Mass Shootings and Massacres in America: The Political, Cultural and Socio-psychological Features of US Society
Over the past fifty plus years, over 125 mass shootings/massacres
have occurred within the United States but not one perpetrator has been
identified as a trained member of an international Islamist terrorist
organization.
A review of the massacres will shed considerable light on the political, cultural and socio-psychological features of US society.
The frequent and intensely bloody nature of these mass shootings are
a distinctly US phenomenon. The high proportion of fatalities over
wounded survivors is a reflection of the availability of high-power
weapons in the US and the poorly coordinated police response – where
SWAT teams place ‘force protection’ over saving lives.
Method and Scope
Until very recently, civilian-initiated massacres were an infrequent
phenomenon in US society up. In order to understand the rise of
civilian-initiated massacres as an Americanphenomenon, we will first set
out approximately 20-year time frames, then list the number of
massacres in each time period, examine the number of fatalities and the
political and social ethos within each time frame. It would be
interesting to look at the ratio of fatalities to wounded survivors in
order to gauge the effectiveness of the police/medical response.
We can identify three time frames: the early period between
1960-1980; the middle period between 1981-1998; the most recent period
between 1999-2016.
Political Dynamics of Massacres
There is a clear and consistent increase in the number of massacres
and fatalities over the entire half century. From 1960 to 1980, there
was one large massacre resulting in at least 14 fatalities and 32
wounded.
In the subsequent period between 1981-1998 the number of massacres
jumped four-fold and the number of fatalities increased four-fold from
fourteen to seventy-one.
In the most recent period (1999-2016) thenumber of massacres almost
doubled again and the number of fatalities increased two and a half
times.
The number of massacres and victims have ‘taken off’ in the last few
years There are grounds to believe that we have moved from massacres
as ararity to a transitional period, to a significant upsurge which has
become the ‘new norm’ for mass killings.
Myths : State Propaganda and Social Realities
Large, civilian-initiated massacres were rare(The Texas University
Tower in 1967) during the two decades (1960-1980) despite this being a
time of mass popular protest against the war and racism, cultural
revolts, labor unrest and community-based collective action.
During these tumultuous years, the political-cultural climate
encouraged mass collective action directed at changing government
policy. Individual political, social and local grievances or
psycho-cultural resentments were channeled through well-structured
community based organizations. State propaganda was challenged by a
widespread system of robust opposition media, well-publicized critical
voices and familiar places of revolt. Domestic massacres, when they
occurred were more often perpetrated by the State – as in the massacres
against the Black Panther leadership, or shooting of students at Jackson
State and Kent State Universities.
The growth of civilian-initiated massacres as public events began to
find prominence between 1980-1998, a time of growing elite dominance
over everyday life and the retreat of collective expression.
This ‘middle’ or ‘transitional period’ was characterized by state and
media emphasis on individual justifications and resentments, together
with the growing cult of private greed– the ‘animal spirits’ of the
market – and the promotion of military revivalism, through Reagan’s
invasion of Grenada, and George Bush’s destruction of Panama and Iraq.
The previous political culture, which had absorbed grievances and offered outlets for individual aggression, was in retreat.
The elites, led by President Reagan, established the culture of the
‘Lone Ranger’ (or lone wolf), vindicating grievances with his ‘righteous
rifle’. The conflation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution
with the worship of the lone vigilante helped to create the contemporary
mass killer.
he political culture of resistance was replaced by the pathology of
resentment; protests directed at political targets were replaced by
violent terror directed at diffuse apolitical publics – the amorphous
innocents.
The transition period established several key determinants that led to the subsequent massification of massacres.
First, the political-cultural elites deliberately and
systematically discredited the social context of mass popular protest,
ridiculing popular discontent and suppressing dissent
while enhancing the image of the power of the individual. The cult of
the ‘individual over the collective’ morphed into a deranged Ayn Randian Atlas with his semi-automatic 9 mm.
Secondly, the transitional political culture renewed and enhanced the
role of state violence in resolving conflicts and extended the notion
of social violence downward into the mass of society.
Under the guardianship of the political and media elites, the 1980’s
and 1990’s did not encourage or permit any effective mass cultural
alternative to violence.
The deregulation of the economy and the Clinton regime’s open-ended
policy of conquest (or ‘regime changes’) through massive bombing of
overseas adversaries led to a massive policing of both foreign (imperial
clients) and domestic civil societies, which fed into the pathological
tendencies of individuals who set out to vindicate their private
grievances.
The first two decades of the 21st century witnessed a
sharp increase in domestic civilian-initiated massacres with an even
greater proportion of fatalities. The cumulative effects of mass
murders of previous decades, found expression in a rising spiral of
massacres.
The 21st century is the epoch of multiple serial killings
at every geographical region, from global, regional, national and local
levels. The bloody consequences of lawless imperial wars of aggression
and pillage (with such psychotic justifications as ‘regime change’ or
‘humanitarian intervention’ especially under the First Clinton Dynastic
Regime) are features of everyday life. Military budgets have
skyrocketed at the international and national level and are mirrored by
multi-million arms purchases by individuals at the domestic civilian
level.
Military metaphysics and quasi-religious public displays of
superhuman ‘avengers’ wrapped in the national flag have permeated every
cranny of society – from mega-million dollar sporting extravaganzas to
school assemblies, business meetings (like the Rotary Clubs) and
workplace gatherings.
Millions have entered the war zones; daily police killings of
citizens, especially African American and marginalized youth, have
become the norm. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of immigrants are
demonized, assaulted, dragged from their homes or workplaces,
incarcerated and deported with barely the shirt of their backs – leaving
sundered families and communities.
Most important, the US imperial state has brutalized and, directly or
indirectly, massacred millions of Muslim civilians, citizens of
once-sovereign nations, throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and
North Africa and even in the immigrant ghettos, raising lawlessness to a
new and more diffuse level.
The pathology of the American state, with its embrace of
state-sponsored massacres, has created mass psycho-phobia against Muslim
people and is in the process of stirring up the boiling pot of even
more brutal civilian massacres. It must be emphasized that American
citizens, overwhelmingly non-Muslim, have committed the vast majority of
mass shooting in America. Even those mass shooting committed by
self-described Islamists have involved US-born Muslims or converts who
have shown an affinity and commitment to the dominant gun ethos of
America. None have been ‘trained abroad’, none have proved to be
‘soldiers’ of some remote international Islamist movement. Most have
learned their requisite ‘skills’ at ‘for-profit’ US shooting ranges and
all have imbibed the national gun ideology over community and mass
collective action.
Only two of the most recent seven large massacres have a remote link
to Islam – and these assassins were not directly related to overseas,
organized terrorist groups but had been ‘self-radicalized’ in the
context of the individualist US gun culture. Omar Mateen, who massacred
scores of unarmed young, mostly Hispanic, people at a gay club in
Orlando, Florida clearly had much more in common (spiritually and
operationally) with the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik (who
shot and killed over seventy youth at a multi-cultural summer camp in
2011) or with Adam Lanzo (who killed 20 small pupils and 6 teachers in
Connecticut in 2012), than with any fighting units in Syria or
Afghanistan.
Conclusion
The personal-political grievances of mass murderers have everything
to do with their cultural and psychological isolation, resentment and
deep spiritual commitment to the dominant arms culture of America:
these massacres have become theirself-prescribed psycho-therapy. The
dominant political and police institutions naturally use these for
propaganda to advance the imperial agenda, rather than encourage
positive collective expressions of grievances to address social issues.
Today there is no collective social expression with
highly credible, committed mass activists as there had been during the
1960-70’s, when large-scale civilian initiated massacres were very
rare. The notorious 1967 mass shooting in Austin Texas by a former
Marine champion sharpshooter (one shot per kill) was followed by
meticulous expert examination of the circumstances and context. Today,
there are no political collective or community responses like that of
the Texas tower sniper. During the 1980-90’s, the elites encouraged and
promoted voracious aggressions against rival markets and whole nations,
which the financial press pundits have celebrated as expressions of the
‘animal spirits’, the triumph of the ‘fittest’, most individualistic
capitalism. From 2000 to the present, the mass media has saturated its
audiences with military solutions to individual grievances. The
psychopathology of the mass murderers is reflected in the state
writ-large.
The original source of this article is Global Research
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