Originally published by CounterPunch
A Recap of Mass Shootings in 2023
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government…”-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” Speech, Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967
Forbes Magazine reports 649 “mass shootings” in 2023, making it one of the biggest years for random mass murder on record in the United States, outpaced only narrowly by 2019. That means that in “the world’s leading democracy,” as the U.S. government likes to present itself both within the empire and across the globe, we collectively endure roughly two random murder sprees per day.
Is there any other way to put it? Last year was the Year of the Mass Killing.
The corporate press predictably feigns concern while engaging in sensationalist story-telling, fanning the flames of this pandemic. The institutions of the ruling class refuse to touch the ideological cornerstones of U.S. society. – a white supremacist, hypermasculine, gun-obsessed culture, a proliferation of untreated mental health issues, profits over human needs, violent conquest abroad and promoting hatred and divisions at home. The human carnage we are witnessing from Gaza to Donbass to the malls, streets and homes of the United States reflect the billionaires’ agenda that is at its root thoroughly anti-democratic.
National Organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace, Ajamu Baraka rhetorically posed a vital question that the pompous punks in power have dodged at all costs: “Can someone help me? Why are the most vocal, liberal gun control advocates also some of the most vocal supporters of war in Ukraine?” These are the same bleeding heart liberals who pilfer the national budget to wage Hybrid Wars and war on Russia, China, Venezuela, Palestine and any oppressed nation striving for genuine independence.
For over a generation now, it is no longer a question of if there will be another headline about a mass shooting. The only question is which school, office, or public space will be the site of the next “random” shooting. A self-reflective and healthy society would have asked by now: what is going on? Why are we doing this to ourselves? How can we really get up under and ahead of this pandemic of shootings so 2024 does not shatter previous shooting and murdering records?
This article, “Murder Thy Neighbor,” will peel back the hidden, taboo layers of the uniquely-U.S. murder epidemic, looking at 1) societal glorification of militarism 2) the promotion of a culture of violence 3) the media-military nexus 4) the violent socialization of U.S. citizens 5) the role of a racist, scape-goating, xenophobic mass media and 6) the proliferation of mental health and bullying subcultures.
The talking heads indoctrinate us with hatred, fear and ignorance about Palestinians, Arabs, African-Americans, Chinese people and other oppressed nationalities.
“Violence is as American as Cherry Pie” -H. Rap Brown
The way corporate media functions does not allow for serious treatment of the root causes of mass shootings. Doing so would turn the country’s eyes back on what social forces within our society are driving this murderous madness that has led to 40,167 deaths from gun violence just this year. How much easier is it to blame China and Mexico (Fox) or Russia (CNN and MSNBC)? That is xenophobia, not analysis.
With the quote above, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, the fifth chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, eloquently captured the reality that the United States is the most violent country in the world. In a previous article, the author explores the violence underpinning the raison d’etre of the United States of Guns:
“The firearm homicide rate in the United States is 13 times higher than that of France and 22 times higher than the European Union. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported 26,328 suicides and 20,598 homicides in 2021, the vast majority committed with firearms. There are 120.5 guns per 100 Americans, far more than any other country globally. There are a total of 393,347,000 civilian firearms in the United States, meaning there are roughly 60 million more firearms than people. About 4 percent of the world’s population has 40 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns.The Pentagon operates 750 foreign military bases abroad in over 80 ‘sovereign countries.’ The United States has more than three times as many overseas bases as all other nations combined, costing taxpayers an estimated $55 billion every year. There are more wars now than any other time since WWII, with the U.S. military involved either covertly or overtly in many of them.Smith and Wesson won the gold medal for the generation of violence, producing 2.3 million guns in 2021, followed closely by the firearms manufacturers Ruger and Sig Sauer. The profits of firearms manufacturers have reached historic levels, and gun companies export roughly half a million guns per year. Here are two studies of how U.S. guns are behind wars in Haiti and Mexico. The mass media promotes suburban panic by distorting the reality of violent crime, which has actually been on the decline nationwide after peaking in the 1980s.”
Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine continues to be useful to understand the context of these “mass shootings.” When he produced that groundbreaking documentary, in 2002, the year my son Ernesto Dessalines was born, did any of us think a generation ago that the April 20, 1999 Columbine shootings, which killed 15 and injured 24 in Littleton, Colorado, would become a social phenomenon we would grow accustomed to?
The Superstructure of Violence
Sociology 101 shows us that “the ruling ideas of a given epoch are those of the ruling class.” Growing up in the United States, we learn violence from the moment we begin shadowboxing in the womb. From the first time our mothers are bullied, harassed and traumatized and our fathers are absent, degraded and exploited, we absorb the social imprints of our time. We are not naturally violent but because our “human nature is formed by the totality of social relations,” this is what we absorb. Even those who don’t experience violence directly in their own families experience it via media, movies, friends, extended families, etc. Those in power, who often hide behind religion, have inverted the Christian maxim from Matthew 22:37, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” into “Thou shalt murder thy neighbor as thyself.”
Swashbuckling, arrogant U.S. militarism has for centuries pursued its interests through violence – at the expense of the American people. Congress just passed a record-breaking military budget of $886,000,000,000,000. This is a massive chunk of federal funds and does not include additional military aid the ruling class doles out to its proxy forces in Kiev, Tel Aviv or any of the countless others. Military adventures and more murder come at the expense of much-needed investment in our collective mental health and pro-social investment. And imagine if these rampant shootings were in Beijing, Tehran, Havana or Moscow? The bourgeois press would have a field day. “The international community,” a high-falutin euphemism for U.S.-led imperialism, would take swift actions to curb the violence.
The documentary “The Ground Truth” is about the economic draft that exists to recruit working-class kids into the military, a subculture that specializes in violence. U.S. military recruiters prey upon the poor to join the army. The Military Industrial Complex has a big influence over the ideas and images that circulate in our society and often owns outright the central media outlets. For example, one of the biggest military companies, General Electric, owned NBC before an even bigger media conglomerate, Comcast, bought it. The Mainstream Media (MSM from now on) glorifies the “noble” role of U.S. “servicemen and women” while ignoring the millions of Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Libyans and other sovereign peoples incinerated underneath the lies and bombs. Capitalism teaches that profits in the billions are worth more than lives in the millions. Overseas “mass shootings”, or more accurately, mass bloodbaths, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq which continues 20 years later in an advanced or hybrid form, cost us taxpayers over 3 trillion dollars. Foreign invasions, presented as this or that mistake by the current regime, Democrat or Republican, are an unavoidable feature of the capitalist system. The lies about Hamas beheading 40 babies or the Iraqi having “weapons of mass destruction” are sophisticated “Atrocity Propaganda.” Afraid of alternatives, the elites demonize China and other societies seeking to build a social foundation on collectivity and social harmony.
Anti-war activist David Swanson writes, “at least 32% of mass shooters were trained to shoot by the U.S. Military.” While the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) hides these obvious connections, it is clear that the combination of PTSD and a military subculture based on hazing, bullying, national superiority or “American Exceptionalism” and extreme violence plays a role in the shooting pandemic.
There are important studies of the different subcultures of violence that mold us. Public intellectual Chris Hedges writes about the moral decay of Americans, examining among other things our frivolous addiction to wrestling matches, football and MMA. How does the video game industry factor in where the bad guys are always the Arabs, Soviets, Cubans and Chinese? Sports writer and social analyst David Zirin produced the documentary “Behind the Shield: the Power and Politics of the NFL” exploring how the MIC that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about has infiltrated myriad facets of our society, specifically professional sports and the National Football League.
In The National Library of Medicine, Dr. James N. Meindl and Dr. Jonathan W. Ivy, looks at the role of the media in creating what’s commonly called a “contagion effect”, inspiring others to carry out shootings through the media’s ability to make a thing seem normal and already present within society.
The sensationalism of the media speaks to the isolation this generation feels. The month before the COVID-19 pandemic, The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reported that teens in America spend an average of nine hours per day on their phones and computers. The pandemic accelerated this phenomenon as we could no longer interact with one another as in times past. The Columbia University Mass Murder Database study concludes: “There’s solid evidence that nearly half of all mass shootings are associated with suicide by perpetrator, or what they call “suicide by cop.” Are the killers more focused on attention, their own death or mass death? If the answer was mass death, wouldn’t they use bombs or fire?”
In the documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America, OG Slauson and mentor to younger gangbangers today, Kumasi explains the social psychology of bangin’. He explains that when you are nobody and then you spray up a whole street or the “enemy,” people at last notice you. You are somebody. Is it any different for many of us labeled “poor white trash,” forgotten and spat upon by both Democrat and Republican elites?
Mass shootings are the scream of the alienated, a desperate search for a dopamine hit, and a call for help.
While a liberal analysis is dumbfounded by so many seemingly random shootings and its formal political structure has it trapped and pointing the finger at the Republicans, a class analysis confidently predicts that 2024 will break all previous records for gun violence.
The Pentagon operates 750 foreign military bases abroad in over 80 ‘sovereign countries.’ The United States has more than three times as many overseas bases as all other nations combined, costing taxpayers an estimated $55 billion every year.
Domestic Terrorists and white Supremacists, Made in the USA
Anti-racist activist and self-described “truck-loving redneck” Dixeywhitey hosted a Southern mother on his popular Instagram page issuing an impassioned call to all white mothers to intervene to stop this heinous violence. Have we heard any parents take responsibility for raising mass murderers? The unnamed woman and Dixeywhitey’s intervention is long overdue, considering 79 percent of all mass shootings since 1982 were perpetrated by white murderers. Almost 100 percent were perpetrated by male shooters. Lost in the atrocity-driven, sensationalist, click-bait headlines is this very specific demographic data. Far right shootings are by far the most common Ideologically Motivated Mass Shootings.
Often, the mainstream media tries to tell us that such things are a result of individual pathologies – the “lone nut” or “lone wolf” narrative. But when we actually look into how these horrible tragedies come about, we find that there are no “lone wolves.” There are Fox News-guided wolves, New York Post-guided wolves and Breitbart-indoctrinated wolves. There are wolves who have been alienated from their pack; they find comfort in the facile lies mainstream media and other bourgeois institutions give them. Everything has a history, and everything has some reason for occurring.
Most shootings are not “random” at all. Many shootings are hate crimes that are racially motivated, targeting terrorist attacks perpetrated by white supremacists. In June of 2015, 21-year-old Dylan Roof infiltrated a Black church in Charleston to hunt down Black people. In May 2022, 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron opened fire at a supermarket in a black neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. On March 16, 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long opened fire at two spas and a massage parlor targeting Asians. 48-year-old Jason J. Eaton shot three Palestinian students last month because of the anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic messaging from in the media, more victims of the ongoing genocide this bourgeois institution bears much of the responsibility for. These are but four examples of shootings that are anything but random. These are Hate Crimes. This is white supremacist violence continuing on into the age of wokeism. And there is a reserve army of disgruntled “whites”; these are the foot soldiers of United States fascism. Who will they turn their 400,000,000 guns on? Us or them? Their true class enemy or the social forces who fight back?
The Battle of Ideas necessitates the correct framing of this pandemic. Shootings caused by Mass Alienation and media indoctrination points us towards adopting accurate terminology that explains rather than obfuscates.
The Shock Troops of Ruling Class Ideology
The chickens are coming home to roost. People are only as good as the information they are given, and how they view society. The talking heads indoctrinate us with hatred, fear and ignorance about Palestinians, Arabs, African-Americans, Chinese people and other oppressed nationalities. They run stories for months, years and generations producing an ideological line that blames targeted communities for “terrorism,” “urban riots,” “mass rape” and “unleashing a deadly virus on humanity,” to name just a few of the most common racist tropes they feed us.
This is a recipe for continuing racial strife. Tell one section of society targeted communities are to blame for all their problems, and tell the other that it’s the fault of the people you indoctrinate. The mass shootings the oligarchs unleash serve their agenda by keeping people fearful, and thus wanting more “protection,” from cops, the surveillance state, etc. The police continue to gun down Black Americans and others at consistently high rates, three and a half years after the torture and execution of George Floyd. There is no discussion of disarming them, or even a message of unity, that the police are killing poor working-class white people as well. The result is as expected. Rather than banding together against a common enemy, people are set against each other based on precisely the divisions the institutions of the ruling class setup. The state and extra-legal vigilantes hunt down Black people and Latinos at the highest rates.
This is the social formula politicians from both sides of the aisle ignore. The shepherds, with their chauvinist doctrines, set the white supremacist sheep (mass shooter) in motion. The ideologues are perfectly conscious of the role they play. Their corporate Board of Directors and CEO’s have placed them there precisely to do that job. Malcolm X’s words are foundational to a class analysis: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Sinophobia, Islamophobia, white supremacy and hypermasculinity are the unofficial religions of our time. The brainwashed act as today’s Brown Shirts, ideologically trained, set in motion and mimicking the fascistic violence of the state.
The ruling class is trapped in infinite hypocrisy. They champion the 2nd Amendment for their shock troops, rhetorically pronouncing, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But we know the history of removing guns from those who posed a threat to the system. Gun control is popular and effective when it targets those who pose threats to the system. The example of the Deacons for Defense, Robert F. Williams and Negroes with Guns and California Governor Ronald Reagan’s disarming of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense are but three examples of U.S. government attacks on the 2nd amendment rights of the masses.
The ruling class’s agenda is clear: arm the state and its attendant ideological allies and disarm and divide the multinational working class who pose a threat to their dictatorship over society.
Can someone help me? Why are the most vocal, liberal gun control advocates also some of the most vocal supporters of war in Ukraine?”
It is Only a “Mass Shooting” if it Affects White People
Their ideological quagmire is laid bare. Both dominant wings of the ruling class have their set ideological positions from which they will not waver. The conservative position keeps their reactionary base and future paramilitaries armed while disarming marginalized communities (i.e. Black and brown people). The liberal position is to disarm the public while continuing to fund and arm the oppressive state apparatus (i.e. the police, ICE, etc.), which further entrenches structural violence and capital’s hold over governance. It is the terrifying randomness of U.S. gun violence that offends liberal sensibilities in ways that systemic, structural violence that they are more likely to be protected from does not mobilize or offend. The issue of gun control is like other hot button issues, such as abortion or the death penalty. The ruling class exploits the “culture war” issues because they are divisive and distracting from the class struggle. What is the third correct pole of ideas outside of the corporate duopoly?
What constitutes a “mass shooting?”
When the oppressed died, there was no talk of “mass shootings” or broad societal concern, unless it spilled over into “respectable society” (read white and more affluent). The documentary Bastards of the Party gives the example of the Crips and Bloods oppressed-on-oppressed warfare (what the media calls Black-on-black violence) led to the death of a young Asian-American woman in the late ‘80’s. This was the impetus for LAPD and Daryl Gates’ infamous Operation Hammer in 1987. As long as the murders were centered in South Central, Watts, Compton, and East LA, the press didn’t care or lead the public to care with eye-catching headlines.
Black Panther Kazi Ture taught us in 1995 that on average 10,000 young Black males were killing 10,000 young Black males per year in the U.S. The system erases 20,000 beautiful young minds and souls from society, burying them six-feet deep or locking them away in a dungeon, stripping them of their humanity and dignity. If 20,000 people were being disappeared every year in Zimbabwe or Iran, how quick would the 82nd Airborne Division bomb and occupy those countries? It has nothing to do with “Black on Black violence.” From a Fanonian perspective, it is oppressed on oppressed violence, which continues to ravage the societally-engineered ghettos. The construction of the Black ghetto has been as intentional as the construction of white suburbia. Fanon’s description of the ghetto in The Wretched of the Earth is foundational. But this violence and the history that gives rise to it is of little concern to corporate politicians.
It is clear this mass violence does not come out of nowhere. It flows from the ruling class worldview internalized by the Isolated, the Alienated and the Defuturized, those who Hillary Clinton neatly dismissed and fit into her “basket of deplorables.” Wild conspiracy theories that do not align with reality plague this population, such as “Replacement Theory,” threats against Israel’s existence as they carry out a 75-year Holocaust of Palestinians or “white genocide.” Americans suffer from Cognitive Dissonance when it comes to understanding and empathizing with the true victims and survivors of global systemic violence.
The state of mental health in America continues to dramatically decline. Over 50 million Americans, 20.78 percent of adults, officially struggle with mental illness and its connection to this pandemic couldn’t be more obvious. The School of Psychiatry at Columbia University has organized the largest database on mass shootings, concluding the following: Fifty percent of shootings are carried out by men experiencing “challenges coping with severe and acute life stressors, and the epidemic of the combination of nihilism, emptiness, anger, and a desire for notoriety among young men.” It is this fertile ground of social alienation and easy access to guns that begins to explain the modern plague of random shootings.
Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale taught that “power is the ability to define phenomena and make it act in the desired manner.” If we are determined to halt or reverse the problem, we must get up under and explain the sociological origins of the problem. This can only be done scientifically through class analysis. For example: The Movimiento Popular Dominicano (MPD), the historic Dominican Marxist-Leninist party that fought the U.S. invasion of 42,000 U.S. marines and occupation in 1965 studied and analyzed the rates of these social phenomena and where they were occuring. The more oppressed a community in the campos (countryside) and barrios (ghettos) of the Dominican Republic, the higher the rates of murder, suicide, alcoholism, PTSD, murders, sexual molestation etc.
Native and other oppressed communities here in the United States are also the most impacted by these structural phenomena, always and necessarily treated as isolated incidents by bourgeois ideologues. Suicides (civilian and veteran), incest, sexual abuse of children, rape, drug overdoses and “mysterious” deaths in the military are further indicators of the deep-seated crises inherent to capitalism. The overmedication of society, specifically our children, has earned the United States of Guns another gold medal.
But where does this begin? Besides generational history and community-wide phenomena, the way we think, what we become, all of it begins for us as children. What about bullying? How do our children internalize and learn to abuse others? Critical comedians Key and Peele offer a reflective, comedic approach to a dire issue that has turned deadly. If we return to the Columbine High School massacre and listen to some of the killers in the build-up to the mass shootings, the human degradation caused by bullying has spawned the proverbial boomerang that is swinging back on all of us. Why is bullying endemic to our society?
Children are a clean slate for the vast array of imprints they absorb from the social world. Why are they absorbing so much hate, self-hatred, fake wokism, hierarchies, racism, sexism and violence? The widespread crisis of bullying in all of its manifestations lays bare the ideological underpinnings driving the system. Twenty-eight-year-old Audrey Hale’s attack at The Covenant School in April of this year is another example of this social estrangement. This former student fired 152 bullets of misguided rage and self-hatred at strangers where they had been bullied a few years before in Nashville. The mainstream media ignores the internalization of violence and underlying causation for this violence, again remaining in the superficial realm of “culture wars” as our children murder each other in record numbers.
To truly combat the pandemic of mass shootings, we have to examine, understand and challenge all of these parts of American sociology in the age of mass isolation, the social media and profilicity crisis, and U.S.-proxy wars on every continent. Princeton scholars, economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton’s book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a damning portrait of our future, analyzing the sharp decrease in American life expectancy three years in a row, specifically for working-class white communities.
All of these social realities serve as individual indictments of U.S. society. These social phenomena cannot be treated in an isolated way; they are pieces of the larger puzzle that is the decomposition of our society. Collectively, they confirm Puerto Rican poet and padrino (godfather) of the Boricua Independence Movement Rafael Cancel Miranda’s diagnosis: “Even Satan himself could not have dreamed of an empire as infernal as the United States Empire.”
“It’s Impossible for a Chicken to Produce a Duck Egg.”
Ajamu Baraka explains why another way forward, outside of the corporate duopoly is necessary: “The democrats want war with Russia, the Trump administration wants war with China, and the rest in both parties don’t care who the U.S. wars with as long as both parties are still committed to the pro-imperialist doctrine of full spectrum dominance.”’
It is only an anti-capitalist way forward that can imagine a genuine solution to this crisis.
Dr. Martin Luther King led an anti-war rally in Chicago in 1967 exclaiming: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America.” As King concluded shortly before his assassination, there is no disentangling the violence meted out by the white supremacist, colonial project, spearheaded by U.S. imperialism, and our polarized society that is wantonly and cannibalistically consuming itself. As Malcolm X explained at a Socialist Workers’ Party Forum in New York City on March 29, 1964, U.S. society can only produce what it is designed to produce. Only a society that breaks with the old could begin to implement policies that truly protect us and our children from the most violent society human history has known.
Malcolm continued that night: “And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken!” Both King and Malcolm X were cut down at 39 years old as they evolved into anti-capitalist thinkers and leaders. They were beginning to envision a society that could move beyond genocidal violence both at home and abroad.
It is clearer than ever that the “revolutionary chicken” Malcolm spoke of is anti-imperialist struggle, building multinational class unity, collectivity, socialism and communism, to transcend a society addicted to a war on all the sovereignty of all nations, plunder across the planet and century-to-century Holocausts against Native peoples.
Thank you to the organizers in Black Alliance for Peace and the Solidarity Committee, Cauã Amaru and the Midwestern Marx Institute for editorial feedback and for contributing ideas explored in this piece.
Danny Shaw is an author at Counterpunch
