Since the eighteenth century, America has been filled with politically displaced peoples who, defeated in their home nations, have in exile supported and celebrated killing their oppressors in their home states. This political ferment has generated a broad cultural strain romanticizing and justifying political mass killing. I would argue that this cultural strain long ago seeped out of its category boundaries to glorify mass killing in general that can be justified somehow, if not necessarily to resist political oppression, then to resist any kind of oppression. Extension of cultural categories beyond their logical definition is especially seductive for disoriented or disturbed minds; in those broken prisms, logical fractures into the psychological. This cultural theme is hardly the entire extent of American cultural values, and countervailing values exist; but it is a real component of them, waiting for its potential to be released.
Even the American colonials who revolted against England can be seen in the light of this tradition. The 2nd amendment right to bear arms itself originated in colonial resistance to British oppression. To prevent the colonials from arming, the British ordered the confiscation of all firearms around Boston. This was a traditional British tactic to thwart rebellion. After the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, England confiscated all the native populations' weaponry. It was to prevent such disarmament and to preserve the ability of the formerly colonial citizenry forcibly to resist governmental oppression, that is, to obtain or to preserve liberty, that the 2nd amendment's right to bear arms was added to the Constitution.
The French Revolution was central to the ideological formation of the nation's first political party system. The Revolution, which destroyed the monarchy and aristocracy in the name of the people, added ideology as well as vocabulary to the tradition of resistance to oppression. Jefferson supported the French Revolution (though he frowned upon mass mobs in cities while living there). He spoke favorably of armed rebellion and the bloodshed it brought to defend liberty.
Before the Civil War, Scots and Irish immigration to the US dispersed throughout America a huge population of persons who had resisted the English. They settled especially in the Appalachian Mountains and other frontier areas, where they, as rural, farming people, felt comfortable and knew how to make a living. Their warrior traditions and legendary opposition to English government were ingrained in regional cultures.
It is worth observing here that the popular expression of gun culture is simply an appropriation and expression of the pre-existing gun culture of the aristocracies of England, Germany, France, Russia, and other originating countries of America's displaced peoples. In monarchies, the military officer class were drawn from the aristocracy who owned most of the land and were tied to the crown. Guns were expensive and only the land-owning aristocrats could afford them. Guns were used to suppress rebellion and enforce rent laws on peasants. It was natural, not only that former peasants would take up firearms as effective weapons, but also adopt the values of the aristocrats' gun culture.
We don't ordinarily think of the frontier wars with the American Indians as political wars, but of course they were. The expansion of the frontier Westward, establishment of territories, and the organization of the territories as states was a political as well as governmental process. The political struggle over expansion of slavery is proof of the political character of American state formation. So the justification of mass killing of native Americans, appropriation of their lands, their evacuation further West, the whole troubled history of nation formation and native destruction, is part and parcel of the American culture of celebrating political mass killings. It was only the great romanticization of the native American at the end of the nineteenth century, when they had ceased to be a military threat, that led to the cultural amnesia we experience today regarding the political context of their mass killing.
The slavery issue before and during the Civil war also stimulated and hardened the culture of justifiable mass political killing. Slave planter resistance to abolitionism generated new content for this culture. After the slave rebellions identified with Toussaint L'Ouverture (Haiti 1791), Vesey (South Carolina, 1822), and Turner (Virginia, 1831), the culture of the American slave South was filled with the justifiability of mass killings, in the process of suppressing rebellion, to enforce racial segregation, overlaying political and economic rationalization (maintaining planter power) with ideology. After the civil war, this racist ideology supported the opposition of the KKK to Reconstruction of Southern social relations.
It took a long time for the former Black slaves to obtain a similar culture (probably subculture is a more accurate descriptive) celebrating killing of oppressors, but it certainly developed in the 1960s with the Black Power movement. The Left, particularly, justified this ideology as an explanation of the Black "ghetto" riots in the 1960s, which were typed as "uprisings" against oppression: Los Angeles Watts riot ("Rebellion"), 1965, 6 days, 34 deaths, 3438 arrests; Detroit riot, 1967, 5 days, 43 dead, 467 injuries, 7200 arrests; Chicago riots, 1968, 39 dead; Los Angeles riots ("Rodney King riots"), 1992, 6 days, 53 dead, 2000+ injured, over 10,000 persons arrested (1, 2, 3, 4).
Marxist revolutionary tradition has been since the late 19th century a fertile ground for the romanticization of political mass murder in the name of destroying the capitalist oppressors of the working class. The use of mass bombings, armed combat, assassination, purges, extermination, of internal and external opposition are now widely understood to be product of the long march to totalitarian rule for the purpose of imposing socialism and communism. The US experienced some of these violent outbursts, as with the bombings associated with unionization (the Los Angeles Times bombing of 1910 killed 20 persons, the Wall Street bombing of 1920 killed 38 persons).
Opposition to the Vietnam War generated justification for killing politicians and police and the celebration of killings involved in native uprisings abroad against European colonial powers. William Ayers, Marxist and Communist, celebrated on the Left as an educational theorist and a friend of President Obama and his wife when they lived in Chicago, "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972" (*). Bombs are always a popular option for mass killing, whether successful or not.
The history of terror bombings since the 1960s, in the US and elsewhere, conducted in the name of decolonialization, or anti-imperialism, or anti-semitism, or promotion of Islam is filled with blast and blood. While it is popular since 9/11 to decry such terror mass murders, it is also true that for fifty years such terror mass murder has been accepted or justified or variously celebrated in the US by a subterranean culture of protest.
Of course, popular culture has been infected with celebration of mass murder and cold-blooded killing. "Bonnie and Clyde" glorification of murder, if not celebration, replete with harshly, intensely, realistic depiction of murder, but without empathic depiction of suffering of victims, has been a staple of movies, video games, and comics. But seldom have these portrayals been without a nod to rebellion against oppression. We see such glorification in the theatrical depiction of organized crime, neighborhood gangs, and cowboys.
The claim that sexual frustration caused by repression of sexual expression leads to violence was hallmark of Beatnik literatuare and has also been a favorite of Hollywood in the past two generations. The implication of the claim is that sexual repression is a technique of social oppression by the ruling classes. My point in the discussion above is that these popular theatrical genres are but manifestations of a deeper, more historical, often more political tradition that looks sympathetically upon mass murder.
The difficulty in keeping a category like mass political murder tightly defined is that in total war, including total social war between classes, or races, or religions, or castes, or ethnicities, murder in the name of liberty against oppression is loose, porous, and easily justifies mass murder on other grounds. Or in moments of glory, or in moments of hubris, on no justifiable grounds at all. During the second world war, the line between combat killing and killing noncombatant civilians disappeared when civilians went to work in the munitions factories. Similarly, total social war justifies killing of children of oppressors, because they will grow up to continue the oppression their parents perpetrated with the social, legal, and political power their parents bequeathed to them. Children of oppressors are born guilty. Killing children is not a new phenomenon.
The school mass killings, workplace mass killings, mass killings of upper class families in their homes (see, Manson murders and attempted murders of Sharon Tate, et. al. [*]), post office mass killings, mass killings at theaters and malls, mass killings in urban "uprisings" are not outside this deeply ingrained American culture. Culture seldom stays confined to tight categories, but spreads to new unrelated situations.
We are not going to stop these mass killings, against innocent shoppers, or innocent co-workers, or innocent movie-goers, or innocent school children, by banning guns, or expanding government authority to new areas of our lives, such as mental health. Indeed, such policies, such politics of governmental intrusion, are the fuel that feeds the historical American culture of justifiable mass killing.
If all the guns are confiscated, if the 2nd amendment were amended to prohibit private possession of firearms, then agents of mass murder would just turn to bombings. Bombings are already an intrinsic feature of the culture of rebellion against oppression. It takes only patience, hiding of explosive materials, and a modicum of intelligence to assemble ingredients to make a bomb and deliver it to a school. The Oklahoma city blast of April 1995 "claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings."(*)
If we confiscate all bomb making materials, confiscate all library books and close the Internet, agents of mass murder would turn to mass poisoning. Jim Jones managed to murder 914 persons at Jonestown in 1978.(*) Jones' victims included 200 children. How easy would be free Kool-Aid at school soccer games?
It's not the tools of mass killing that need confiscating. It is America's political culture that justifies mass killing that needs reforming.
America has a historical culture of mass violence, but not because of the presence of guns. America has a mass of guns, because of the presence of a culture of mass violence. It is the culture, not the guns, that instills the value of killing.
What, we ask, might changing such a cultural pathology involve? How could such a change be defined that does not give, in the name of security, legitimacy to a creeping totalitarianism of American social life?
Revised December 23, 24, 25, 2012, January 7, 2013.