What Devil?

I have to tell you: I’m having trouble comprehending these mass shootings that slaughter innocents. The one we just had in San Bernardino has only exacerbated the problem. I mean, what devil can impel a couple, new parents of a 6-month old they left with grandma, to load themselves with weapons and take off in their SUV on a suicide mission? Anyone who’s ever had kids knows that the first 6 months with a newborn can seems like endless confinement: no sleep, constant worry over the baby’s health, being on call 24-7 to a bundle of cells that seems intent on fully occupying your head and body and living space with no competition allowed, no respite allowed. The other side of that coin is a unique outpouring of love and determination to keep that bundle of fragrance and softness and hunger and, yes, piss and shit, safe. Comfortable. Happy. In the face of which, abandoning it in the service of some call to kill as many of the presumed enemy as possible—would seem completely out of the question.

            But it wasn’t out of the question to Syed Farook and his wife (or fiancée), Tashfeen Malik. They seem to have calmly dropped the baby off with his mother saying they had a doctor’s appointment, and then, in a sequence that still seems confused, attended a Holiday party at his workplace, the County offices, left in some sort of anger, donned their military gear and armed themselves with assault rifles and pistols and pipe bombs, and started killing co-workers at the party they (or he alone) had recently left. Fired nearly 100 rounds. Coldly and ruthlessly slaughtered 14 and wounded over 20. Then escaped, only to be caught by hordes of police, engaged in a horrific shootout, and shot dead in a hail of bullets.

            And what I can’t get into my head is how the hell can people do such things? What motivates them? What can possibly override the parental instincts of an apparently contented couple and allow them to go on a killing mission that must have clearly held the probability of suicide? What can force them to override the love instincts that come with caring for a baby and switch almost instantly to the hate instincts necessary to slaughter innocent people at random? Because these people weren’t just responding with anger to some perceived slight at a holiday party. If the evidence reported is accurate, they had to have been planning this assault for quite some time. They had to have built up an incredible arsenal. They had to have made the pipe bombs. They had to have anticipated the assault and probable result when they arranged to drop off their infant—did they say tearful goodbyes? Did they know they’d never see their child again? We don’t know. All we know is that this was no impulsive killing spree. This was planned down to small details, or as small as such people are capable of attending to. As new parents can bring to bear. As a mother could manage to muster rather than attending to the biological imperatives demanded by her child.

            Just today, it has been reported that Tashfeen Malik apparently had posted, under an assumed Facebook name, her attachment to and allegiance to ISIS. Indeed, it almost seems that this Tashfeen (Tashfiend?)—no photo of her has surfaced so far, with no explanation for why not; was she careful not to be photographed ever?—may have been the instigator that Syed Farook was awaiting to begin his rampage. She may have been the hard one (A co-worker said that Syed was different when he came back with his wife, that “he married a terrorist”.) We simply don’t know. He apparently met her online. Then decided to go to Saudi Arabia, where she was living (why did she leave Pakistan, her birth place? to end up in that hotbed of radical Islam, of Wahhabism?) and brought her back to America with him as his fiancée or wife. With another trip to Saudi Arabia in there somewhere, this time to participate in the holy pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj.

            But these are all details. They don’t really answer the root question: what could possibly prompt a couple to undertake such a murderous suicide spree? How do such people justify what they’re about to do? Are they moved by such a huge reserve of hatred that they can sweep past all moral concerns, all human attachments? It would seem. It would seem that something powerful, insistent must drive them. And in this case, one can imagine that even if there were moments when one or the other faltered in his or her resolve, the other, there constantly, would have fortified the partner’s flagging courage. Argued, like Lady Macbeth to her husband, perhaps, that they were in too deep now. Insisted that this was the only way to rectify what must have seemed, despite outward appearances, a grossly unfair or polluted or hostile world. And that the only option left was the abandonment of their child and the mass murder of innocents.

            This bespeaks a human sickness so deep that I really cannot comprehend it. I mean I’ve had my rages, as who hasn’t? My imaginings of revenge—even with respect to these very killings. My awareness that in a fit of passion, I might do serious damage had I the tools. But this. This was coolly done. Planned. Anticipated so fully that both cleansed their computers well before the event. Stocked their arsenal for weeks or months. So we have to come back to the question: What do these people believe in? Do they really think that their action will result in something good or positive for them or theirs? Do they really think that they are striking a blow for the freedom of their people, their country, their religion? Do they really believe the fundamentalist madmen who spout their idiocy in their Internet postings? Are they moved by beheadings? Encouraged by mass murder in the skies over Sinai? By the massacre of innocents in Paris?

            It is enough to make one despair for the human species. Humans are a murderous lot, yes; we’ve known it for eons. But humans are also an empathic species, like all other primates. We have brain circuits that inhibit hurting or killing others of our kind. Or at least others that are related to us by birth or by proximity or by religion or nationality. And many of us, these days, feel that inhibition in a wider sense, with respect to all others of our species, no matter the color of their skin, the language they speak. And even beyond that, to all species on earth, no matter their genetic distance from homo sapiens. And yet, humans can be hyped up by madmen; by perceived slights; by the mangling of their loved ones by foreign death from the skies—as in Pakistan or Yemen or Afghanistan when U.S. drones snuff out suspected terrorists and many innocents nearby. Yes. All that is true. But it doesn’t seem, so far, that either of these two Americans were specifically scarred by such incidents. Only that something prompted them to act like coldhearted lunatics; something managed to shut off their every human instinct to preserve life including the life of their infant, to avoid hurting others like them, and to deliberately murder as many people as they could.

            I suppose that is, in the end, what puzzles the most. And perhaps this should be looked into. We can understand how drone operators in some cave in Colorado can push a button to shatter bones and bodies in a distant place perceivable on a screen. But we can’t understand how two people can enter a crowded hall and fire shattering metal into the bodies of people who bleed right in front of them. Though even that seems to be easier for humans than to inflict the same kind of damage with a knife or a sword or their bare hands. The more distance, that is, the easier to kill. Drones are, in that sense, the ultimate weapon: no danger to the presser of the button, no need to see blood and brain spattered over walls and oneself; just a button pressed and the horror goes on out of earshot, eyeshot, the smell and shudder of death. But not, of course, beyond the eyeshot and earshot and bloodshot of those on the ground. And perhaps that can help explain the hatred that seems to have overcome Syed Farook and his wife, and all like them. That the United States has amassed so much power that it can now rain death from the skies not simply from supersonic bombers far beyond the reach of any air defenses (and most nations in the Middle East lack even minimal defenses), but also from these fiendish little drones that can hover for days seeking out their targets and vaporize them without even the sound of bombers approaching. Without any risk to the killer directing the drone whatever. Perhaps in the face of that, threatened by silent, invisible death from the skies, one can override any human inhibition against killing, and kill with a will.

            And yet. We still do not know. All we know is that something drove a husband and wife into an abyss; to abandon everything known and presumably loved in a mad drive to inflict as much damage as they could. And then engage in a suicidal gunfight with the law that they must have known would seek them out, snuff them out, orphan their child.

            All we know is a horror we can’t wipe away.

Lawrence DiStasi

Right to Kill

Despite all the rhetoric from pro-gun legislators and the propagandists of the National Rifle Association, rhetoric that insists that we can’t allow gun-control laws in America because the Second Amendment gives every American the right to own as many guns and as much ammunition as he can gobble up, the truth is something other. What these quintessentially American gun-lovers and gun-manufacturers really prize is THE RIGHT TO KILL (and, pun intended, that it’s right to kill). That’s right. Americans of the stripe who scream about gun control really refuse to have their right to kill abrogated in any way. It is the primary right, in their minds, of every human being, especially of the white male persuasion.

At one time, of course, this right to kill was hidden behind the rationale of hunting: the alleged reason Americans insisted on the right to have guns was that they were clean, sport-loving hunters who lived for the time of year when they could go out into nature and stalk and kill deer or ducks or whatever game happened to be in season. Sarah Palin proudly proclaimed her membership in this fraternity, regaling audiences with her adventures shooting wolves from an airplane, and they responded by making her the darling of the loony right in America. More recently however, especially since the Roberts Court ruled, unequivocally and idiotically, that the second amendment confers an inalienable right not to members of a militia but to every single individual American to own guns, that right has been justified as conferring the right to self-defense. In other words, gun ownership is now promoted as a right primarily of protection: a man has a right to protect himself and his family and his castle in the most lethal way he can—with a gun. ‘Stand your ground’ laws passed by many states extend even this, for no longer is a person required to retreat into his castle before shooting at someone he finds threatening; in ‘stand your ground’ states, a person can shoot a perceived threat anywhere, at any time, emphasis on “perceived.” The Trayvon Martin case in Florida, a ‘stand-your-ground’ state, clarified this for all to see, because George Zimmerman was not in his house or anywhere near it when he shot Trayvon Martin, whom he saw as threatening (i.e. black and male).

I raise these issues not to enter the gun-control debate again during this week when the Senate is scheduled to vote on new gun-registration laws. I raise them because my recent reading of Jared Diamond’s latest book, The World Until Yesterday (Viking: 2012) provides a different angle from which to view these issues. Contrary to what we might like to think, i.e. that small bands of humans in the traditional societies of our ancestors were peace-loving hunter-gatherers who resorted only occasionally to small-scale hostilities, the small bands Diamond himself has investigated engaged in war and killing almost constantly. Males in tribes like the Dani of New Guinea, according to Diamond, were always on the alert for any “stranger” from another tribe. This is because in such small, tight-knit communities living their lives almost exclusively in an isolated valley, an unknown stranger was considered to be hostile—perhaps an enemy scouting out one’s own territory for weaknesses preparatory to an attack, or perhaps seeking quick revenge for a prior one. With no inhibitions on killing face-to-face (children are trained early that killing an outsider is good), all members of these New Guinea tribes, not just a professional warrior class, are (or were until Australia imposed state law) constantly prepared to go to war to prevent a rival group from taking their women, their foods, or their territories, or to retaliate for prior takings. And the figures Diamond provides show that, as a percentage of population, the constant warfare in these traditional ‘edens’ took a greater toll of human lives than the stupendous slaughters that have riven modern nation states at war. This is because modern warfare tends to be intermittent: four or five years of savage killing in World Wars I or II, for example, were relieved with breaks of ten or twenty years even for the most warlike states like Germany or Russia or the United States. The figures Diamond provides thus show that, given the greater population of large states, the percentage of those killed in war is only a third or a sixth or even a tenth of the killed-vs.-population percentages in small societies like the Dani of New Guinea. Nor is this simply a bias of a modern-state resident like Diamond. Members of New Guinea tribes themselves indicated by their behavior in readily giving up tribal warfare as soon as Australia imposed state-authorized policing, that they much preferred the relative peace brought by the modern state. In other words, when the state arrogated to itself alone the right to kill those who violated its laws, these New Guinea tribesmen indicated to Diamond that, despite the “loss of freedom” to continue to kill their neighbors for whatever reasons, they preferred the ability of the state to guarantee peace. Though they lost their own “right” to settle disputes in the traditional way, they gained the much more valuable peace and security they had never been able to achieve on their own.

This points up, indeed, a prime function of any state. Rather than letting people settle grievances on their own, with a continuing round of killings to avenge prior killings, the state sets up courts and other elements of an adjudication procedure that outlaws taking justice into one’s own hands. Under this regime, only the state has the license to kill, and only after whatever procedures it sets up to judge guilt or innocence, liability or immunity.

This, in short, is why any state will also take great pains to control the means of violence its citizens have access to. When a few dozen citizens have only spears or bows and arrows, and are obliged to curtail warlike activities in order to go bring in a harvest or support their families by hunting, perhaps access to primitive weapons might be considered harmless or even necessary. But when masses of citizens can easily obtain lethal weapons capable of killing dozens or hundreds of their fellows in seconds, a state has an obligation to severely limit the extent to which average citizens (not soldiers) can have such weapons, and under what conditions they can use them. It may license its citizens to use weapons for sport, to hunt animals for sport, in a season designated for it. But a rational state would have to see that, given its charter to maintain peace and security for its citizens, it ought not to allow them to possess the most deadly weapons in its arsenal. Because it is not that long ago that humans were killing each other routinely in the way that Jared Diamond describes. A mere ten thousand years ago for most societies, and until yesterday for some, all humans, based on several varieties of evidence Diamond marshals, were engaged in tribal warfare with their neighbors almost constantly. The urge to kill those who have wronged you, or whom you perceive to have wronged you, thus lurks in the emotional DNA of every human being. For a state to allow masses of such humans—in the United States, there are estimated to be 300 million guns in the hands of private citizens—to have the means to kill dozens of their neighbors or hundreds of random strangers is simply insane. It is also an abrogation of the prime duty of the state to ensure the public safety; to provide its citizens with reasonable security (we will omit from this discussion the right of the state to periodically compel some of its citizens to don uniforms and slaughter people it has no quarrel with; or to impose often unbearable restrictions on its citizens, especially those without money or influence); and to assure its citizens that rational state laws and those who enforce them will do everything possible to keep most other citizens from killing them.

And that is why gun control is absolutely necessary in a modern state. Humans, all humans, have the recurrent urge, if pushed hard enough, to kill. To give such volatile and dangerous animals wholly unfettered access to weapons of mass destruction—and make no mistake, assault rifles and glock pistols with magazines capable of holding 30 or 100 rounds are weapons of mass destruction—is literally insane, and, in a social-compact sense, an abrogation of the state’s primary responsibility. It is a pretense of giving humans a constitutional right, a freedom, which is not freedom at all.

Rather, it is license—license to kill. And it must be, and eventually will be I hope, controlled. Even here in killer America.

Lawrence DiStasi

After Newtown

The principal came into the class, just before lunch, and whispered into the teacher’s ear:

            “We’re on lockdown. I’m not exactly sure what it’s for, but I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.”

            The teacher—she happens to be my daughter—knew what she had to do. She turned out all the lights. She drew the shades so the room would be nearly dark, as if no one were there. She told the children, 5^th and 6^th graders, to crawl beneath the desks, make themselves as small as possible, and stay there. As a reading specialist, she is supposed to teach them reading, but there would be no more of that. Something was amiss and the grammar school in Newark, CA was on lockdown.

            Now my daughter has been on lockdown before. She used to teach in a grammar school in South Central Los Angeles, and there were helicopters chasing criminals in the neighborhood all the time, so the school would go on lockdown regularly. But before today, she never worried much about it. It was clear in L.A. that the danger was outside and the targets were criminals, not children.

            After Newtown, that casual attitude towards lockdown is out of the question. No one knows anymore whether a lockdown means an external threat, or a direct threat to the school, to the innocent children in the school. That’s why the kids are told to hide and be silent. That’s why the windows are closed, the shades are drawn, the lights are extinguished, and the children shrink to zero: To create the impression, if some killer like Adam Lanza should break in searching for easy targets, that the classrooms are empty. (Whether this makes sense or not is another question). And the kids know exactly what to do; though my daughter had not been there the day they had their drill for this, the kids remembered it perfectly and did what they had been taught. That’s what teaching involves now: teaching kids to nullify themselves in case a killer comes to school. Of course, two of the boys were fooling around, until, that is, my daughter told them in no uncertain terms that this was serious. They then stopped fooling and vanished like the others.

What is the effect of such instruction on school children? It appears that it scares the bejesus out of them. One of the little girls asked my daughter if the hunted person were armed. She said he probably was. Imagine. Little kids having to disappear, imagining what might happen if automatic weapons suddenly start blazing, with them as the target. Some of them no doubt remembering nightmare images they’ve seen of Newtown.

Today, the lockdown in my daughter’s school lasted more than an hour. Kids cowering beneath their desks and tables for over an hour in a darkened room, with no idea how long the danger would last. Five of them had to go to the bathroom, and had to use the waste paper basket; they’re not allowed to leave the room. All were famished by the time they got to lunch, because those in the lunchroom at the time of lockdown likewise had to stop eating and hide beneath their tables.

Imagine being a teacher in such a situation. No information on what the hell is happening, or how dangerous it is, or how long the terror is going to last, and unable to reassure the terrified kids in her charge that it will soon be over. This is America in the 21^st century, after Newtown. Schools that used to be safe places; even boring places; places that kids couldn’t wait to get out of so they could go play; are now places that can become fortresses at a moment’s notice. Fortresses of isolation filled with fear that someone armed to the teeth with the weapons that are perfectly legal and even common in America might burst in and start shooting you and your classmates for no reason.

Making this possible is what the crazies in the NRA consider freedom. Most Americans that I know most decidedly do not. I would guess that most kids in lockdowned schools don’t either. How long is it going to take for the cowardly creeps in Congress to catch up?

Lawrence DiStasi

A Good Guy With a Gun

You really can’t make this stuff up. The National Rifle Association, after a long period of silence, has finally responded to the Newtown Elementary School massacre. Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the NRA, held a press conference today (Dec. 21, with no questions allowed), to offer his solution to mass school shootings. Here’s what he said:

"I call on Congress today to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation."

La Pierre explained that his proposed program, which he dubbed the “National School Shield,” would be headed by former Arkansas Republican representative, Asa Hutchinson. After adding, apparently in agreement with Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert, that “Innocent lives might have been spared,” if armed security had been present at the Newtown school, he summarized the NRA position with this well-prepared sound bite:

            "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

Now there’s a philosopher for you, and one with great sympathies for innocent children too.  LaPierre resembles the aforementioned Louis Gohmert in that regard. Gohmert, on December 16 (perhaps anticipating LaPierre) expressed sorrow at the death of Sandy Hook principal, Dawn Hochsprung, by saying to Chris Wallace on Fox News,

"Chris, I wish to God she had had an m-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out ... and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids…"

            So there it is, folks, the simple solution of our right-wing geniuses. Just arm teachers or principals to shoot first and ask questions later, to make schools more like prisons than they already are—with armed guards at every gate—and you solve the problem just like that. As to what little children or even big ones will think about having to be locked in and guarded (with assault rifles?) to ensure a “safe” environment for learning, well that’s a possible downside we’ll just have to put up with. Guns, are, after all, one of the constants in American history that kids should learn about anyway.

            Now that I think of it, perhaps a little history would be appropriate here. Robert Parry, a fearless journalist and creator of Consortium News (consortiumnews.com), provided us with some of that history—that behind the adoption of the Bill of Rights, including the 2d Amendment so dear to gun owners and the NRA. The Bill of Rights was in truth a late concession by conservatives like James Madison, who actually considered such a bill unnecessary because the already-agreed-upon Constitution specifically “set limits on the government’s power and contained no provisions allowing the government to infringe on the basic liberties of the people.” But Madison finally agreed to 10 amendments to spell out the people’s rights, and thank god for that.

            As to the second amendment, which reads—“A well regulated militia(,) being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”—its meaning was clarified, according to Parry, at the Second Congress when the government enacted the Militia Acts (there were two: the first on May 2, 1792, the second on May 8, 1792). They decreed that all white males of military age were conscripted, and should provide themselves with a bayonet, a musket, shot, and other equipment needed to serve in a militia. This lends credence to the long-held idea, and plainly implied in the amendment’s actual wording—recently overturned by the current idiots on the Supreme Court—that serving in a militia was central to the right to bear arms. The idea, again according to Parry, was to ensure the “security” of the young nation. To do this, there needed to be militias armed and ready not only to counter possible aggression from European powers like Britain, France and Spain—all with claims in the Americas—but also to subdue Native American tribes on the frontier, and to “put down internal rebellions, including slave revolts.” The wealthy southern planters who made up a large portion of the new nation’s most prominent citizens—Madison, Jefferson, Washington, Monroe—were especially concerned about keeping slaves under control. Real estate speculators like George Washington were likewise concerned about keeping restive Indians from decreasing the land value of his western holdings.

            Thus, it is clear that the Second Amendment so precious to conservatives had nothing to do with some idealistic ‘freedom’ for nature’s individual noblemen, Americans, to possess guns. If anything, those who wrote the Second Amendment would be alarmed at the numbers of the “masses,” whom they feared above all, running around with high-powered lethal weapons. Their chief concern was security—and security, as we have seen so vividly in the past fifty years, is compromised by the free availability of millions of lethal weapons (300 million weapons in a nation of 310 million).

            The only thing that is really secured by our absurd gun policies is the ability of weapons manufacturers to take advantage of the American male’s adolescent power fantasies to make huge profits.

            Profits before life—it could almost be the mantra of American capitalism.

Lawrence DiStasi