The bottomless maw of Moloch the Gun God was fed again last Friday in Santa Fe, Texas. He is never sated. This was the 22nd school shooting where someone was hurt or killed, according to CNN, in 2018.
The public script is all too familiar. Last Friday, a 17-year-old white teenager named Dimitrios Pagourtzis entered Santa Fe High School. He then proceeded to murder 10 people and injure 13 others. One of Pagourtzis' victims was 16-year-old Shana Fisher. According to her mother, he had been harassing her for several months. Pagourtzis would also engage in a gun battle with the local police during which he injured at least one officer. After being captured, Pagourtzis told the police that he killed 10 people and wounded 13 others because he wanted the attention of having his story told.
In the hours and days since the Santa Fe massacre, the other boxes in what some have described in macabre gallows humor as "mass shooting bingo" were also quickly filled in.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis is a "nice boy" who was "bullied," as though this matters at all.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis got the guns from his father, who supports the NRA.
Republican politicians and other right-wing gun fetishists sent their "prayers and well-wishes" to the Santa Fe community.
And these same Republican politicians and other opinion leaders in the news media trotted out inane and flabbergastingly absurd and stupid solutions to the plague of mass murder by gun in America's schools. An example: Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said that mass shootings in schools would be less likely if there were fewer doors on the buildings.
Nothing will be done to change America's gun laws. The issue will drop off of the collective radar until the next mass murder by gun occurs. In all, mass murder by gun is treated like gravity or the weather, in America. These are so-called "acts of God" which exist outside of the dominion of mere mortals.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis' mental health has also been called into question.
Pagourtzis' mass murder spree is an act of gendered violence: He reportedly stalked and harassed a teenage girl, who stood up to him in public. Pagourtzis then decided to kill her and nine other people.
There will be little if any national discussion of how toxic white masculinity — as it has so many other times in America's epidemic of mass shootings — killed 10 people in Santa Fe last week.
Again a white young man committed an act of mass murder at his school. This is almost unheard of among nonwhites. Such acts of mass murder by gun are disproportionately committed by white men and boys.
There will also be no national panic over this. Nor will there be a "national conversation" about where white men are being radicalized into committing such acts of heinous violence. Of course, if Pagourtzis were Muslim there would 24/7 news coverage and presidential proclamations about "Islamic terrorism." Likewise, if Pagourtzis were nonwhite and entered a high school and then proceeded to kill and injure dozens of people there would be mass hysteria about the "bad culture" of black and brown people and demands by politicians that America "get tough on crime."
Pagourtzis, a heavily armed white male who committed violent crimes, was not killed by the police. By comparison, unarmed, innocent and otherwise defenseless black and brown men, women, boys and girls are routinely killed, attacked and otherwise brutalized by America's police because the latter claim they were somehow "in fear of their lives." Apparently, white mass murderers do not inspire such terror and fear. Negrophobia is lethal.
And as is increasingly common in the public script that accompanies mass murder by gun in America, a white man carrying a pistol, an American flag and wearing his Donald Trump "Make America Great Again" hat decided to make an appearance at the site of the Santa Fe mass murder.
Beyond callous cruelty and a desire to intimidate and re-traumatize the survivors of the Santa Fe massacre — and by extension, any other people who want America to have more effective gun control laws — why would a person actually do such a thing?
In America, the gun is inexorably linked to white men's political and social power as a group. This was true before the Founding. It is true in the 21st century. Moreover, the gun is also intimately tied to white male identity, especially for conservatives. To wit: white men are approximately 31 percent of the population but own 48 percent of the guns in America.
And it cannot be overlooked that white men are also grossly overrepresented among those Americans who own more than 17 guns. This is not a mere hobby or fetish-driven obsession: The gun is the ultimate means of ending political debate; the gun is a pinnacle statement of authority; in an increasingly diverse country where white conservative men feel embattled, the gun takes on an increasing amount of both literal and symbolic power.
Social psychologists and others have also shown that guns are a type of magical totem and fetish object. For conservatives, the gun — especially after mass murders such as in Santa Fe — triggers feelings of death salience and mortality. Here, instead of seeing a logical and rational need for better and more effective gun control laws after such a horrific incident, conservatives (and others who closely connect their personal sense of self and status with gun ownership) become more protective of guns because they view them as a means of becoming immortal.
In total, these facts help to explain why there will likely never be effective gun control laws in America.
The response to the Santa Fe massacre also signals to a much deeper political and social divide between liberals and conservatives regarding the relationship between freedom and democracy, as well as the role of government in American society.
Conservatives tend to embrace a belief in negative liberty. In this framework, the government, the Commons and social democracy are the enemy. Laws are (generally) viewed as unreasonable limitations on individual behavior and action. This political cosmology is orientated around a worship of gross selfishness and crude self-interest as being supreme to all other values. It is embodied by American right-wing scion Grover Norquist's dream of making government so weak he can drown it in a bathtub like a baby, second-rate speculative fiction writer and (admirer of a sociopathic killer) Ayn Rand's political "theories," and Donald Trump and the right wing's rubblizing of the American government and the social safety net.
By comparison, liberals and progressives tend to believe in positive liberty. Laws and the government can actually be used to expand democracy and to improve human dignity. Here, "freedom to" means the ability to live a more full and free life where, for example, a person is free to not worry about onerous health bills, where food and adequate housing are inalienable rights, the rights of racial and ethnic minorities (as well as women, LGBT folks and other marginalized groups) are inviolate, education is affordable and a living wage for people who work full-time should be guaranteed. Positive liberty is embodied by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Second Bill of Rights" and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign.
As distilled down to America's gun debate, one camp believes that the freedom to own guns without restriction trumps the freedom of other people to live free of the fear and reality of being shot, killed, maimed or otherwise injured by guns. In a healthy society that was not in many ways sociopathic, such a debate would not even be necessary. The profound truth of positive freedom and liberty would be self-evident for all rational and considerate people.
Last week's massacre at Santa Fe High School, just as with the previous spectacular mass murders by gun in places such as Parkland, Las Vegas, Sutherland, Newtown and the other too numerous incidents of quotidian violence where tens of thousands of American are killed every year by guns, are examples of a culture where this misery is embraced and normalized by millions of Americans as the true and real price of "liberty and freedom."
The country's government is broken — and has been for a very long time — because American carnage is now inseparable from American democracy. This is a rot and moral crisis that extends from the White House and Donald Trump down and through to the halls and classrooms of the country's schools where mass murderers such as Dimitrios Pagourtzis hunt their prey on what feels like a daily basis.
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