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Are mass killings becoming a new norm?

By Robert Mclean - posted Friday, 28 December 2012


Actions beyond what most consider normal resulted recently in the deaths of 26 people.

The mass shooting at the Newtown primary school in Connecticut, USA, unleashed a wave of emotion as the news broke that 20 of those killed were kids between the ages of five and 10.

The young man responsible, who first shot his mother at home before focussing on the school, ended this sorry episode when he shot himself.

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However, for a moment, let’s consider what happened at the Newtown Sandy Hook Primary School is in fact becoming the norm for it was the outcome of living in a society drenched with the idea that whatever is troubling you can be resolved through violence.

The educative and humanising processes of society are swamped by this idea to become a nation-wide characteristic that sees the United States embroiled in a hegemonic rampage around the world.

Blame rests unequivocally with the young man, but it seems diametrically unfair that he should shoulder the blame alone when the broader society of which he is a product sees violence as an attractive solution with guns as the preferred method of dispute resolution?.

The portrayed bravado of America’s wild-west from late in the 19th Century has transmogrified to a grotesque and bizarre sense of normal today in which many Americans, and some Australians it must be noted, feel a sense of vulnerability without a firearm in the house.

The young man was unquestionably troubled, but is it just to heap all the responsibility upon him and walk away comforted by the thought that there was nothing you could do when the young man and his behaviour is clearly a product of the society we helped create?

Many shocked by events at the school see themselves as pacifists, but stand with a government that commits similar, or worse, atrocities in other countries.

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Unable to explain it any better I quote Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, who said: “Like Bush’s government in Iraq, Barack Obama’s administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA’s drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom 64 were children.”

“Yet”, Monbiot writes, “there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them; no pictures on the front pages of the world’s newspapers; no interviews with grieving relatives; no minute analysis of what happened and why.”

That prompts the question: Are some children automatically more valuable than others in our eyes?

Was what happened at Sandy Hook Primary School normal? Considered from the perspective of what is the statistically most violent culture on earth it has to be ”yes”, but the vast bulk of Australians would say “no”.

Meanwhile, the sentiment that seeks armed guards in US schools is a manifestation of a culture that is out of context and out of time.

Stumbling about and reeling from the 18th century revolution, residents intoxicated by the recent slaughter and with minds still afire with the rule of the gun, Americans cobbled together a constitution and then added a Bill of Rights.

The Second Amendment of that Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, protected the right of people to keep and bear arms.

Fresh from a national conflagration of death and destruction in which personal security seemed to hinge on owning and bearing a weapon, such a right seemed to make sense, at that time.

As with everything, times have changed, things are different now, we are different people, but that 18th century mandate still has a vice-like grip on the minds of many Americans today.

Interestingly, a variation of that out of context and out of time inflection is apparent in the thinking of many Australians who put a high value on individualism, an independence that borders on anarchism, an idea that deplores governmental influence.

Oddly the right the keep and bear arms is a hierarchal government mandate, but one that appeals to the Americans distorted sense of freedom, a freedom bought at their local gun shop and secured through the elimination of that of another.

It was the late Chinese chairman Mao who said that ultimate political power comes from the barrel of a gun and it seems many, particularly Americans, see freedom coming from the same source.

Freedom is not however, to be found in the subjugation and intended or otherwise control of others, rather in your own thinking.

Personal security vanishes into the void the instant you arm yourself with a gun, or for that matter a stick, as no longer are “you” negotiating your imagined security for in reality you have delegated it to an artefact; an unemotional “thing” that knows neither right nor wrong.

Anarchy has arrived.

Australia has a wretched history in relation to guns, a claim that can easily be verified with a quick look at the treatment of our indigenous people, but there was a shift in the national consciousness soon after the Port Arthur shootings in Tasmania in 1996.

To his credit, the then Prime Minister, John Howard, bravely strode amid the controversial labyrinth of gun control and through buy-backs, restrictions on the types and number of guns people can own and tighter permit rules, made the country more secure.

Australia has been a safer and, I would argue, a freer place since those changes more than a decade ago and those who disagree would see their argument vanquished by the vanishing numbers of homicide and suicide gun deaths.

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