After shooting his mother in the head with her own gun, Adam Lanza killed 20 schoolchildren, six adult school staff and then himself with a Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. By now the facts of the matter are difficult to forget.
The horror and tragedy of unimaginable proportions for the families touched by the events sparked public outpouring of sympathy and support. As the media saturated the airwaves with images of funerals and memorials, people responded with local candlelight vigils and moments of silence. President Obama spoke eloquently as a parent and a leader; Ann Curry initiated an internet campaign of unsolicited good deeds.
NRAs Policy of More Guns
In complete defiance of logic and fact, the NRA insisted that more guns is the solution. The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, declared Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president. They argue that making schools gun-free zones has left them vulnerable to attack, ignoring the fact that Columbine High School had an armed sheriffs deputy on duty the day Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 and injured 21 students and teachers.
Others have gone further and suggested training teachers to use weapons will keep students safe. This assertion, again, contradicts the evidence. Even well-trained professionals can miss their intended targets: bullets fired by two New York City police officers hit nine by-standers in addition to their suspect in August outside the Empire State Building. Increasing the number of guns in classrooms will increase the number of students shot with them.
The liberal media and many Democratic Party politicians have countered with stepped-up demands to re-instate the assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004. Anticipation of new limits on semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines has stressed the ability of suppliers to fill record orders. Brownells sold more than three years of ammunition in three days.
Clearly, a narrow debate on gun control will not bring us closer to answering the big questions: Why did this happen? And how do we prevent these catastrophic events in the future?
The events at Sandy Hook Elementary School were one in a series that made 2012 the deadliest on record for gun massacres, including the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting and the Christmas eve ambush of firefighters responding to a blaze in Webster, NY.
We live in a violent society. All these events occurred against the backdrop of war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, brutal repression of mass movements in Syria and Libya, continued drone strikes on civilian targets in Pakistan and the crackdown on Occupy protesters at home.
In 2008, more preschoolers were killed by guns than law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for African American teenagers and the second leading cause of death (after motor vehicle accidents) for white teens. Eighty-seven percent of children killed by guns in the richest countries of the world were killed in the U.S. (Childrens Defense Fund). Clearly semi-automatic assault weapons should not be available for sale in the U.S. But a new assault weapons ban will not address the root causes of this recent series of mass shootings. Any discussion on reducing access to these weapons should also address the militarization of the police and other security forces which are now used to intimidate peaceful protests by social activists, including the Occupy movement.
Escalating Social Problems
One cannot understand the shocking events at Newtown without looking at the increased social costs on U.S. society of a failing capitalist system. By shredding the social safety net, creating massive inequality and implementing devastating neo-liberal polices, capitalism has failed all these children, their families and even their attackers at every level. The violence of three decades of attacks on living standards, effectively an unanswered class war by the rich on the working class and the poor, has taken its toll. Wealth has become so concentrated at the very top of society that six members of the Walton family (Walmart fortune heirs) possess more wealth than the poorest 41 million Americans.
Instead of a system that can provide cradle-to-grave quality health care for everyone, we have a profit-driven health care industry. The insurance corporations’ inability to extract the necessary profit margins from mental health services curtails their willingness to provide these services in anything even approximating a comprehensive, competent and humane manner. Public mental health programs have not fared well in the series of massive state budget battles since the onset of the Great Recession. They are often the first programs to be cut and the last to be restored. Quality health care, including mental health services, is essential to a healthy society. Many of the shooters in the recent period could have been identified early and treated in such a system, potentially saving lives.
Education has been touted as the vehicle through which the U.S. working class could escape into middle-class comfort and security. While never sufficient to provide a decent life for everyone, quality public education enabled large sections of the working class to train for employment in a period of deindustrialization. Republicans and Democrats have cooperated to cut billions from local, state and federal budgets, shredding access to adequate public K-12 and higher education. Those who do manage to graduate from college are saddled with huge debts and are unlikely to get the well-paid, secure jobs they were promised.
Michigan’s right-to-work legislation is just the most recent attack on unions and their ability to protect workers with living wages, benefits, pensions and health care coverage. The corporate and legislative assault on unions has undermined conditions for all workers, as hourly wages have stagnated over the last 30 years despite impressive advances in productivity. Meaningful work at a decent wage should be a basic right.
Increased Anger and Tensions
In a capitalist society, where the ability to have some sort of quality in life is tied to obtaining a decent job, the proliferation of low-wage dead-end jobs has created massive pressure for young people to succeed. Yet in this system only a few can succeed in reaching the so-called American Dream.
Growing evidence points to the corrosive effects of this increased inequality not only on those most affected, but on society as a whole. Reviewing conclusions from the excellent and well-documented book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Bill Hopwood writes: ”There is strong evidence that people have a deep sense of fairness which an unequal society offends. In an unequal society, people feel excluded or fear being excluded. It is harder to form and maintain strong friendships and a sense of community. Inequality is divisive and corrosive of societal and individual well-being.
“In a more unequal society if things go wrong, such as job loss, failure to do well at education, serious injury, long-term illness, or household break-up, the distance to fall is greater with more suffering. So, in more unequal societies there is more stress and insecurity. Even for those doing reasonably well, there is concern about the future.” (Inequality Rising,” Socialism Today) Wilkinson and Pickett found levels of mental illness were five times higher across the whole population in the more unequal societies.
This corrosive decline of capitalism, with increased division between haves and have-nots, and all its devastating social consequences, does not only affect those who are directly suffering from the economic decline. The intense social pressure to succeed in an accelerated rat race affects all communities. This is exacerbated by the corporate media and corporate politicians who create scapegoats to blame for this social crisis.
In our society, children are schooled in the laws of capitalism to compete for power and to push ahead of others at any cost. Also, the pressure to conform to these corporate-created roles is growing ever more intense. This results in more kids failing and escalating levels of depression and mental issues, particularly among adolescents who feel alienated and scapegoated and see little solidarity with their communities or fellow human beings. For the most desperate, the corporate-created culture of mass violence can become an attractive way out. What we are seeing is a volatile cocktail of semi-automatic weapons, poorly treated mental health issues, misdirected anger and resentment, and the disintegration of society as we know it.
The Corrosive Consequences of a Declining Capitalism
Another contributing factor to the problem is the culture of gun violence promoted by the weapons manufacturers, the movie industry, and video games industries. These industries profit by promoting the idea that “real men” use violence and domination to demonstrate their manhood. Not surprisingly, almost all the mass shooting incidents have been carried out by males.
Any real solution to the culture of gun violence has to dig much deeper than simply regulating the distribution of automatic weapons. We have to fundamentally change our society so that there is no longer an elite class of corporate investors directly profiting by promoting war and a twisted culture of violence and hyper-masculinity for their own narrow interests.
As the gap between the rich and the 99% becomes an unbridgeable chasm, people are pressured to adopt the most brutal aspects of capitalism. They have no choice but to step on the heads of others to lift themselves up. Every time they do, they become less connected to one another and more alienated from one another. This reflects the nature of capitalism as a system of competition, oppression, and exploitation.
This touches on the concept of alienation, which is a key concept Karl Marx discussed when looking at the negative effects of capitalism on human beings and human society. Capitalism is a pathological society that creates inequality and divisions in society and cannot provide the basic elements of a just society. The anger, alienation and psychosis created by this unequal society will always find an outlet, and often the target will be the least powerful, the most vulnerable among us. The horrific killings in Newtown are yet another shocking event which highlights the devastating consequences for millions of a declining capitalism in the U.S.
At the same time as a declining capitalism creates dysfunction, it also creates those who rebel against it. The emergence of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 is just the beginning of a new movement which will explode in the coming years, as young people and workers increasingly revolt against this new ugly capitalist reality. It is only by building a new powerful social movement that exposes capitalism and fights for a better life for the 99% that we can reverse the corrosive effects of capitalism on our lives.
A democratic socialist society would take power out of the hands of the elite and put it into the hands of the majority. It would shift democratic decision-making to workplaces, schools and neighborhoods. A democratic socialist society would be based on the common interests of all, rather than individual pursuit of profit at the cost of all else which drives the capitalist system. Manufacturing industries and the corporate-controlled mass media would be placed under public ownership and democratic control by all the people, rather than being run by a wealthy elite for their own private gain. Only replacing capitalism with democratic socialism will eliminate the violent behavior of individuals twisted by the insanity of capitalism.