The American ruling class has lost the capacity for self-examination. It knows that any serious analysis of the roots of this and other tragedies points back to itself and the society it dominates."
Meanwhile in a culture infested with violence, gun sales are surging, according to the Guardian.
"That's a picture replicated across the US from California to Louisiana and even in Newtown where Robert Caselnova said his gun shop saw high demand for assault rifles in the days after the killings. The nationwide increase in sales was reflected in longer than usual delays for legally required background checks which in some cases took hours rather than minutes.
The surge in sales is
not unusual. Following a mass killing at a Colorado cinema in July,
applications to buy guns rose more than 40% in a week. ...The increase in
weapons sales also comes in a year in which the FBI reported a record number of
background checks for gun purchases, with nearly 17m applications."
The weapon used in the Connecticut killings had been banned but the ban was allowed to lapse during George Bush's Administration, as historian Juan Cole noted:
"The Federal ban on weapons
such as the Bushmaster, in place 1994-2004, was allowed to lapse by the George
W. Bush administration and his Republican Congress, all of whom received
massive campaign donations from the gun lobby. (Reinstating this ban will be
the Obama Administrations gun control "reform.")
"There is a Connecticut ban, but the maker of the Bushmaster used a loophole in the poorly written state law to continue to sell the gun in the state.
The Bushmaster is manufactured by a subsidiary of the Wall Street hedge fund, Cerberus Capital Management, called the "Freedom Group"- which also owns Remington and DPMS Firearms. It is the largest single maker of semi-automatic rifles in the US, and they are expected to be a major growing profit center in the coming years. The Freedom Group was sued over the Washington, DC, sniper attacks, and paid $500,000 without admitting culpability." (Stung by bad publicity, and under pressure from its own investors, Cerberus announced it would sell its gun holdings.)
The Obama Administration is likely to push to reinstate the ban next year.
The very presence of the Wall Street owned gun industry and the poweful NRA gun lobby, endorsed as it is by Democrats and Republicans, suggests, it is not likely much will change, even with a ban, in the aftermath of what happened in that school.
Its not even a
"tragedy." argues Stephen Marche in Esquire Magazine, "Calling the massacre a
tragedy makes everybody feel better. It purges the emotions. It lets out the
rage that this horror causes deep in our souls. But it solves nothing," he
writes."
"Newtown wasn't a tragedy;
Newtown was a policy decision. We can do nothing for the children who are dead;
weeping for them like they're our own is partly ridiculous, and partly obscene.
What's even more ridiculous and obscene is not preparing for the next one. What's
needed now isn't warmhearted empathy; it's cold-blooded reason. America needs
its leaders to look at the numbers of mass murders, look at the most effective
policies for reducing mass murder, and apply those policies."
And, also we need to recognize that our own military interventions are killing children the world over who are as innocent as the kids in Connecticut. The violent culture we spawn has a way of "blowing back" and killing our own.
Remember that famous line from a song that reverberates in American history, "Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition."
Happy Holidays and Season Greetings.
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