The cult of violence in the United States
By Jesús Arboleya Cervera
HAVANA – Last April, while the bodies of 20 children and 8 adults massacred in Newton, Conn., were still warm, the U.S. Senate voted against establishing a minimum control over the sales of firearms.
To many, it is incomprehensible that many of the same persons who reacted with shock to the killings should support that decision, arguing that access to firearms is a right of individual freedom endorsed by the very Constitution of that country.
As far as I know, the United States is the only country where a constitutional clause authorizes people to own a certain type of weapon that is fairly common in the world, but also makes any attempt to control that possession a restriction of citizens’ rights.
Clearly, that attitude is affected by powerful economic interests with strong influence on the political life of the nation. But that’s not enough to explain a cult of violence that lies below the matrix of the culture and history of the United States.
Although the use of firearms increases the destructive effectiveness of the Americans’ behavior, to reduce the debate over their control could distract us from the essence of a more encompassing problem. If the guns-trade fanatics are right about anything, they’re right when they say that guns don’t kill people; people kill people.
In the U.S., the right to bear arms goes back to colonialism and slavery. Later, it was included in the Constitution of the nascent North American republic because of the contradictions among the states and the federal government, the only institution capable of organizing a professional army. This eventually led to the most devastating civil war in U.S. history.
The “law of the gun” characterized the westward expansion that decimated the native tribes. Even today, when the law of the gun is assumed to be everyone’s right, it has not lost the sense of class elitism and racism that led to its creation, inasmuch as it is part of an ideological scaffolding that justifies violence by victimizing the most privileged sectors.
Transported to the current situation, it is a problem that focuses on the fears of the so-called white middle class in the face of the "dangers posed by others," which explains the backing of these sectors for the positions held by arms merchants.
Proof of this is that you don’t see blacks or Latinos at the activities organized by the National Rifle Association. I imagine that it would be suspicious to see one of them buying an assault rifle at a gun show.
The dilemma facing "peaceful" citizens is very simple: because the "criminals" can get guns no matter what controls are established, the citizens should also have the right to own them for self-defense. That has also been the perfect excuse to intervene in other parts of the world identified as posing a danger to the "national interests" of the United States.
As a result, the cult of violence generates an ethic that expresses itself in all aspects of the nation’s life.
Foreign civilian victims are downgraded to necessary "collateral losses." The presidents of the United States are proud of the extralegal murders committed anywhere; thanks to their casualty records, they even win re-elections.
If we look at it closely, the concept of "preventive warfare" justifies (on a national scale) the killing of a suspicious person loitering around someone’s home. It has evolved little from the old logic where killing an American Indian or a Negro was seen as an act of legitimate defense.
As a result of that mentality, the white middle class ends up as the victim of its own paranoia. While crime, drug trafficking and gangs are problems endemic to U.S. society, with a large number of victims, especially young people from marginalized sectors, despite the magnitude of this daily war, I don’t remember a single instance of a black man or Latino firing indiscriminately into a group of innocent children of his own ethnic group.
Such events afflict the white middle class and practically occur only in the United States. Given their recurrence, the killings cannot be explained by saying that they constitute the unpredictable attitude of a psychopath. True, someone would have to be mad to do something like that, but madmen also respond to cultural standards that condition their conduct.
Many historians, psychologists and sociologists have explained the tremendous pressures people endure under the alleged freedom of individualism. While individualism is one of the greatest strengths of the capitalist system, because it induces the expectation of personal accomplishment through someone’s own efforts, it tends to isolate man from social communion and forces him to compete with the rest for respect and self-respect.
When man cannot succeed, he ends up on the side of the losers. That is a trauma for everyone and explains the tendency to alienation and crime among the discriminated sectors, but it particularly unbearable for the white middle class, whose presumed superiority arises from his origins.
Although drug addiction, alcoholism and crime also occur among white middle-class people as a result of lack of adaptation, most of them resign themselves to their fate and, at most, turn to psychiatrists to deal with their problems.
In some cases, the "loser syndrome" generates feelings of extreme hatred, either toward others – i.e., crimes of racial or xenophobic intolerance or sexual preferences – or against their own people, like those apparently senseless massacres.
I believe that this culture of violence and the pressures exerted by individualism in a segmented society combine into an explosive mix that explains acts of violence that do not occur elsewhere in the world. It is not an exaggeration to say that they are a product of the American Way of Life.
