Opinion: Mass shootings show what is poisoning American democracy - CNN - 0 views
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he recent shootings in Boulder and Atlanta have put the issue of gun violence at the center of America's national discussion, and both tragedies demand greater attention be paid to how racism and gun violence, especially mass shootings, intersect.
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At a policy level, Congress and the President should pass common-sense gun control laws, complete with stringent background checks, and an assault weapon ban that would reduce the likelihood of mass shootings and gun violence.
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Right-wing narratives suggesting that Americans' second amendment birthright -- along with White patriarchal power structures -- are under assault spread not only among hate groups online but in Congress. "Every time that there's an incident like this," observed Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis, "the people who don't want to protect the Second Amendment use it as an excuse to further erode Second Amendment rights."
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The Supreme Court is scheduled this week to discuss adding a case to the next term's docket that could expand the scope of the Second Amendment if the court declares New York state's stringent concealed carry law a violation of an individual's right to possess a firearm.
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America's broken political system prevents even basic, common-sense gun control legislation from ever seeing the light of day.
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Race plays a central role in America's twisted history of gun control. When Black folk, from Malcolm X to the Black Panthers, tried to apply their Second Amendment right to bear arms in the service of defending Black lives against racial terror they were violently repudiated.
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The Republican Party, beginning with Richard Nixon's 1968 "law and order" campaign and continuing through Sen. Ron Johnson's comments about Black Lives Matter in relation to the January 6 insurrection, has successfully vilified large parts of the Black community as criminal. At times this was done with an assist from Democrats, including then-Sen. Joe Biden's coauthorship of the 1994 Crime Bill, who co-signed treating many Black Americans as gun-toting "thugs."
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In this sense, America's crisis of mass shootings -- ongoing before the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing amid its ravages -- is not only bound up in the operations of our political institutions but also more emotionally connected to how some White Americans understand their relationship to our national identity.
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Organized racial terrorist groups, beginning in the late 19th century, reached new peaks of national respectability in the early 20th century as the reformulated Klan (rebirthed in Stone Mountain, Georgia) marched 30,000 strong at the US Capitol on August 8, 1925.
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White supremacist violence infects our criminal justice system as much as it does our political institutions. Dylann Roof, the young White racist who murdered nine Black church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, was treated with respect, even kindness, by law enforcement, who stopped by a fast-food restaurant to get him something to eat after he committed mass murder.
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Perhaps what is most striking in the case of the apprehension of violent White mass shooters is that law enforcement routinely manages to arrest them unharmed. This stands out in stark contrast to oftentimes innocent Black suspects who end up dead at the hands of the police.
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The deadly assault on the US Capitol cast a spotlight on how predominantly White law enforcement understood, responded to and at times sympathized with White rioters who brandished Confederate flags and anti-Semitic propaganda in the Capitol building rotunda.
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We will see a sign of true equity in criminal justice when we can see Black and White shooting suspects safely apprehended at identical rates. But limiting the easy access to guns and ending racist police violence will not eradicate White rage.