gun violence: a symptom of a larger disease?

Jesus. Apparently there was a shooting an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, today where at least twenty six people were killed, eighteen of them children. Just three days ago, a guy walked into one of our local malls and started shooting, killing two people and seriously injuring another before turning the gun on himself. It's pretty fucked up, especially considering the recent shootings at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and a theatre in Colorado were only a few short months ago.

I know some will say that if more people were armed and able to defend themselves (as well as others), things like this would happen less and/or would be more easily prevented by armed citizens. But the statistics seem to show the opposite to be true, e.g., a study done at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that "states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide," while data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime shows that the US has the highest rate of gun ownership per capita of any nation, yet also has a higher rate of gun violence resulting in death than any other developed country.

The way I see it, there's no easy solution, really. A combination of things like better funded and easily accessible mental healthcare, stricter gun control laws, and gun safety programs may help to reduce incidents like this, but they'll never be able to completely stop them. Part of this is because the roots of much of this kind of violence within society goes much, much deeper than crazy people or prevalence of guns, and they won't be uprooted until we take a long, hard look at the society of fear and violence we've created, or that we've allowed to be created for us—a society where things like a basic guaranteed income and universal healthcare (including better funding of, and easier access to, mental healthcare) are fought against tooth and nail, and starting wars in the name of peace and dropping bombs that routinely kill innocent civilians seems as easy as buying a gun at Walmart.

As a friend of mine put it on Facebook in response to the news, "No amount of gun control will do anything but make the problem worse until we change the culture. The United States has been in a perpetual state of violent war, both domestic and abroad, since it was founded." Which reminded me of something Martin Luther King, Jr. said in a speech he gave in 1967, called "Beyond Vietnam," that seems as relevant today as it did then:

My third reason [for speaking out against the Vietnam War] moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. 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. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

As well as a similar, and perhaps even more directly relevant, line from a eulogy he gave in 1963 for four young girls who were killed when members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama:

They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, these deaths are just a drop in the bucket. According to the US Census Bureau, approximately 150,000+ people, including children, die every day all over the world for a variety of reasons, from wars, accidents, and random acts of violence by poor, opportunistic, sadistic, or mental unstable and distraught individuals, to more easily preventable things like starvation, lack of clean drinking water and access to basic healthcare. In essence, it's partially a structural problem, and that aspect is something that'll take a long time to work out, especially when taking a broader look at human progress and seeing the cycle of revolutionary and reactionary ways we change and deal with the dialectical processes of history. The more consciously we do this, and the less reactionary we are in the process, however, the better and quicker I think our evolution towards a more cohesive and peaceful society will be.

It's sad that this happened, and I really hate hearing about things like this. So I'll continue to support things like universal healthcare in the short term, and fight for a healthier and less volatile society via progressive socio-economic changes in the long term. Beyond that, though, I don't know what else I can do. And yes, I'm politicizing this issue because the way I see it, it is a political issue.