Mass murderer Dylann Roof
Thursday: Is a U.S. foreign policy centered on
violence without responsible for an arms race among U.S. citizens within?
The 'Unbridled
Arms Race' Among U.S. Citizens (La Jornada, Mexico)
"The
superpower is a structurally violent state in which the use of force as a means
of resolving differences serves as an example to every citizen. No country in
history has been responsible for as many aggressions, direct or indirect,
against other nations: military invasions, bombings, occupations, the
sponsorship of terrorist acts, sabotage, blockades, destabilization,
assassinations and extrajudicial kidnappings are just some of the methods the
United States has used to impose its interests on dozens of countries in
Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, including several times, Mexico."
In reaction to the massacre perpetrated Wednesday at a
church in Charleston, South Carolina, U.S. President Barack Obama referred
again to one of his administration's pieces of unfinished business: the need to
regulate the sale of firearms in his country, where more than 80 people die
from gunfire every day. The president said he has had to deal with this problem
too many times and regretted that innocent people have to die because someone
with intent to do harm has easy access to a gun or rifle.
Although murders with firearms are lamentably common in the
United States, the slaughter committed against the Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church had the acute uniqueness of being an
unequivocal hate crime perpetrated by a White against a religious congregation
of African-Americans and the determined intent harm to members of their
minority. In a year marked by massive protests against the killings of young
black men by White police officers, the crime on Wednesday may be a sign of a
hardening of ancient ideologies of hate which may now be subsumed beneath
political correctness, but have never been eradicated from the minds of many in
the White majority of our neighboring country.
'Thank Allah the Virginia Killer Wasn't Muslim' (Kitabat, Iraq)
The fact is that these massacres, triggered by distinct
motivations, have periodically occurred in kindergartens, churches, shopping
centers, universities and even U.S. military installations. Given this reality,
Obama urged his fellow citizens to reflect on why such monstrous violence
doesn't occur with the same alarming frequency in other developed countries.
This question evokes and retrofits one expressed by his predecessor George W.
Bush following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: "Why does the
world hate the United States so much?", whereas the question posed by his
Democratic counterpart boils down to: "Why do United States people hate
each other so much."
There is an answer that both Obama and Bush that the
political and business classes and huge sectors of U.S. society refuse to
acknowledge: the superpower is a structurally violent state in which the use of
force as a means of resolving differences serves as an example to every
citizen. No country in history has been responsible for as many aggressions,
direct or indirect, against other nations: military invasions, bombings,
occupations, the sponsorship of terrorist acts, sabotage, blockades,
destabilization, assassinations and extrajudicial kidnappings are just some of
the methods the United States has used to impose its interests on dozens of
countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, including several times,
Mexico.
This warring barbarism directed at the outside world has a
domestic counterpart in the excessive, abusive violent impunity practiced by
the state against its own citizens and communities. Whereas in a democratic
nation, the legitimate use of violence must be understood as an exercise of
government in exceptional cases only, events ranging from an epidemic of police
killings to the oft-mentioned criminalization of entire sectors of the
population have become common, everyday affairs for federal, state and local
authorities in our neighbor country. This is amply demonstrated by the
disproportionate percentage of Blacks and Latinos imputed and behind bars.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
In this context, it's no coincidence that there is an
unbridled and even paranoid citizen arms race: the phenomenon reflects the
belief in the alleged legitimacy of violent methods on the part of a large
section of the population. This explains why registration applications for the
purchase of firearms amount on average to more than 16 million per year.
Paradoxically, state institutions are far more concerned with combating
terrorism outside the country than curbing the insatiable acquisition of
instruments of death on its own territory. This although the chances of a U.S.
citizen being killed in a terrorist attack are one in 3.5 million, whereas the
odds of being killed by a person with a gun is one in 22,000.
In the most recent tragedy, Obama addressed the issue of
guns in a routine and formalistic manner. Although his remarks were essentially
correct, they lack credibility because he is expressing them at the end of his
presidency with an opposition Congress, a diminished capacity to act and
declining influence.
