As more details emerge about the 18-year-old boy who gunned down 19 children and two teachers from the very same elementary school in Texas he had attended, it all seems eerily and scarily familiar. He had a troubled relationship with his parents, he shot his grandmother before going on the larger killing spree and he had posted his murderous intentions on social media. He was also a quiet type, who had been bullied in school for his lisp, hairstyle and clothes.
Oh yes, and he loved video games, and saved up $5,000 working at a fastfood joint to legally buy two assault rifles and more than 300 rounds of ammunition as a birthday present for himself, a week before he used them in a classroom of 9 and 10 year olds and their teachers. His employer said he was a quiet type who did his work and collected his paycheck. The scariest part is that none of these details is unique in any way from other mass shooters in the US.
The problems faced by this mass shooter — and others like him in the past, and very probably in the future too — are also not uncommon in other countries around the world. India, with its huge economic disparities, has bullying, gender and caste slurs, dysfunctional families, financial distress, feelings of isolation and not being able to cope. But the anger arising from these travails is not almost inevitably taken out on children in classrooms or supermarket shoppers.
As usual the debate after the Uvalde shooting has focused on the shockingly liberal gun laws in many US states and the Constitutional right to bear arms that Americans consider inviolate. There are more legally bought firearms in the US than there are people; and the National Rifle Association — the visible avatar of the powerful “gun lobby” — remains a huge political force. Even 20 percent of Democratic Party supporters (besides 44 percent Republicans) own guns.
Easy — read legal — availability of firearms and social sanction for them in the US do give the use of guns silent encouragement. But are these the only reasons for such shootings, particularly those targeting children in schools? Surely there needs to be some deeper analysis of this terrible malaise rather than falling back again and again on the predictably partisan lines taken in the never-ending slugfest between Democrat and Republican politicians on this.
Some of the blame can rightly be put on violence seen on TV — both in reportage of true incidents and the depiction of fictional ones in serials and movies — and video games full of guns and mindless virtual killing. The apparently unaddressed issue of bullying and belittling in schools — despite surveillance systems and supposedly strong supervision — also contributes to a violent atmosphere. Therein also lies an indicative tale about differing values and philosophies.
Last week, a video went viral of a teenage Indian-American boy being subjected to extreme bullying in a school cafeteria — also in Texas —t hat clearly also had racist overtones. The boy did not fight back but quietly and politely refused to be provoked, even though he was choked, dislodged from his seat, and thrown to the floor amid cheering kids. The school authorities responded by suspending both boys — the aggressor for only a day, but his target for three!
Though there is a current counter-narrative about ancient India being as nasty, brutish and violent as medieval and colonial India, the tradition and virtue of non-violence held in great esteem from Buddhism in antiquity to Gandhism in the 20th century — and assiduously taught in schools — finds a strong resonance in Indians round the world. And their value is manifest in this incident. Had the Indian-American acted on US values, the outcome may have been different.
The statistics of mass shootings in the US are enough to make anyone’s hair stand on end, including Americans: 119 since 2018, with 27 in 2022 already. Also, last year, almost 250 people were targets of such gun-toting killers, up 50 percent from 2020. In a Pew survey some 94 percent of Americans even admitted to guns being a “problem”, but only just over half of them wanted stricter gun laws! Why does the right to bear arms remain so bafflingly important for Americans?
The concept predated the US Constitution and came to be when the newly-independent but “united states” adopted British common law which also had that proviso, albeit due to totally different reasons. Thereafter, a citizen’s right to “keep and bear arms” was reinforced by the Second Amendment way back in 1791 and several judgments by US courts at all levels though the world and its attitudes to guns, colonialism and violence has changed so much.
So there must be more to this shibboleth. Part of the answer is seen in what late Senator Orrin Hatch as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution stated in the Right to Keep and Bear Arms report: “When our ancestors forged a land ‘conceived in liberty’, they did so with musket and rifle. When they reacted to attempts to dissolve their free institutions, and established their identity as a free nation, they did so as a nation of armed freemen.”
Thus, settling issues with guns and brute force has had historical and polemical sanction in the US, and have been subliminally passed down the generations as a matter of personal privilege, embodied in the right to bear arms — and presumably to use them to resolve disputes. Shooting vast numbers of fellow human beings due to some perceived infringement of personal happiness or advancement then may not seem all that outrageous to (far too) many Americans.
Change has to come from within: Americans have to face up to the violence of the US’ birth — which included the systematic elimination of Native American tribes by guns rather than peaceful co-existence. The US has to mindfully repudiate the “musket and rifle” philosophy as indefensible and unacceptable today. Only a “truth and reconciliation” movement and change of mindset can give ballast to a move to repeal the Second Amendment and curb personal arms sales.
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed are personal.
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