Written by Tom Adams   

America is perhaps the most violent culture in the modern, industrialized world. We spend almost as much money on weapons of mass destruction as the rest of the world combined, while 50 million of our citizens go without basic human health care. We have more violent deaths per capita than any other developed nation, more than twice as many as the next nation on the list. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and we have 5% of the world's population, but over 25% of the world's prison population. Our homicide rate is by far the highest in the industrialized world.

If you take a close look around, the signs of violence in our culture are everywhere. Hollywood films and video games, for example, are filled with graphic violence. War and violence are even glorified by the government and the media, which is obvious if you've ever seen an armed forces recruiting commercial, or the countless "war memorials" that scatter the American landscape. And our language is saturated with violent references; in this country, when we have a societal problem, we attempt to use violence to solve it (the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on cancer, the war on poverty, ad nauseum).

With the recent tragic shootings in Connecticut, the media and the government are awash in talks about gun control, re-igniting the debate between civil libertarians and gun owners on the one hand and liberals on the other. But it would be extremely negligent to even broach the topic of gun control without mentioning the single largest purveyor of guns and other weapons of mass destruction in the world: the United State government, and the corporations that serve it. The war and death business in this country is massive; we are the largest arms dealer on the planet. For instance, the corporate arms dealers in 2011 totaled over 60 billion dollars in profits, with Boeing logging nearly 69 billion in revenue, followed by EADS, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and BAE.

The United States government has invaded roughly 70 countries since world war II, killing millions of people. We killed between 1 and 2 million North Vietnamese alone during the Vietnam war and over a million Iraqis since 1990.

After the recent shootings in Connecticut, the media and the politicians, in almost knee-jerk fashion, have turned to gun control as the core problem, and there's little doubt that enforcing stricter gun control would result in fewer violent crimes. But to focus on that issue alone ignores the underlying causes of these problems, which are much deeper and more complex, and much more relevant if we want to get to the root causes of the violence that pervades our culture.

The harsh reality is that the violence that is deeply entrenched in American culture is inextricably tied to our economic and political systems, which profit from the death and suffering of others, create massive inequities in wealth and economic power, thereby encouraging and necessitating violence, and emphasizes material gain at all costs. Of course, the media, the politicians, and the pundits will use the tragedy in Connecticut to push their respective political agendas on gun control, and the American public will follow in lock step, but the reality is that gun control is a giant red herring.

Indeed, this country was founded on genocide, and our history is a history of wars. And wars are ultimately always about the control of resources, which lead to economic wealth and power. That wealth and power, by the way, is disproportionately controlled by a very small percentage of the population, as 1% of the people control about half of our nation's wealth.

The good news is that we humans are by no means destined to live in endless violence. Not only are we hard-wired for cooperation, but cooperation is far and away more important to the long-term survival of our species. In fact, as anthropologist Agustin Fuentes points out, fossil records indicate little or no evidence of widespread violence and aggression among humans until the advent of modern agriculture, the period in human history, not coincidentally, in which material inequities began to surface in human societies.

And so not only are we not doomed to repeat these endless cycles of violence, we know precisely how to end them, or at least contain them to more reasonable levels, as violence will always play some role in human interactions. The connection between inequity and violence is undeniable, and ultimately societies that do not have such vast inequities in wealth as the United States are also less violent. The bottom line is that if we want to talk about ending or curtailing violence in our culture, we absolutely must address the underlying economic, social, and political inequities that cause it.

In addition to gun control, the other red herring in the discussions of the Connecticut murders is "mental illness". The media and the pundits would have us believe that the perpetrators of these heinous crimes are "mentally ill" or "psychotic", and that may or may not be true. Regardless, the reality is that the "mentally ill" are more likely to be the *victims* of violent crimes than the perpetrators of them. Besides, are these people any more "mentally ill" than the billionaires who control our political and economic system: the ones who buy up commodities to create artificial scarcity and profit from the starvation of thousands of people; the ones who spend 700 billion dollars a year on weapons of mass destruction that kill millions while the homeless, the destitute, and the "mentally ill" are discarded and swept up by the for-profit prison industry that capitalizes on their misfortune; the ones who hold press conferences and shed crocodile tears for twenty dead American children while he pulls the triggers that kill hundreds of Muslim children in foreign countries; the ones who sap the nation's wealth and resources in the name of profit while millions live at or below the poverty line. Those are the "mentally ill" we should be concerned with, because the inmates are running the asylum, and they're not wearing military fatigues and shooting up schools, they're wearing suits and ties and they live in mansions in respectable neighborhoods and they contribute to and profit from the proliferation of violence, suffering, and death on a grand scale.

So by all means, let's talk about gun control and "mental illness", but let's talk about them after we've addressed these larger, more relevant problems out of which most of our cultural violence is borne: the vast economic inequities that stem from an unjust political and economic system and the soul-less culture of consumerism.


Sources:

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/20/america-is-a-violent-country/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Prison_statistics

http://www.pwc.com/en_us/us/industrial-products/assets/pwc-aerospace-defense-review-and-forecast.pdf

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/world/asia/pakistan-us-drone-strikes/index.html

http://www.kon.org/hswp/archive/consumerism.pdf

http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/627/mon-111912-aggression-war-and-sex

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0917_030917_monkeyfairness.html