As a onetime columnist for the Buffalo Evening News, I had been working on an appropriate response to the racist massacre in Buffalo. But I hadn’t made much progress when the Buffalo atrocities were upstaged, only 10 days later, by the wholesale slaughter of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, which cost twice as many innocent lives. There are times, becoming more frequent, when no one outside our national community knows what to make of America.
Even some of us natives are beginning to wonder if there’s any way forward, or even any way to explain ourselves to our neighbors. Two almost concurrent mass murders by deranged teenage loners, both armed with legally-purchased assault rifles, naturally spurred sane legislators and officeholders to renew their demands for effective gun control, that ever-elusive goal here in Earth’s arsenal with its 400 million civilian-owned firearms. But what’s left to say, that wasn’t said after Newtown, after Parkland, after any of the scores of mass shootings (277 since 2009 where four or more people were killed) that occur here and virtually nowhere else on the planet? School shootings — a kind of imitative, competitive way for floridly insane teenagers to commit suicide — are such a bizarre nightmare feature of life in America that no dystopian novelist could have made them up. There have been 27 this year, and counting.
(Morning in America, June 3, 2022, front page headlines:
New York Times—“Mass Shootings Just Won’t Stop: 20 in Nine Days”
Raleigh News and Observer — “NC Had Info on Over 250 Planned School Attacks”)
No marginally civilized country would ever allow civilians to own military-style assault weapons, the weapons of choice for mass murderers. It’s been reported that America’s “hunters” now own more of them than its army. Pistols? Fifty years ago Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas endorsed restricting them to law enforcement officers. No doubt he was right, and back in 1960 60% of Americans agreed with him. Today, after decades of deadly brainwashing by the gun lobby, only 19% would support a pistol ban. Our ballistic passions are unique. Open-Carry and Concealed-Carry rights sound like science fiction to anyone but an American. In a country with any hope of protecting its children from homicidal psychos, paranoid home-defenders would have to pretend to be hunters, and required to keep their rifles and shotguns under lock and key.
In all the world beyond America’s exotic gun cult, that’s logic in its simplest, starkest form. Arguing against it is dangerous and ridiculous. But tell that to the Republicans. Locked in a sexual embrace with the National Rifle Association, reduced to prostitution by the NRA’s largesse, the Republican Party finds itself morally paralyzed — blind to reason, blind to irony, blind to shame. The massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde should be a final litmus test of the GOP’s humanity. If it can shrug off the memory of those murdered children and still refuse to move the needle one degree in the direction of saner gun control, it has no place left to hide its shameful, pitiful bondage to the bullet merchants. And this faltering republic it pollutes, on life support since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, will have slipped into a coma from which we may not recover.
Gun control is the argument we never lose, the battle we never win. In this pay-to-play political system we like to call a democracy, no pressure group has maximized its resources half as effectively as the gun lobby. Though only 30% of American adults are gun owners — and a significant percentage of them are not Second Amendment extremists—-the NRA and its shock troops cast the biggest legislative shadow of any weird minority on Earth. In many red states, a politician who opposes them commits political suicide. The arms industry and its lobbyists couldn’t have done it, of course, without a certain strain of primitive belligerence that always lurked in America’s bloodstream. It’s up to psychiatrists to explain the malignant blend of machismo and paranoia that created our gun cult. But we all have neighbors whose idea of freedom is an AR-15 in every pickup.
The egregious Texas governor Greg Abbott, who in the past year signed 22 laws loosening gun restrictions, surveyed the slaughter in Uvalde and blamed it on pure “evil,” as if it had been some incarnate demon pumping lead into the bodies of cowering children. No, governor — it was a mad person, an insane boy who had taken psychosis to its furthest human extreme. Even prosecuting him as a criminal and executing him would have been an empty charade, A permanent padded cell is the only safe place for a lunatic who mows down third-graders in cold blood. “Evil” is the NRA, once denounced by the novelist William Styron as “one of the most evil organizations to exist in any nation, past or present.”
“Evil” is a political system — specifically Republicans like Abbott — that enabled this mad boy to buy an assault rifle at the age of 18. You can identify the gun cult’s most abject slaves by the mindless prefab slogans these officials recite after every massacre,“law-abiding citizens,” “a good guy with a gun,” “guns don’t kill people …” etc. Even the holy Second Amendment is a laughable pretense, as if something authored by men in powdered wigs, in the days of hostile Indians and muzzle-loaders, retains any relevance in the age of AR-15s and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.
In a country where 100 people die of bullet wounds every day, new gun laws are a simple matter of life and death — literally — and the people who oppose them have innocent blood on their hands. Buckets of it, lately. But outrageously easy access to deadly weapons is not the only factor in the terror that’s turning a prideful republic into a reeking slaughterhouse. It’s true that the entertainment media — TV, movies, video games — are rotten with gun violence. But in the long run a more psychologically damaging influence may be the vaunted Internet and its deformed offspring, the social media.
The internet snakepits, the racist and neo-Nazi sites and conspiracy factories have poisoned the brains of millions of Americans of all ages. But it’s the younger generations who appear to have the most disturbing online addictions. The racist assassin in Buffalo was a total creature of the internet. According to the New York Times, he “surfed through a smorgasbord of racist and anti-Semitic websites online … He lingered in furtive chat rooms on Reddit and 4chan … He toggled between ‘documentaries’ on extremist websites and gun tutorials on YouTube.” And I can testify that the psychotic racism that resulted in the deaths of 10 black people was fed only by his online experience. He was from Conklin, N.Y. I grew up in an almost identical small town in the northern Appalachians, where there was no racial tension because there were almost no African Americans.
Half an hour before the massacre in Uvalde, the shooter declared his intentions on three social media posts. On the day he bought his assault rifles, he sent a photo of them to another Instagram user in Europe, a woman he was trying to impress. The Buffalo shooter was live-streaming online when he opened fire, for god’s sake. When I read these things I can’t help thinking about all the “influencers” and Instagram and TikTok “stars” and “superstars” who are making a living, and fortunes in some cases, by feeding personal content to thousands and even millions of “followers” online. Performance. These young people are performing. They’re living their lives in front of an audience. This seems pretty crazy, at least to those of us from the prewired generations. It seems pathological. And when online performance is a norm for sad losers who are already profoundly crazy, some may become assassins who know that only a school massacre will ever make a big enough impression online.
A few of us can remember when only politicians and entertainers needed an audience, and when we thought the most effective and admirable people were the ones who called the least attention to themselves. Pardon my antiquity. Clearly the world has changed, though not in many ways that I applaud. When did privacy become archaic? Of all the extremes that mark the generation gap, performance culture may turn out to be the most alarming and tenacious. We can change our crazy gun laws if a terrified unarmed majority can find a will and a way to flex its electoral muscle. But this strange compulsion to perform your life for an online audience has printed a couple of generations with pathological needs and vulnerabilities their parents could never imagine.
Most of the shooters belong to these generations. They’re males under 25. If that’s the way the demographics keep trending, banning AR-15s might not be enough to save the schoolchildren. The conventional wisdom about the internet and its ugly children is that we can never turn back — technology is a one-way street. If that’s the case, and I don’t doubt it, it’s going to take changes a whole lot more nuanced and deep-rooted than gun laws before Americans can put away the bulletproof vests.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2022
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