To The Gun Lovers: Here's Why I Won't Stand With You Confronting White Supremacists If I Know You're Carrying Concealed

Mourners after the El Paso shooting targeting Latinx people according to the shooter's manifesto. Photo credit: DNYUZ

I live in Maine's 2nd district, now represented by a gun-loving combat veteran who I predict will do nothing to respond to the three mass shootings last week in the USA.

(Note: I do not count offering "thoughts and prayers" as doing anything.)

Rep. Jared Golden has his staff write back to me about gun control saying that my neighbors, his constituents, don't want it, and that he went to Congress to represent them. How much the corruption riddled NRA has to do with his position will remain a sore subject with liberals scrambling to defend Democrat Golden because he replaced the odious GOP incumbent.

Recently I got involved in a group on social media committed to standing up to anti-immigrant white supremacists here in Maine. A friend of a friend started a public group and it burgeoned quickly into a group with several angry-sounding males expounding the virtues of gun ownership and use. It wasn't taken kindly when I commented that I would not be joining in where guns were present to witness and document white supremacist activity, or to defend neighbors being snitched on to ICE storm troopers.

Apparently I am an old white boomer (redundant with old) whose privilege has protected me from violence and who doesn't understand. The fact that I am a woman and thus a default target of violence from childhood doesn't seem to occur to them.

My clearly stated objection -- that the probability of injury to everyone goes up significantly when loaded guns are present -- was mocked as "guns are icky" by the young men.

The group appeared to lack moderation and focus. Debate over strategy and/or tactics among activists who share a goal can be divisive, especially if conducted in public, so I left. I continued to think about and talk about the issue while absorbing news of three mass shootings by angry young white men in a week: Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton.

Here's one acquaintance's report on the Dayton shooter:

I don't know the shooters but I do know how they grew up: in a society steeped in violent images, with the opportunity to spend hundreds of hours pretending to shoot people on screens in order to "win." They also grew up surrounded by gun shops, gun shows, and heavy propaganda glorifying the death machine that is the U.S. military.

The Dayton shooter killed his own sister and 8 other people.

As reported in Heavy.com:

Betts was in ROTC in high school. A Dayton local newspaper purchased a social media background check on him that revealed he used words and phrases like “All Shall Be Annihilated,” “Bloodlust,” “Absolute Carnage,” and “Bloody Massacre.” 

According to a press conference given by Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl, the weapon Betts used on Sunday morning was obtained legally. “The rifle was ordered online from Texas and transferred at an area firearms dealer,” said Biehl.

Many blame the demagogue with bad hair for hate language inciting the angry young white men of the USA, and its quite likely that his rhetoric is a factor.

But the violence that plagues us began long before he was "elected" to "lead" us.

Other countries similar to ours -- founded on attempted genocide of the indigenous people -- have achieved gun control effectively and drastically reduced the incidence of mass shootings: Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Eric Garner being choked to death by armed police on Staten Island five years ago this week. They didn't use guns to kill him for selling loose cigarettes on the street, but they were emboldened by being heavily armed. Image credit: Wikipedia

Black and brown people in the USA continue to suffer extreme levels of violence from the trained and licensed gun-toting police, many of whom are clearly white supremacists hiding behind a badge and a uniform. (Many people of color believe carrying a gun will protect them, too; but it did not protect Philando Castile.)

I say disarm police, also.

I lived in Tokyo for four years and police did not carry guns. In the U.S. even "school resource officers" aka uniformed police carry guns. And they are often quite violent with students of color, and useless when a mass shooting is underway.

I say disarm combat veterans, also.

It will reduce the chances for them to shoot themselves or their families when experiencing PTSD symptoms that make them want to end it all.

These are short term solutions (that will not be used here in the gun-crazed USA). Long term solution for toxic gun culture? It might be to reduce the ratio of males to females significantly.

Could a Congress full of women like those of The Squad, i.e. not having clawed their way to the top of a system of violent patriarchy, pass meaningful gun control laws? 

Could an army of women who've had it with gun violence and were in charge of governance buy back a large portion of guns now in circulation? I think they could.

U.S. Army Tweet Backfires On Memorial Day

For Memorial Day I visited the family cemetery and removed the flags placed on my father's and brother's graves at the behest of the VFA (Veterans of Foreign Wars) in Skowhegan. I've asked them to stop doing this, but the cemetery manager says he has to do what the VFA says.

My brother never enlisted, but he bears a similar name to a Civil War vet ancestor of ours who died by his own hand. My father, who was in the Army in Korea post-combat, passed on what his WWI vet father taught him: "Don't believe them when they say the next war is a good one. There is no such thing." (My father enlisted after his father died of his war injuries, before I was born.) My little granddaughter wanted the flag because she loves the stars and stripes design.

It is marketing like this that keeps the Pentagon death cult churning out wars and victims.

But marketing can only take you so far into denying reality. Two of my favorite thinkers blogged about a now infamously ill-advised tweet by the U.S. Army last week, "How has serving impacted you?" The number of responses was only at 5,300+ when Bruce Gagnon, himself an Air Force veteran, weighed in with "Army: It's not a job, it's an adventure..."

• “My daughter was raped while in the army,” said one responder. “They took her to the hospital where an all male staff tried to convince her to give the guy a break because it would ruin his life. She persisted. Wouldn’t back down. Did a tour in Iraq. Now suffers from PTSD.”

• “I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years,” said another.

• “Someone I loved joined right out of high school even though I begged him not to. Few months after his deployment ended, we reconnected. One night, he told me he loved me and then shot himself in the head. If you’re gonna prey on kids for imperialism, at least treat their PTSD.”

By now various authors have compiled some of the 10,ooo responses. Caitlin Johnstone all the way down in Australia posted "The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut Wrenching."

“My dad was drafted into war and was exposed to agent orange. I was born w multiple physical/neurological disabilities that are linked back to that chemical. And my dad became an alcoholic with ptsd and a side of bipolar disorder.” 

~ 

“i met this guy named christian who served in iraq. he was cool, had his own place with a pole in the living room. always had lit parties. my best friend at the time started dating him so we spent a weekend at his crib. after a party, 6am, he took out his laptop. he started showing us some pics of his time in the army. pics with a bunch of dudes. smiling, laughing. it was cool. i was drunk and didn’t care. he started showing us pics of some little kids. after a while, his eyes went completely fucking dark. i was like man, dude’s high af. he very calmly explained to us that all of those kids were dead ‘but that’s what war was. dead kids and nothing to show for it but a military discount’. christian killed himself 2 months later.”

George Marlowe writing for World Socialist Web Site, "Memorial Day 2019: US Army tweet prompts outpouring of antiwar sentiment," pointed out what I've been thinking since I saw the original thread on Twitter: "This outpouring of rage on Twitter highlights the latent but deep going antiwar sentiment in the American population[emphasis mine] that finds no expression in the current political system or the corporate media. "  

How can we antiwar activists do a better job of leveraging this?

I would love to hear your thoughts in comments.

Veterans Responsible For Recent Gun Massacres #ThousandOaks #TallahasseeShooting

Facebook photo posted by Scott Paul Beirle, the yoga class killer.

We already know that the face of mass violence in the gun-infested USA looks male and very, very white. This week, it's looking increasingly like a white male veteran of the empire's many wars.

Scott Paul Beierle, age 40, shot and killed two women and injured several other people at a yoga class in Tallahassee on November 2. Five months ago he was fired from his job as a substitute teacher on the grounds of "unprofessional conduct." Students complained that he would fixate on girl students and stare them down, describing him as giving off a "psychopath vibe." He had been arrested more than once for assault, and investigated for harassing women. He was resentful about being rejected by women, a self-styled "incel" who couldn't get a date. He made videos that included racist rants and praise for another gunman who killed women who wouldn't go out with him. After he shot up the yoga studio, he turned his weapon on himself.

In almost any other rich nation, Beierle would not have been allowed to own the gun he used to murder his victims before turning the weapon on himself.

Scott Bierle was a veteran. Little is known about his time in the Army during 2008-10. He joins the ranks of the 20 veterans who commit suicide each day in the USA.

Ian David Long was the 28 year old veteran who shot up a country music nightclub in Thousand Oaks, California on November 8. He killed 13 people -- if you include his own suicide --and wounded many others.

According to ABC News article, "Thousand Oaks shooter was part of 'new generation of veterans' psychologist says":

The U.S. Marine Corps confirmed Long served from 2008 to 2013, and was deployed to Afghanistan from November 16, 2010, to June 14, 2011...

"There's no front line. These wars have been fought primarily through improvised explosive devices," clinical psychologist Dr. Elena Klaw told ABC7 News. "So that means that every man, woman or child that you see could be an enemy."

Dr. Klaw is also the director of Veterans Embracing Transition at San Jose State University. She explained the combat experienced in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars could impact a veteran's transition to civilian life. 

"You can't tell who's an enemy, and who's a combatant and who isn't," she continued. "So that required an enormous amount of what we call hyper vigilance." 

"Veterans have told me that the hardest part of their service has been coming home," Klaw said.  

Long's neighbors told the media they suspect he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.

Another mental health care provider did not agree. From CNN's story about the tragedy:

Thomas Burke, a pastor who served with Long in the same US Marine Corps regiment, said Long's battalion arrived during intense fighting in Helmand province.But Burke warned against too quickly blaming Long's actions on trauma experienced during war. 

"PTSD doesn't create homicidal ideation," Burke said. "We train a generation to be as violent as possible, then we expect them to come home and be OK. It's not mental illness. It's that we're doing something to a generation, and we're not responding to the needs they have."

A meme that's making the rounds: in the last 50 years, more people in the U.S. have died from gunshot wounds than ALL the people in the U.S. who died in all our wars.

Another angle on this story: the migrant waves from Central America and Mexico are made up of desperate people fleeing both poverty and epidemic gun violence. TeleSUR news reports that 2,000 guns made in the U.S. enter Mexico EVERY DAY.

Our endless (largely ignored) wars against people all over the planet, our fatally lax gun control, and our culture of  "entertainment" like video games where children are trained to kill for wins, have converged to create a perfect storm of violence.

From the VA:

From 2005 to 2016, Veteran and non-Veteran adult suicide rates increased 25.9 percent and 20.6 percent, respectively...

Veterans who are in crisis or having thoughts of suicide – and those who know a Veteran in crisis – can call the Veterans Crisis Line for confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Call 800-273-8255 and press 1, chat online at VeteransCrisisLine.net/Chat, or text to 838255.

Happy veterans day.