What in the world has come over you? What in heaven’s name have you done? – John Prine
Looking back at the years of growing violence here in the United States, it’s becoming clear that restricting access to guns, realistically a hopeless goal in this country now, may well have missed the point anyway. Admitting that violence itself, in particular as it is currently manifesting in the behavior of a growing number of US citizens, really is the problem, is tantamount to accepting what the NRA’s main argument has been all along: “people kill people, not guns”. Yet, the truth must be acknowledged. Many Americans are embracing and using violence. Nevertheless, regardless of whether or not it is the consequence of the extraordinary access to guns that Americans have, there has been a kind of devolution here into a society where lethal violence has become not only a legitimate response to conflict or disagreement, but rather the default response. The daily news is filled with stories of fights breaking out at a party or a bar, where one angry (and perhaps inebriated) individual goes home, grabs their firearms, then returns and kills a number of other people – often followed by themselves.
People are exploding and shooting each other all around the country, killing children for retrieving a toy on their property or knocking on the wrong door by accident. They drive up to – or directly into – people at street parties and gun them down, often killing bystanding children. Every day, people in the US shoot each other in personal arguments and disputes, at home and in public, schools, churches, workplaces, on the street, in cars and anywhere else.
Young adolescents – including rural, white, churchgoing American kids, male and female – as young as fourteen now regularly carry out mass and/or targeted shootings at their own schools, plotted from the safety of their parents’ homes and using weapons owned by their parents or given to them by their parents.
However, needless to say, people’s violence is not only expressed with guns. In the final weeks of last year, the US saw spectacular discoveries of troves of homemade explosives, as well as reports of a variety of thwarted attacks. Then, of course, there was the attack on a crowd of people celebrating New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, and the sad suicide explosion in Las Vegas, both of which were carried out with electric trucks. That said, incidents of people using vehicles as tools of violence by driving into crowds of people they disagree with are now nothing new in the US. The size and power of those vehicles in these recent incidents, however, is something new.
The attack in New Orleans was meant to involve guns and explosives (fortunately not deployed successfully), but the main weapon was an electric Ford pickup truck. Consider for a moment the lethal power this offered to the attacker: the Ford F-150 Lightning stands at 79 in. high and 80 in. wide. In other words, the truck is taller than most average people and as wide as several people standing side by side. It weighs 6015 lbs (2728 kg) and has an engine that produces 580 HP, with 775 lb. ft of instant torque. Its body is made of “military grade aluminum alloy” mounted on a “high-strength steel frame that delivers exceptional torsional rigidity”.
The Tesla Cybertruck, on the other hand, with its macabre sharp-edged steel body and its useless-by-design ethos (at least you can do things with an F-150, the gas version of which has long been one of the most popular trucks in America), will now be enshrined as the vehicle used by a very badly traumatized member of the US military – who by all accounts was suffering both physically and mentally but was afraid that asking for help would cost his career – to literally explode. This poor soul seemed to hope that his action would be a warning to the rest of us. In pointing out the potential lethality of the vehicle, he succeeded. His tragic action showed that the sides of the Cybertruck were so strong that they were able to contain the entire force of the explosion inside the vehicle and direct it upwards.
Now, imagine if he had chosen to drive that explosive laden, ultra-rigid powerhouse (600 HP standard, or over 800 HP in the “Beast” version, nomenclature which says at least something about its intended audience) directly into the lobby of the Trump hotel before the detonation – or into a crowd of people. What could have stopped him? How much damage could have been done?
While on the subject of the growing rate of vehicle-related violence in the US, it is also worth mentioning the very noticeable increase, at least here in the NC news, in the number of high-speed vehicle chases ending in fatal crashes, with drivers accelerating beyond 100+ mph while pursued by State Trooper cruisers (which are capable of outrunning virtually anything else on the road), in a nihilistic scenario that often ends with the car plowing into someone’s home or business, amplifying the death and misery.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the US is also home to rampant sexual violence, very often perpetrated by adults against children. There is a sad, constant stream of news headlines about sexual abuse and violence, child pornography, human trafficking and more. Meanwhile, the seemingly endless series of arrests and horror stories emerging from the circles of extreme wealth have demonstrated that many those who possess the power that comes with great wealth seem to often presume that this gives them the right to satisfy their every carnal desire to an equal extreme, no matter who gets hurt. It’s not a show or an idle boast – these people really do rape whoever they want to.
Here in the US, people love having the biggest and the best of everything, and when it comes to the tools of violence, the nation has really outdone itself. With military grade weaponry, military grade vehicles and militarily trained – and traumatized – people on the streets, steeped in a society that is itself exploding with violence, both rhetorically and physically, it would seem that the US has really entered a new phase of continuous and escalating violence. Behind it all is big money, bigger money than anyone has ever controlled, but also a new political atmosphere that has all but shattered any taboo about political violence. The recent pardon of all of the Jan. 6, 2020 rioters, including those found guilty of serious violent acts and physical harm, has only reinforced not only the validity of violence as a form of personal/political expression, but also the assurance that those who choose to act this way will not only ‘get away with it’, but will receive support from the highest echelons of government.
But one need not only take my word for it. Evidence abounds:*
March 9, 2016: A 78-year-old white male Trump supporter punched a Black male protester being escorted out of a Trump campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Trump supporter was recorded on video saying he enjoyed “knocking the hell out of that big mouth” and “Yes, he deserved it. The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.” …at the time, law enforcement officials tackled the protester to the ground after he had been punched in the face. Two days after the assault, Trump said such attacks on protesters were “very, very appropriate” and the kind of action “we need a little bit more of”.
May 8, 2019: At a Florida rally, Trump joked with the audience about the idea of shooting migrants and asylum seekers, a day after reports that a border militia member said of migrants, “Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them? We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber.” Trump asked the crowd, referring to immigrants, “How do you stop these people?” A woman at the rally reportedly yelled “shoot them” in response.
The United States is certainly not the only nation to suffer or to have suffered from domestic violence, yet it is fair to argue that the sheer extent of individual violence coupled with the ways in which violence is now being contemplated as a tool of official US domestic power is something new for this country, and by extension the world. The nation is seething.
Speculation about where this all might lead must be set aside for the moment. The reality is at once evolving at lightning/fiber Internet speed, and at the same time it seems very much like a repetition, or distortion/mutation of something we have seen many times before. Put differently, violence, and its instrumental use as a tool of power, domination and resolving conflicts is as old as humanity, but with the increasingly lethal tools and the daily flood of violent acts that now permeates American life and the new government in the US, I find I can only wonder: what is this rough beast, its hour come at last?
If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise.”- Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Feb. 1, 2016
*Citations edited from https://www.vox.com/21506029/trump-violence-tweets-racist-hate-speech
Cover Image: The Gun Store, Waterbury, CT USA
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