“Thoughts, prayers” and NRA cashing in.
The US death toll from gun violence eclipses all wars ever fought by America — combined. No other developed nation comes close to the rate of US gun violence. The youngest victims include 2 unborn children and an 8-month-old.
How did this happen? Answer: “enemies, foreign and domestic”.
Some 300 million Americans are under siege by the American Taliban who in concert with other enemies of the state (some of them traditional foreign adversaries) are doing incredible damage.
For so-called Cold War kids, the air raid drills concerned possible attacks from a foreign enemy far, far away — possibly communist. But today, it’s duck and cover for school kids all over again.
Nuclear weapons history professor Alex Wellerstein noted in 2012, about the cold war: “Hiding under your desk probably wouldn’t help you much if the bomb went off right over your head, but could be significant for all of the people who were within a mile or so of the blast.”
Fortunately, that far away ‘communist enemy’ never dropped an atomic bomb.
This time, it’s not a bomb, and the threat is not imaginary or distant.
In 2018 alone, there were 94 school shootings and 163 casualties — averaging one shooting every 8th school day. The killers holding the guns in these atrocities are American. And the monsters aiding, abetting, giving comfort to child-killers and actively blocking change that would protect American kids, are American.
The Civil War and the Cold War never ended — they just mutated.
America is facing an existential threat both from within and from traditional rogue state adversaries. The news corporations might not report America as a real war zone; but the staggering numbers of guns (300 million, nearly one for each citizen), gun deaths and injuries (40,000 in 2018), school shooting drills, political proposals (to arm teachers), and the annual gun industry revenue of $40 billion from the rivers of American blood, tell a different story. America is as much a war zone as Yemen.
“For the United States,” wrote James Cook, BBC News, about the Thousand Oaks shooting on 8 November 2018, “this the nightmare that never ends. The names of countless schools, churches, colleges and even entire cities have become synonymous with mass murder”.
The US has suffered over 1.4 million gun deaths, compared with 1.2 million US casualties in every conflict, from the War of Independence to Iraq — combined.
The list of shooters include
– a mother who helped kill 14 partygoers at her husband’s workplace;
– 2 middle-schoolers (11 and 13) who pulled a fire alarm to flush students and teachers out of their school, and began shooting from a wooded perch nearby. They killed four girls and a teacher and wounded 10 others.
26,819 people were injured, and 13,286 people were killed in the US by guns in 2015, alone, including 64 school shootings in that year, alone.
There were more mass shootings in the US in 2017, than there are number of days of the year.
The recent (but by far not most recent) attack on a Florida high school was the eighth shooting to have resulted in death or injury during the first seven weeks of 2018. That’s more than one shooting a week.
There were 1,624 reported mass shootings in the US between when 4 people were shot at an McKeesport (Pennsylvania) New Year’s Eve party in December 2012 — and the Parkland, Florida shooting in February 2018.
Since 2000, there have been more than 188 shootings at schools and universities. That’s as much violence as schools in 36 countries — from Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Guatemala and Israel, to Kenya, Northern Ireland, Russia and Yemen — combined. To put those numbers in perspective: In 2010, the United States had about 309 million residents. The population of the other countries totaled 3.8 billion.
How is it that the most “powerful” country in the world can’t protect its children? It can — it just won’t.
Because, in large part, a criminal and terrorist organization with global links has infiltrated the highest echelons of the US government and been allowed to fester and grow to the extent that the USA is, in essence, the biggest war zone on Earth. The supposed deadlock between political beliefs and between interpretations of the Second Amendment, is a manufactured one. In fact, 80% of American gun owners are not NRA members. The vast majority of Americans want gun control.
In a democracy, safer gun laws would already be the case. Remaining NRA members make up only 1.5% of the US population. So how can some 1.5% turn an entire country into a shooting gallery? Criminal minds asked themselves the same thing, and made it happen.
One main reason for the bloodshed is that the NRA openly buys politicians and have them work full-time to keep Americans in harms way.
“A fraud on the American public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun.
Americans own an estimated 300 million guns, more than one gun for every adult. The arms dealers behind the NRA and the US gun industry earn $9 billion in annual revenue. The NRA is (literally) making a killing.
And so are some former foreign adversaries, who devised ways to dismantle the USA and kill millions of Americans without having to pull the trigger themselves.
The more guns and the less gun-safety in America, the greater the chance of an incredible number of American’s being killed annually. This is a scenario that Vladimir Putin, KGB-officer during the cold war, can live with. Numerous American casualties of gun violence obviously won’t.
But the NRA wouldn’t be able to lobby and buy corrupt politicians if there weren’t millions of voters aiding and abetting in getting them elected and re-elected. The beliefs that these politicians hold, and the positions they take, have deadly consequences and they know it. Many of their acolytes yearn to wage war against other Americans opposed to their views — and they know this too. These groups strived and succeeded to seize control of government and weaponize policy-making institutions in order to legislate fascism and the oppression of women and LGBT persons (to name just a few targets of weaponized politics and radicalized hate). Anybody speaking against them faces clear and present danger. Even people who are just trying to go about their day, have to live under a sword hanging over their heads in the form of said politicians working very hard to sneak or ram through legislation that puts the lives of millions of Americans in harm's way. This is malicious intent.
That’s what makes this motley coalition of hate groups the counterpart to the Afghan Taliban. They are truly the American Taliban.
The mainstream media is right to be taking some on the chin right in this context. The definition of terrorism is “the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population”. The way that the media report “terrorism”, however, has solidified the impression in people’s mind that only the Other (the “bearded brown men”) can be terrorists. A google search of the word, yields pages and pages of this result:
According to this massively distributed and promoted worldview, “white” people who weaponize American institutions for the purpose of perpetuating the systematic use of violence to maintain a general climate of fear in a population, are anything but terrorists. Thus, the fear factor and extreme state of alertness and urgency that the mainstream media and politicians promote regarding violent “bearded men” with vests, is bypassed when it comes to the much bigger danger of mass shootings and “lone, deranged” killers.
The “code red, all bets are off”-threat level warning situation represents a one in 3.6 million risk for an American to be killed. The risk of being killed by a toddler, is considerably higher, yet downplayed. ..A little kid finds a gun, fires it, and hurts or kills himself or someone else. These cases rarely bubble up to the national level. The same goes for most mass shootings.
The slaughter, fear-mongering, gun-sales and manufactured “ideological differences” continue. In the meantime, in spaces that easily could be a thousand times safer, small children have to practice to duck and cover while the NRA and its cohorts cash in. This is terrorism, plain and simple.
It shouldn’t have to be like this in a civilized country.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
