Amses: More than the gun

This territorial expansion displaced Indigenous Americans and — coupled with the Louisiana Purchase in the early 19th century — saw the nation’s population, driven by high birthrates and consistent immigration levels, quadruple in 50 years, driving millions west seeking new land and more opportunity. This rapid growth added more states to the union and intensified the issue of slavery, eventually leading to the Civil War, which, from several perspectives, continues to this day, providing the catalyst for the race-based mass shootings with which we’re growing all too familiar.

While the country having more guns than people is certainly part of the problem, it is arguably not the entire problem, which is far more complex, demanding the kind of comprehensive scrutiny that has been sorely lacking up to now. Perhaps because, when we face that particular mirror, we don’t like what’s staring back at us. According to The Guardian, white supremacy is no longer marginal in the United States but imbedded in our institutions — most dangerously in our police departments: “Hard-right organizations have now infiltrated so many police forces — the connections number in the hundreds — they (police) have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.”

Former FBI agent Michael German, who worked undercover in domestic terrorism, explains that, in 2015, the agency instructed agents to no longer put white supremacists being investigated onto watch lists “because police could then look at the watch list and determine that they are their friends.” As chilling as this is, it gets way worse.

“If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power” German continues, “they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” which leads to street violence, which upsets the general public. Leaders might respond with “Our hands are tied, give us broad enabling power, and we’ll go after these thugs,” but then the thugs become part of a “broad security apparatus or auxiliary force.”

There are indications that the Buffalo shooter was motivated by more than simple racist hatred. The idea called “accelerationism,” seeking to hasten the demise of western governments, bringing on a race war, is designed to “destabilize and discomfort society” through individual acts of violence, culminating in “white victory.” Certain passages in the murderer’s “manifesto” were directly copied from the writings of the New Zealand mosque shooter who killed 51 Muslims in 2019 and were also cited as influencing American mass shooters targeting Jews in a California synagogue and Hispanics in Texas.

One of the primary challenges we have is teasing out exactly which mass shootings are motivated by racial hatreds, politics, mental illness or the rising tide of anger that increasingly permeates the culture. No small task considering that, in the first half of this year alone, NPR reports 198 such incidents, defined as four or more people being shot or killed, excluding the shooter.

Although these numbers make the crisis feel insurmountable, we could begin by acknowledging there are not “Good people on both sides,” as posited by the previous president after the deadly chaos of 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. To be clear, Ku Klux Klansman, Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, the Alt-Right, and Confederate sympathizers are not “Good People.”

They are a murderous brew of racists, antisemites, homophobes and haters enamored by far-right politicians touting “Second Amendment solutions,” and essentially weakening gun-safety legislation into nonexistence even as foreign terrorists such as ISIS urge fighters to “spray the infidels with bullets” using America’s “easily obtainable” weapons.

In a country where high school-aged kids are 82 times more likely to die from a gun homicide than in the rest of the developed world, it is most certainly about the accessibility of firearms as David Frum maintained in the Atlantic shortly after the Parkland shooting. But in the four years since, 17 students and staff were killed at that Florida high school, we’re learning that our current spate of mass murders can no longer simply be classified as “random acts of violence.”

We can debate gun violence, firearm safety and our sacred “freedoms” for the next 100 years without touching on the horror of what’s actually happening — which is a series of specifically targeted mass killings, interconnected by a larger political objective that is already being carried out against African Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, Muslims and the LGBTQ community.

This is about way more than guns.

Walt Amses lives in North Calais.

On a personal note: Writing this commentary had more of an effect on me than I would have thought. When it was done — midday Tuesday — I shared what a gut wrench it was with my wife and surprisingly, emotion got the best of me, my eyes welling up at the implications and significance of what I had learned. I had no idea a few short hours later another lone gunman would rip the heart out of a small Texas community, killing 19 elementary school students and two teachers. At this point (early Wednesday) the GOP vows to increase police protection, arm teachers and fortify school buildings. Delving into mass shootings may have viscerally connected me to this one but, at this point in the only country where this happens, to imply that more guns will solve anything, is certifiably insane.