Stop, look, and bristle with anger at the image above. The obscene rates at which American children are gunned down or left with life-altering physical and psychological scars from gun violence should horrify and activate us all.
What’s the story, anyway? Are Americans genetically inferior to Canadians, Germans, the French, Slovakians, and citizens of all those other countries where there are so many fewer gun deaths of of children? Do most Americans lack a kindness gene? Do they uniformly inherit murderous violence?
Is there something in our polluted air that contaminates American minds and hearts, making people blind to the suffering of others, ready to kill anyone, anything that gets in the way?
I think the answer to these questions is No, but clearly the country has a big problem with deadly violence–a correlate, I believe, of structural violence and the corrosive collusion of too many Americans with structural violence laced with racism.
Structural violence is what helps the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Structural violence means that the powerful get to make the rules in ways they believe (perhaps mistakenly) serve their own interests; if having desperate people available to remove their garbage and tar their roads, then you can be sure the powerful will limit educational opportunity, employment opportunity, and freedom of movement to keep a substantial segment of our society trapped in poverty, undereducated, and locked up or shot if they are in anyway noncompliant. Or look too different.
When you combine social injustice and social inequality with anger, frustration, and the ready availability of guns, does that sound like a mix that can explode in violence? Does that violence have the potential of spilling over in ways that destroy countless lives, including those of children and adolescents? Seems like a Yes to me.