The longer I live, the more…I wonder why the Lord allowed man the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.’
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Eugene Stoner didn’t live to see the weapon he invented, the AR-15, used in any mass shootings. But his family maintains that he would have been revolted to learn that the rifle is now used by civilians in any capacity, and heartbroken to see it employed in civilian mass killings in America. In 2016, Stoner’s adult children and grandchildren told NBC News that the late Marine was an “avid sportsman, hunter and skeet shooter.” But they insist he had “never used his invention for sport. He also never kept it around the house for personal defense. In fact, he never even owned one.”

“He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events,” Stoner’s family told the outlet, days after the Pulse nightclub massacre, where the killer used an AR-15 to kill 49 people. “After many conversations with him, we feel his intent was that he designed it as a military rifle.”

“What has happened, good or bad, since his patents have expired is a result of our free-market system,” Stoner’s family said. “Currently, a more interesting question is, ‘Who now is benefiting from the manufacturing and sales of AR-15s, and for what uses?’”

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

By Leigh Ann Carey

“I don’t know if I want to hold a weapon,” said Lindsay Caesar, a social worker and new member of Redneck Revolt (RR), at the “Charlottesville and Community Defense” event held in Durham, North Carolina over Labor Day weekend. “I’m not sure where I fit in yet, but my ethical imperative is that we have to be doing more than we have been. Personal politics isn’t enough.”

But when the personal is political and the political becomes real weapons wielded by Nazis and white supremacists actively seeking to harm, what is the appropriate response? Just what is enough? And given the staggering number of innocent people who die from guns every year in the U.S. — and the country’s prevalence of mass shootings — what defense can be made for carrying guns as a means of social justice?

Redneck Revolt is an anti-racist, pro-gun community defense network providing answers to these questions, while raising a host of others. The organization purposefully counters white supremacist messaging and organizing in traditionally white-held spaces — where the hard right is known to recruit — like NASCAR races, flea markets, and gun shows. Members do so with an inclusive economic message, an authentic affinity for “low-brow” culture (including railings against elites), and smart historical analysis.

‘My ethical imperative is that we have to be doing more than we have been.’

Redneck Revolt started as an online off-shoot of the John Brown Gun Club in Lawrence, Kansas, in 2009. Cofounder Dave Strano was involved in the gun club, a community of gun enthusiasts focused on self-protection, and radical organizing work taking place in the Lawrence community in response to the rising Tea Party movement.

Within the local culture of social movements, he saw a need to create space for firearms education and training, while demystifying gun culture and gun use to activists on the left. He began blogging and experimenting with different ways to communicate about guns, the struggles of the white working class and poor, and understanding the historical role the white working class played in promoting and upholding systemic racism. The initial blog was a short lived venture going offline for a few years. Yet, it planted the seed for Strano to re-launch Redneck Revolt in June 2016, now expanded as a national network with a substantial online following and on-the-ground presence.

The term “Redneck” brings with it significant cultural baggage. It is both a trope rolled out to demean working, blue-collar people by elites, and a badge of honor for some on the right who believe in a certain portrayal of the hyper-masculinized, politically incorrect, gun-toting white guy wearing a MAGA hat.

In reality however the term is decidedly neither. “Redneck” is squarely rooted in a progressive piece of working class history. In the 1900s, a multi-racial coalition of coal miners fought for their right to organize in West Virginia, one of the largest labor uprisings in U.S. history. Coal company owners paid workers in scrip, not dollars, and required coal miners to shop only at approved company stores.

To make matters worse for workers, the company stores routinely inflated the prices of necessary goods. The miners — many of whom were immigrants and people of color — were fed up and began to formally strike against their working conditions. To identify each other as allies, they all tied red bandanas around their neck, and the term took root. Redneck Revolt is continuing this tradition, with participants identified at protests and community events by their red bandanas.

The broader history of the white working class is also one of oppression and terror of others through enslavement and genocide, working in collaboration with and on behalf of white economic elites. Redneck Revolt sees in this collective history significant challenge and opportunity. White supremacy is both a system that the white working class has protected and benefited from, and a tool used against all working people. Helping the white working class better understand this history and connect the dots to their current economic struggles is a big part of the counter-recruitment efforts the group engages in.

Brett M., a Southeast Michigan Redneck Revolt chapter representative, grew up working class. His family and community were hit particularly hard by NAFTA and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

“There is a lot of misplaced blame and anger out there,” says Brett. “So much of the left lives in this very sterile environment, where there is no connection to the working class.” When he discovered RR and their mission, he knew it was the kind of work he wanted to be doing.

He is not alone. In January of this year, the group had 13 chapters nationwide, and now boasts 34 branches, with 26 of those branches in states that went for Trump.

Poverty and economic hardship is a lived reality for most folks Brett and others are in dialogue with. In recent years, studies have shown huge spikes in suicide and drug abuse among working class whites without college degrees. Redneck Revolt members largely hail from the working class communities they organize within. Many members are white, but the organization reflects the diversity of the working class itself, cutting across race, class, gender, regional, religious, and political affiliations.

“You are not going to get very far at a gun show, for example, talking about dialectical materialism,” says Brett. “You say, ‘hey, the government has left you behind. We are in the same boat. We are all in this fight together. It isn’t brown or black keeping you down or immigrants. We are all being used as an apparatus of the state, and the only people looking out for working people are other working people. Isn’t it wild that so many working people supported some Yankee billionaire?”

This approach, according to Nadine Hubbs, Professor of Women’s Studies and Music at the University of Michigan and author of Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, is spot on. She adds, “If we are to dismantle white supremacy, we need to get the working class on board.”

I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump

The organization’s counter-recruitment praxis is not without criticism, namely that they are romanticizing the white working class and enabling the very complicity in white supremacy they are supposedly dismantling. Jamil, a first generation Palestinian-American, Muslim cis male who joined the organization in 2016, offered this response to these concerns:

“Real, material anti-racist work requires not only acknowledging the blatancy of privilege in our analysis, but putting our own bodies on the line. As folks working directly on the ground, we are accountable to the oppressed people in our communities. We build coalitions with them, cross-train with them on community defense, and build trust via our conduct and follow-through….Although our principles explicitly state zero desire to deny the irrefutable complicity of white folks in white supremacy, we also acknowledge the existence of nuance within that complicity. This all falls under our strategy of meeting people where they are at — one which has netted us real results.

While Redneck Revolt is not the only path…..it is one of very few which takes reactionary elements directly to task…facing down the most brazen threads of white supremacy that threaten and target folks in our community — because we see it as a shared one. The other part of the work requires us to hold our own in white-held spaces, which serve as breeding grounds for white supremacy — spaces which liberals and radicals have, in most recent history, steered clear of.”

Alongside counter-recruitment, RR aides in communal self-care amid dire circumstances. “You can’t shoot poverty. You can’t shoot homelessness,” says Dwayne Dixon, a Silver Valley Redneck Revolt member, who grew up in a military family in North Carolina. “We are about liberation. We focus on alleviating poverty, not just [on] guns.”

Poverty is seen as a systemic problem, though the organization steers clear of political advocacy efforts and electoral politics, choosing to solve specific needs as they arise. In Southeast Michigan, the group has held “Rent Parties,” wherein they’ve raised money to help families struggling to avoid eviction. The Silver Valley Branch in North Carolina grows a community garden to aid in feeding the hungry healthy food. In Kansas, transgender health clinics are run to help people receive primary care, surgical referrals, and gender affirming hormones.

‘You can’t shoot poverty. You can’t shoot homelessness.’

For brown, black, LGBTQ, and ethnic communities, RR offers firearms and self-defense training — and armed protection when requested. RR distinguishes between responsibly owning a gun for self-defense and lauding support for the arms industry and the military. To them, the gun lobby industry and the NRA are economic elites manipulating poor folks for profit.

When it comes to gun control, as evidenced by their statement on the mass shooting in Las Vegas, they assert that pundits, economic elites, and elected officials leverage and coopt these moments for their own purposes, but care little about actual public safety. These forces are invested in maintaining gun manufacturing monopolies and policing populations, determining which people get to protect themselves and which ones don’t. This never works to the benefit of the marginalized.

In June of this year, the Somali community in Lansing, Michigan requested RR show up armed in a neighborhood thought to be under threat by ACT for America, a group that bills itself as the NRA of national security and which organized more than two dozen anti-Sharia-law rallies around the country. ACT believes Somali refugees are a terror threat. RR was not able to stop ACT’s larger protest in Lansing, but was able to repel the ACT march of terror through a major Somali neighborhood.

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“Current threats are deadly serious. Our defense strategies should be too,” says Brett M. “The left has a very long history of being non-aggressive and there’s been a hesitation to use firearms (or other show of force). The overall reaction by alt-right organizations has been one of shock — when they see a bunch of folks in red bandannas, armed. They’ve been more hesitant to do the proactive things they would have done.”

Following President Trump’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, the trans administrator for the Northeast Kansas RR branch posted this to their 1,600+ Facebook followers:

“We exist to put our bodies in the way, to get you out of dangerous situations, to guard your home if you feel threatened, to escort you where you need to go in daily life, to help equip and train you if you feel it necessary to acquire body armor for use in the home or in the street, to begin carrying a weapon for self defense, or both. Get in contact with us so that we can be ready to back you up.

We know well that the temptation of self-harm is magnified by owning a firearm, too, so do not be ashamed if you feel unsafe about the idea. You don’t need to be made any more uncomfortable than existing in this world already is for people like you and me.

We carry the gun for you. We will carry you. We’ll get through this time of increased persecution together. They can try whatever they want, but we won’t go quietly.”

The pro-gun tactics, even when requested and willfully chosen by members, is not without critique. “The fixation on firearms on their homepage struck me,” says Hubbs. “A lot of people might not get past that, people who would otherwise be interested in their political analysis.”

Since the Orlando night club shooting in early June 2016, there have been 556 mass shootings in the United States. Each year, the CDC estimates nearly 12,000 gun related homicides take place, and for every person shot, there are at least two more estimated to be injured by a gun. The individuals and communities experiencing post-traumatic stress and injury either directly or indirectly from gun violence is vast. The presence of armed protesters at community events, regardless of purpose, may trigger fear in many.

The organization’s gun stance is rooted in the belief that there are individuals and communities all across the country which feel unsafe and abandoned. The violence and potential violence against them is so real and so visceral, at a physical and systemic level, that arming themselves or leveraging armed protection from neighbors — many of whom they’ve likely never met before — is seen as the only option. If you are on your own, with the expectation that those in power will not aid you, radical self-determination becomes not so much a philosophical statement on the role of government in society, but an act of survival.

That the Somalis in Michigan or trans people in Kansas or organizations like Muslims for Social Justice or Black Lives Matter cannot reasonably and completely count on the police to protect them at protests or in their day to day life — that is a root failure that should be roundly condemned and fixed. Local governments, and political and relief organizations, are falling short.

Radical self-determination becomes not so much a philosophical statement, but an act of survival.

RR members at the Charlottesville debrief were clear that they’d rather have spent their weekend doing almost anything else than holding the line against Nazis, who were armed. Dixon spoke about the gripping, traumatizing fear he felt that comes with possibly stopping a bullet with his own body. He is a parent — many of the people in the audience who had also gone to Charlottesville were moms and dads. To them, they aren’t choosing violence, so much as violence is here, it is now, and it is on the attack.

Whether or not arming oneself or joining armed protests is the only response, an escalating response, or one of many reasonable responses to a newly ascendant and unafraid white supremacy is a question, unfortunately, we are all being asked to answer.