America is steeped in violence. And the roots of that violence go deep

It’s not just about guns. I wrote this essay for The Guardian reflecting on how America’s obsessions with guns and violence terrifies its citizens, but it also reflects its own genocidal and racist past.

After an 18-year-old gunman shot and killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, President Biden took to the airwaves to address the nation in a speech full of sorrow and anger. “I just got off my trip from Asia, meeting with Asian leaders, and I learned of this [massacre] while I was on the aircraft,” he said. “And what struck me on that 17-hour flight – what struck me was these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world.”

He’s right, of course. In 2018, CNN investigated school shootings worldwide between 2009 and 2018. The US, as it turns out, has “57 times as many shootings as the other six G7 countries combined”. What an appalling statistic.

Any sane person would hear this number and ask why. And that’s precisely the question Biden addressed next. “They have domestic disputes in other countries. They have people who are lost. But these kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency that they happen in America. Why?” he asked.

This may be the most important question confronting the country today, but the answer that most people, at least most Democrats, reach for – that guns are too easy to access – isn’t, well, it isn’t good enough. While this response is not wrong, and the country certainly and desperately needs a sane policy on guns, such an answer avoids grappling with the fundamentally violent nature of American society, something that guns may exacerbate but didn’t produce.

Do most Americans realize how steeped in violence this country is? So far this year, there have already been 27 school shootings nationwide and we have only just reached June. Move beyond the perimeter of a school and you’ll discover that there have already been 213 mass shootings in 2022. To put that in perspective, that’s about three mass shootings for every two days.

But American violence isn’t limited to mass murderers. As we remember the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis two years ago this week, we should also reflect on the fact that police shootings killed 1,055 people in 2021, as reported by the Washington Post. This was a record number since the Post began its tally in 2015. The United States is a large country, but American police kill civilians at much higher rates than any wealthy nation, more than three times the rate of Canadian and Australian police and almost 30 times the rate of German police.

A country that develops and relies on the overwhelming size and severity of its penal system is also a country beholden to its own violence. And the United States continues to incarcerate far more people than any other country. About 664 out of every 100,000 people are in prison. Compare that with 329 people out of 100,000 in prison in the Russian Federation or the 93 people per 100,000 in prison in France. About one-third of all incarcerated women worldwide are found in US prisons. A 2018 study found that El Salvador, where women are routinely and unconscionably imprisoned for having abortions and miscarriages, has the same incarceration rates for women as Wisconsin.

Of course, we need a sensible policy on guns, but will that stop us from venerating guns as love objects? How many of us have read the Creed of a United States Marine? “My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life,” it states, along with “my rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.”

Maybe this makes sense as part of military indoctrination but, let’s face it, culturally, we are all expected to buy into this idea, and with interest. We celebrate snipers, turn them into national heroes, and make movies about their accomplishments, even when a lot of what we’re told probably isn’t true. Our parents and grandparents watched endless cop shows, Dirty Harry movies and John Wayne westerns, believing that guns are as much a part of the American wardrobe as the Stetson hat…

Read the rest here.