First and Foremost
It’s time to take a hard look at our priorities.
It seems like we’re at an inflection point in American society. Our primary drives now appear to be short-circuiting our capacity for reason with an intensity that is, frankly, pretty damn overwhelming.
No more perfect an example of the above could exist than the terrible tragedy in Parkland, FL. It is here, in this moment with these kids that the worm may have finally turned. We may see a gun control reform and a re-definition of the Second Amendment, something I confess I never expected in my lifetime. The #NeverAgain movement shows no signs of abating.
Then, there’s the real indicator of shifting winds — an increasingly large host of corporate partners telling the NRA, “buh-bye.” To be clear, this is far from over. And while the temptation to get stuck in the muck of a myopic debate about “gun rights”, I find it increasingly worthwhile to take a step back and look at ourselves from a wider angle. Sure, this moment is about guns, our right to liberty and our safety. It’s also so much bigger.
Gun$, Gun$, Gun$
It’s no secret the NRA funds political policy and the politicians who enact. They fund it with a significant amount of money. The NRA’s position — and those of its supporters and partners — is that it is defending the Constitutional right of American citizens to bear arms.
Here’s the rub: the NRA isn’t really about protecting gun owners. It’s about protecting gun sellers.
If the NRA’s real mission were to protect gun owners, it stands to reason that they would be heavily invested in ensuring that the population of gun-owning individuals was of the highest caliber individuals. And to that end, the NRA claims it supports stronger mental health protections… but it doesn’t. Granted, the ACLU supported that rollback as well, but read the fine print of the ACLU’s statement (bolded for emphasis):
The ACLU and 23 national disability groups did not oppose this rule because we want more guns in our community. This is about more than guns.
And yet this is where the NRA attempted to steer the conversation, and that got a big push courtesy of our President. Bonuses for bullets. For teachers.
Still think this is about Constitutional rights?
It’s about capitalism. It’s about not limiting the pool of weapons that can be sold on an open market, or the amount of buyers available to purchase them. We the people of the United States of America are 4.4% of the world’s population, and we own 42% of the world’s guns. The NRA’s mission isn’t to protect rights, it’s to protect commercial interests.
Culture Compromised
This isn’t about violent pop culture, either, much as some on the far right would have us believe. In the aftermath of these deadly mass shootings, there’s a lot of pushback on the gun control narrative about how it’s pop culture that is warping minds, how parents need to take more responsibility for their children. You know, “pay attention” and stuff.
Where do you think Hollywood gets their ideas? From us, of course. Why are violent, role-playing videos games far and away the most popular? Because broadly as a society we conflate violence with heroism. In America, we’ve gone so far down a rabbit hole conflating virtuous patriotism with violent force that we’ve lost sight of the sky.
If you love the military and the troops and think we kick ass all over the world, you’re a patriot. If you question our military actions, the sheer size and scope of our military and/or the stupefying investment as part of our overall budget, then you’re a treasonous coward or worse, a socialist.
What the hell?
What’s really warping our minds, and has been warping them for decades, is the equation in which the level of your patriotism is determined by the fervor with which you support military action, AKA gun violence, bomb violence and all manner of violence. You can draw a straight line from President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisnehower’s warning about military-industrial complex to the ever-increasing amount of war-mongering in movies, TV shows and video games.
The choice part of that speech:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Look at that graph. We spend nearly nine dollars on the military for one dollar we spend on Education. We spend at about the same ratio when comparing the military budget to science and energy budgets. Combined.
We’ve got an aging workforce about to enact a mass exodus from our economy, poor student performance in key areas of economic growth opportunity (math and science), and dying fossil fuel industries. And this administration wants to add spending to the armed forces, which already get 10X multiplier compared to education, energy and the environment.
Yay, ‘murica.
Such a narrow definition of patriotism was always bound to reap real problems, and now they’re coming home to roost. This conversation about guns has devolved into a shouting match, neither side willing to concede a single factoid. It’s disgusting. And we did it to ourselves.
We have so many social and political constructs that carve us up into groups, so many things vying for our attention and an increasing exasperation with all the noise that it’s getting hard to see the forst for the trees. But we must.
We need to remember who we are. We’re human beings, first, patriots second and capitalists third. You can’t re-shuffle these priorities into any other order and concoct a winning formula. We have very important shared interests — as human beings. We have some shared interests as patriots, but we believe the means to those ends can be had differently. As capitalists, we have even less shared interests, because the underlying premise of the system is, “you’re on your own, chief.”
Of those shared human interests, safety is way up there. Thing is, assuring our shared safety doesn’t have to prevent us from fulfilling any of the other needs on that pyramid. We can have sensible gun laws and support people’s right to bear arms. We can support mental health while also taking proper measures to keep at-risk individuals from doing great harm. This isn’t a binary choice. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We just need to step back, stop looking so narrowly at how we’re divided, and start looking at how we’re united. As human beings with shared needs. That’s one fact with no alternative that we can all agree upon. That’s a starting point.
