Shootings: Political Violence for Sadist Politics

Call me a naive comparativist historical sociologist but I'd like to know where the cultural / moral pattern of "solving" personal, social, political, etc. problems through indiscriminate violence "comes from". Of course restricting firearms ownership is crucial for reducing the level of violence--once we have a culturally set, extreme-high level of proclivity to violence in a particular culture. In this case, the public culture of the USA.

But, IMHO, that is not where the heart of the problem lies if we actually want to understand what we are dealing with. The more primary question is, why so many people think it is a good idea to destroy others. As a help, here's a factoid from the US Council on Foreign Relations: There are countries in the world where the population at large has access to firearms or other technologies of generalized violence and, yet, the level of gun violence is very considerably lower than in the USA. Specifically, the site IHME argues, based on a study published in JAMA,

"[a]ge-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole. The US has 23 times the rate of firearm homicide seen in Australia.

Within the US, gun violence varies widely. Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates range from a high of 17 per 100,000 in Washington, D.C. to a low of 0.91 per 100,000 in New Hampshire. Washington, D.C.’s rate is similar to those of the Bahamas and Mexico, which rank eighth and tenth globally. New Hampshire’s rate is similar to that of Pakistan. Even though New Hampshire has the lowest rates of age-adjusted firearm homicides in the US, its rate is nearly five times greater than that of the European Union as a whole."

My hunch: Acts of indiscriminate violence--be they committed by the police or civilians domestically or by (ir)regular armies abroad--are forms of political violence. They are products of a political culture that sees as its ultimate goal the destruction of others, in the physical sense. A political culture of pure sadism. For a practitioner of this kind of politics, the inability of the public-to-be-victim to wage a counter-violence of self defense is a perfect condition. The perpetrator is not seeking heroic self-demonstration "against all odds" for "a common good"; instead, he just seeks bodies to destroy. To torture or, ultimately, to end bare life. That is how, he imagines, he will reach his ultimate political goal.

The public has a hard time recognizing school, cinema, mall, etc. shootings as political violence because we are conditioned to expect political violence to be directed against organs of the state, or at least against other armed groups, put together by corporate organizations. So, here is a--to me--major clue about shootings of unarmed, innocent civilians as political violence: These shootings are that form of political violence where the perpetrator seeks situations in which he can destroy lives for political purposes with--at least for a moment--little to no resistance. It is difficult for me to miss the isomorphy between the political violence of shootings of civilians and attacking smaller, militarily or economically weaker societies. It is a pattern that is practiced by "your" state on Others; the perpetrator of the shootings "just" acts out this pattern on a smaller scale. The lone imperialist war perpetrator who attacks kids in a nearby school to destroy the "sovereignty" of the victims.

School shootings are to politics what drone attacks on civilians are to war.

The second thing that makes it difficult to recognize shootings as acts of political violence is that the perpetrators' political "motives" are rarely formulated in terms communicable / perceptible to others but the shooter. Arguably, one additional thing that is common among most perpetrators--the extent of this is difficult to tell from the breathtakingly imprecise and fragmented coverage the public get about these stories--is that they struggle with the ambition of expressing themselves in terms understandable to others. In other words, they suffer, among many other things, I'm sure, from an inability to articulate their political wishes / goals. They are, clearly, products of a system of education that restricts the right to an ability to articulate political ideas to the top 1-5% of the income/education/property classes.

Nor do we have access--for perfectly understandable reasons--to the full extent of the texts produced by shooters. But neither their inarticulateness nor the unavailability of their texts, political ideas, demands, etc. to the public, makes them less political. It just makes the motives appear murkier, harder to decipher.

Indiscriminate mass shootings are the political expressions of inarticulate subjects, caught up in a culture of generalized violence and a desire to wreak havoc on human lives without those humans being able to defend themselves.

BTW, the cult(ure) of violence is of course a key component of fascist politics.

We have enormous problems, bigger and tougher than most people, even most analysts, realize.

And we haven't begun talking about the specific social and political adjustments necessary for the US not to blow itself (and the world) up due to the end of its global economic and even military dominance. We live in unbelievably dangerous times.