Hang your head low in sorrow as you read about the latest set of child victims of a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, and hear their stories .
Hang your head low in embarrassment that the whole international community is getting yet another damning look at the moral sickness embedded in the heart of the power structure ruling the United States and contaminating our whole society.
Hang your head low in shame if you have done nothing since the last school shooting to support the student gun reform activists, and nothing to remind your Congresspeople that they are responsible for the well-being and safety of the citizens they represent, not the NRA, which will grease the palms of anyone who supports their deadly agenda.
Or
Lift your head high and set your eyes on the prize: a successful campaign for sane gun laws. There are countless efforts underway. Join them.
Raise your head up and square your shoulders back and commit yourself to doing everything in your power to break the death grip that the NRA and the arms industry it represents has on the hearts and souls and wallets of the people elected to represent you.
Use your head to ask yourself if you really, truly have examined every opportunity available to you to resist fear-mongers, violence justifiers, promoters of hate, and exploiters of us all.
Invoke your conscience to propel you to take action in support of what may be the best chance in many decades to resist the power of the gun lobby and the violence-profiteers, and move instead to promote and protect the lives and well-being of our children and all of us.
The argument you get from the warlords, the arms industry, the right-wing extremists, the power-seekers is that some forms of torture are needed to fight terrorism, to save lives endangered by “ticking bombs.” Bull hoowey. If you want to understand why people torture, consider the components of this definition from Miriam Webster:
Torture is “the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.” (emphasis added)
To punish. That’s a biggie, one we’ve discussed before on this blog. The monotheistic religions “of the Book” (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as well as countless other religions from earlier centuries, have promulgated visions of Hell in which “sinners” (e.g., violators of cultural norms, rebels against authoritarian rulers) will be punished (tortured) by eternal burning and sometimes other horrors.
That preoccupation with punishment has a broad reach and is as American as apple pie. Parents who inflict intense pain on children (e.g., whipping, burning) for “not minding their manners,” for “giving lip” or “being sassy” are inflicting torture on their children—and were often tortured themselves while growing up. Both men and women often torture their partners physically or psychologically to punish them for infidelity and other “crimes.” And racism in this country has, for centuries, been associated with the torture and murder of people of color, both in the streets and in prisons, to punish them for their differentness.
To coerce. Okay, in today’s world “coercion” could be interpreted as requiring an admission regarding the location of a ticking bomb (although there is no evidence of such a location ever having been discovered this way) but for centuries coerced confessions involved, for example, admitting that one was or was not a “good” Catholic. Think Inquisition. We may well ask how effectively torture worked to protect Catholicism from infidels and purify the image of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
For sadistic pleasure: Heartbreakingly, torture for sadistic pleasure is widespread in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world where abuse of various forms is a part of everyday life. My guess is that every one of my readers has at some point in his or her life met someone who got pleasure from inflicting pain on some person or animal. Right?
Regardless of its purpose or motive, torture, as well as cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, is banned at all times, in all places by international law.
Shouldn’t people of conscience be acting to resist its use in their homes, their communities, their country, and wherever their efforts can reach? Time to stop excusing it?
First of all, perhaps we should stop harping on “gun control.” The hard-core right-wing NRA devotees will never stop fighting all kinds of control. That’s a dirty word to millions. It’s in their bible: “Don’t you dare try to control me you weak-kneed, government-pandering, lily-livered mother-lovers.”
What is important to these don’t-try-to-control-me-my-gun-is-my-life devotees is their freedom—their freedom to bully, to threaten, and to “defend” themselves against all the threats, known and unknown, that seem to lurk everywhere. You know, the freedom they are sacrificing every time they let some smooth-talking, race-baiting, fear-promoting tyrant tell them whom to fear and whom to hate, and what to do to feel better.
If we want to get real freedom from fear and danger, maybe we can start with an alternative term for “gun control.”
“Gun reform” probably appeals to a lot of progressives, but “reform” is sure to sound leftish to the hard-lined be-ready-to-kill-anybody-if-they-look-at-you-wrong advocates. Not to mention its association with schools for delinquents.
Maybe we should talk about “gun sanity.” Maybe a gun sanity movement can remind people that nobody is perfect, that even gun-lovers who advocate gun-safety can end up accidentally shooting themselves.
Better yet, how about “gun sense”? or “gunsense”? Sounds like a no-nonsense expression, linked to commonsense, which should appeal to everyone.
And, actually, there is a grassroots gun sense movement emerging within several states, including Texas , Georgia , and Vermont , a movement that may succeed in promoting sanity at local levels while the U.S. government waffles under the control of the NRA.
For those who believe the nay-sayers claiming that you can’t legislate morality or even do anything to reduce violence, check out this studyAnd this one
and think about what you can do to promote sanity, commonsense, and gunsense.
In our last post , focusing on Albert Bandura’s analysis of moral disengagement as a manipulative tool in the hands of the NRA leadership, we discussed how the NRA uses “moral” (i.e., pseudo-moral) justifications, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, and diffusion of responsibility to manipulate people’s thinking about deadly weapons.
Bandura also describes the way the NRA minimizes and misrepresents the adverse effects of today’s deadly semiautomatic weapons. Charlton Heston, former NRA president, proclaimed “I want to save the Second Amendment from the nitpicking little wars of attrition, fights over alleged ‘Saturday Night Specials,’ plastic guns, cop-killer bullets and so many made-for-prime-time non-issues….”
The NRA is also skilled at attributing the blame for the growing deadliness of guns to agents other than themselves. Remember their mantra: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
Bandura suggests that the gun industry has also developed their own novel way of promoting moral disengagement regarding guns—i.e., by claiming that gun regulations are futile. After the fatal shooting in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the state governor argued against stricter gun controls, saying that if the shooter had been unable to buy weapons, he would have made a bomb.
In an earlier blog, I identified mechanisms of moral engagement that are parallel to and can counteract reliance on processes of moral disengagement. Let’s consider how these mechanisms might work in response to the NRA propaganda machine.
The NRA’s pseudo-moral justifications for unlimited access to arms can be countered by the use of principled moral arguments both against reliance on deadly weapons to combat fears of harm fueled in the media but also against NRA arguments such as their claim that arming the German citizens in the 1930s would have prevented the Holocaust. (Did he never learn that the armaments of many countries were insufficient to stop the Nazi machine for several years into the war?)
Euphemistic labeling can be countered by realistic descriptive language—telling it like it is, which is essential to speaking truth to power (and corruption). Guns are not, as the NRA claims just a means of protection from violence and an assertion of independence in the face of autocratic governments; they are deadly instruments of violence that can kill oneself, one’s family, and other innocent people–and do so every day.
The reciprocal of advantageous comparison is identifying better alternatives; as Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye” leaves the whole world blind. There are better–more moral and more enduring–ways of securing the future.
Rather than diffusing and displacing responsibility, a morally engaged person is a moral agent who accepts responsibility, recognizing, for example, that refusing to stand up to the NRA endangers the safety of all Americans—in their homes, in the streets, in movie theaters, in elementary schools, on college campuses.
Rather than blaming the victims of violent crimes for not having guns to protect themselves, as the NRA does, we should recognize that those victims deserve exoneration—and shift the attribution of responsibility to those who profit obscenely from gun sales. (You know who they are.)
Finally, instead of dehumanizing and denigrating supporters of gun control, as Charlton Heston did when he called them “loony leftists,” isn’t it better both to humanize the victims of gun violence and respect those who have the courage to take on the NRA?
To learn more about the Brady campaign to end gun violence, click here.