Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr
by Robert C. Koehler
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
April 15, 2023
Once again… once again… once again….
I’m sure you know what I’m referring to. Yeah, another — the latest (?) — mass shooting in the United States, this one at Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 10, two days ago as I write. Five killed, eight injured. The shooter, an employee of the bank, was killed in a shootout with police. Three officers were injured, including a rookie officer (ten days on the job), who was shot in the head and is struggling to survive. The gunman’s weapon was a nice, reliable AR-15-style rifle, legally purchased at a local gun shop a week earlier.
That’s the basic data.
Loved ones cry in stunned grief. People demand saner gun laws. The mayor of Louisville, “noting the enormous amount of blood needed to treat gunshot wounds… urged residents of Louisville to donate blood.”
What will happen next, of course — in the larger context known as the United States of America — is nothing. Politics will harden, of course: voices will rise, protests will erupt, Republican legislators will stand tough against demands for gun control. And eventually another mass killing somewhere will grab the headlines.
And while yes, yes, yes, I believe that assault weapons should be banned and legislation should be enacted requiring background checks, I don’t think legislative — superficial — efforts will begin to address the country’s mass-shooting epidemic. The Louisville shooting was apparently number 146 in the country this year (“mass shooting” defined as at least four people killed), with each one seen and reported as an isolated action by a violent loner. Nothing can begin to change until we dig into the national soul and find the connecting context.
As I wrote two weeks ago, in the wake of the Nashville shooting: “This is not simply a loner’s psychological flaw: the denial of full, or any, humanity — any spiritual value — to chosen others. It’s a phenomenon embedded in the social norm. We have enemies. We need them. We kill them.
“We go to war!”
And going to war means one thing above all else: dehumanization. While a loner’s mass shooting spree means dehumanizing the victims at a personal level, war means dehumanization at the national level. Every American citizen is expected to acknowledge the need to kill the enemy du jour: via bombs, via tanks, via torture, via radioactivity and whatever poison our weaponry leaves behind. Strategy is what matters. Dead bystanders — dead children — are collateral damage.
As Peter Turchin wrote a decade ago, in the wake of the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School: “The reason we should be worried about rampages is because they are surface indicators of highly troubling negative trends working their way through deep levels of our society.”
He called the victims “canaries in a coal mine.” Their toll is rising. And not just at American schools and banks and churches and shopping malls, etc., etc., etc. The toll is rising around the planet. Humanity has organized itself politically in the context of us vs. them, and this context is expanding. As the world grows technologically more connected — oh, the irony — its need to “defend itself” from the other has grown more ferocious. As soon as it’s labeled “war,” the concept of defense has virtually nothing to do with understanding.
And the United States, the most militarized country on Planet Earth, is at the heart of it all, fighting its forever war against terror: continuing to bomb, torture and poison evil itself out of existence. The 2023 U.S. military budget is $816.7 billion, with the 2024 budget likely to expand well beyond that. Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University, puts it this way: “In fact, it now seems as if this country is moving at breakneck speed out of the era of Forever War and into what might be thought of as the era of Eternal War.”
And let there be no mistake. The era of Eternal War includes America’s mass shootings. What the lost souls who commit them have access to, before they can go around the corner and buy an assault rifle, is the concept of dehumanization. Mass murder would not be possible without it.
Yeah, I know, when we go to war, it’s all done bureaucratically. It’s all classified. The enemy is determined, dehumanized and killed at the highest level of national government, blah blah blah. American citizens get to read about it in the newspaper, watch it on television, cheer (allegedly) and even protest, but the decision to kill is impersonal and “democratic.”
Well, too bad. War creates war, not peace — especially when the “tools of war” are so readily available. One reason we are apparently entering an era of Eternal War is that it’s accessible not just to the commander in chief but to every lost soul in the country. Everyone wants to feel empowered. And the seduction of war is that it seems like such a simple obvious solution: Choose the enemy, dehumanize it and kill it. Problem solved.
I blame the media: for mostly going along with the sham at the governmental level and for failing to notice, let alone report on or analyze, the broken social context revealed by every individual mass shooting.
To paraphrase the mayor of Louisville, an enormous amount of understanding is needed to address, and ultimately prevent, gunshot wounds. We all need to donate what we can.
Robert C. Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound. His website is Common Wonders.
Take Action!
Tell Congress: Ban Assault Rifles and Other Military-Grade Weapons
From the archives:
New York Times Is Now Telling Bigger Lies Than Iraq WMDs and More Effectively, by David Swanson
Dancing on the Edge of Hell, by Robert C. Koehler
The Chris Hedges Report: Breaking the Cycle of American Violence, with James Gilligan
The American Nightmare, by Kenn Orphan
Chris Hedges: America’s Gun Fetish
Maybe it’s Time to Show the Crime Scenes, by Kenn Orphan
At Least 36% of Mass Shooters Have Been Trained By the U.S. Military, by David Swanson
Abby Martin: Why America? Mass Shootings and White Nationalism Share Roots
Dandelion Salad 
Reblogged this on silverapplequeen and commented:
Sad but true.
Thanks for the reblog, silverapplequeen.
I agree, particularly with it being “embedded in the social norm”. In ancient as well as modern times, hierarchical mass societies were (and still are) divided societies. Their social structures create virtual war amongst their citizens. First of all human beings are divided from each other by occupation and class or caste. Occupational separation, competition, precariousness and fatigue frequently creates stress and anger and de-sensitises people to each other as human beings. They exist as competitors for numerous important resources associated with living. In terms of food, shelter and working conditions, many powerless people, such as slaves, prisoners, refugees, are ‘caged’ and treated more like animals than human beings. Dehumanisation is therefore normalised within all hierarchical mass society formations. Before and during warfare this symptom is both promoted by the elites and intensified to such an extent that those refusing to shell, bomb, kill or harm other human beings are severely socially humiliated or officially punished as cowards or refuseniks.
Second, mass society citizens are diverted away from direct contact with nature. The hidden away, mass incarceration and killing of herds of animals by a relative few individuals, and the packaging and parcelling up of animal body parts for food, renders human beings (apart from pets and favoured species) largely indifferent to the treatment of animals. With a few exceptions, many if not most citizens of hierarchical mass societies, become de-sensitised to insect, plant, animal and human mistreatment and wholesale slaughter. Consequently, apart from occasional ‘silent’ minutes of sorrow, there is among the majority of people, virtually no consistent or continuous empathy, sympathy or solidarity for life on earth in general or for people in general. For a badly affected minority, this lack of empathy, sympathy and solidarity, becomes transformed into frustration, anger and even hatred. It is invariably the latter three symptoms which trigger killings.
I suggest it is the hierarchical mass society model of living which needs a revolutionary transformation to reduce or end these and many other inhumane symptoms.
R. Ratcliffe (www.critical-mass.net)
Excellent points, Roy.