Hitler’s rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule and

neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leadership of large

populations, survived many interior and exterior crises, and braved the

numerous dangers of relentlessintra-party struggles if they had not

had the confidence of the masses.

My father owned a gun. Every now and then, I glimpsed the gun in his hand. For how long he was a gun owner, I don’t know. Neither could I have known or, for that matter, understood, what he thought of himself as he sat on the edge of my parents’ bed cradling the hand gun so close to his chest. It’s a surviving memory. This one time of one too many times: my baby brother sibling, less than a year old, lies to one side of my father while, on one side, sits the family’s phone. I’ve come to stand at the open bedroom door because I heard the word “kill.”

Kill you?

Out of the corner of my eye, my mother comes into view. She’s walking past me. Stopping at the bedroom door - is she screaming? His finger is on the trigger. I see the profile of the gun in the foreground of the chest of the inebriated man.

It’s 1966 or 1967. I’m 12 or 13 years old. I’m already running past the apartment door and out the vestibule. I’m running toward 61st street where there’s a phone booth. I’m a girl, on the south side of Chicago, and, even if it’s well past midnight, I’ve been taught to run as if on cue. So I invested my whole being, for brief time, to appeasing violence.

A few years later, my uncle, having graduated from the police academy, is now a member of the sheriff of police. At home, he has taken to calling us “civilians,” as he walks around us while we sit, listening to him recall his day on the Force. To this day, I’m not sure if my uncle began calling us, his mother, my mother, his sister, me, his niece, “civilians” before or after he was shot in the chest by some gun-toting suspect in an ambush. (My uncle survived and continued with the sheriff of police until retirement).

You civilians!

Even if I never see the gun, his gun, I hear the word that designates us, family members, other.

Another uncle, drafted by the US Army, served in the Korean war. In combat. He managed to survive two terms. When he returned, this uncle, a poet, lover of books, classical music, and Jazz, shut himself off from us. Periodically, he would step out of his room, try to express something that was so inarticulate as to appear to me (a child still) surreal. Were there words uttered? Screams? What is happening when he raises a chair above his head?

Staying in place, we didn’t breathe. It will be over soon enough. My uncle returned to his room. Slam the door…

We didn’t know about PTSD or drugs. We didn’t know what he had seen in Korea, among the people, among members of his own unit? His band of brothers? What atrocities he had seen or had to participate in? What did he think of his country? Of himself?

My oldest uncle served 23 years in the US Air Force, starting sometime in the 1950s. He would send me photos of himself around the city of Okinawa. In one photo, he looks right into the camera as he sits on a rickshaw, the Japanese driver, stands behind. Not smiling.

Still a young child, I wanted to fly jet planes and wear the flight jacket of a fighter pilot. Group think is introduced early and, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned, there is such a thing as being too late - too late to unlearn something built on ignorance.

It’s no wonder that the US Air Force base in Okinawa has experienced days in which Japanese citizens organize and march, calling for the removal of what boils down to arrogance and indifference.

Malcolm X has been assassinated. So has Dr. King, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Chicago Mayor, Richard Daley, calls for his police force to “shoot to kill” any and all who dare to protest the link between the political machine and the war in his city. Yet Nixon warns good Americans about those urban dens of violence.

What’s new about America First? isn’t new. Even then, white conservative America called for a return to the old days. In the 1899, the angry white newspaper editor, sheriff, and wealthy business leaders of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 would have understood perfectly well the meaning of the slogan, Make America Great Again, when they burnt down Black businesses and homes, chased Blacks out of town, and killed, massacred those who didn’t run fast and far enough. And white liberals would stop congratulating themselves, forty and fifty years later, for once, one time, marching along side Blacks or Latino/a protesters or participating in a campus protest or a Vietnam rally.

On my birthday in November of 1971, I would have been eligible to be drafted into the Vietnam War. I would have been a private, maybe. In the US Army, perhaps. 1971. Or in 1972. Or 1973. Or 1974. I would have joined the 2, 709, 918 Americans who served in that war. I could have been one of the 58, 220 who died there on that soil—defending our freedoms, as is frequently reiterated today. If I had been born a boy, I would have been a young man running the miles with my own band of brothers, us, non-civilians, training to use a M14 or M16.

I would have killed other human beings too. No alcoholic threat. But wide eyed. A killing machine! I would have seen other incidents similar to My Lai, in other parts of Vietnam. How would I have survived the insight? Assuming I recognized in those others, my father or mother or uncles or younger siblings. Myself.

If I had survived my tour of duty in Vietnam, maybe I would laugh, as I do now, as a woman, who only went through Europe to arrive in Ethiopia to teach for a year, months before the start of the Iraq “Shock and Awe” War, every time I see Jeff Bridges and John Goodman in that car and CCR’s “Jun through the Jungle” gradually starts up. Or maybe not. Maybe not.

We know more about PTSD now. But we don’t seem to care.

Well ahead of Russia and China, when it comes to selling weapons, is the US. The statistics from 2012 to 2016 show the US ranking #1 - the King of weapon’s export. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s 2015 report, the US leads the way with the top 6 corporate manufacturers of weapons:

Lockheed Martin

Boeing

BAF Systems

Raytheon

Norththrop Grumman

General Dynamics

According to the April 18, 2018 edition of the Washington Post, April 18, the Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin the massive hypersonic weapon contract, at the cost of $928 million dollars. The US, it’s citizens, need hypersonic weaponry - for what - peace?

Two months after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that left 17 people dead, we in the US should watch the images out of Yemen. They are appalling! Mutilated and slaughtered civilians, including children, covered in blood. And these human beings were only participating in a wedding!

The horror continues. In November of 2017, the Washington Post reports on the sale of over $1 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia seems to have raised no eyebrows among the general public here in the US. In the same month, The Atlantic reports that Africa received $248. 6 million dollars worth of weapons! Africa - a continent that not long ago, the US president referred to as a “shithole”!

Peace and caring just isn’t profitable.

Back at home, violence is. Profitable, that is. Ask real estate dealers and builders cashing in on neighborhood once thriving with gun activity. Gentrified neighborhoods now. Gentrification normalizes what used to be thought of by many Americans as “shithole” neighborhoods of the precarious class of workers and of the poor - perceived as “aliens.” And Americans, for the most part, fail to recognize their contribution to the disappearance of women and of children - of fellow human beings.

Safety, says the politicians, the media. Safety against violence!

At home, the arms industry survives. Sturm Ruger is #1 in the US market as of 2014, according to a Mother Jones, June 14, 2016 investigative report. In the US home market, the gunmaker’s profits from the sale of mostly riffles, then shotguns, and lastly, handguns, was $1.64 million and a whopping $551 million, globally. In third place is Smith and Wesson with $1.31 million in profits at home from the sale of mostly handguns. The company profits globally, $552 million.

The Glock comes in in fourth place, with profits almost $800 million at home and, globally, $400 million in handgun sales.

Josh Harkinson, in “Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers: Meet the Moguls Making a Killing from Gun Sales in the United States,” lists the profits of these gunmakers, the number of civilians killed by these weapons, and the outrageous articulations of capitalists defending their bottom line by outright lack of concern for human life. Harkinson opens his article with this statement: “They are all white, all middle-aged, and all men.” Yes, white men - and capitalists. In the US, it’s all about success. Making a buck. Getting ahead. This is America - not Russia! Not China!

These men attend special meetings, wearing special jackets awarded to each of them as they are inducted into the Golden Ring of Freedom, a kind of band of brothers, each of whom has donated $1 million to the National Rifle Association (NRA). They are special people, more than all those I mention above, starting with my father and uncles, the soldiers who served in Korea and Vietnam; they are more important, it would seem, than the children killed in school shootings by other children with stockpiles of guns and ammunition in their bedrooms. Yet, it’s not cynical to consider how many “good” Americans would jump to the opportunity to don the special jacket and sit at the conference table among the elite members of the Golden Ring of Freedom. Liberals, socialists, democrats! As a nation, in a moment of crisis, again, we have among us such a group of white men like the Golden Ring of Freedom. And we have them not because they dropped from the sky! We’re not being tested by the apparition of good or evil! We have these men, holding court, as if kings, because they are surrounded by too many Americans who are without a strong commitment to social justice, to socially democratic ideas.

Too many Americans fear what might be lost - and for what purpose?

So when in 2011 the CEO at Sturm Ruger states that he can’t see the value of regulating magazine capacity to deter crime (Harkinson), his fellow Americans shouldn’t see him as the only exemplar of an American who is greedy, therefore, indifferent to the concerns, ultimately the suffering of other human beings. What did the majority of Americans do, what meaningful discussions followed Columbine or any domestic shooting? How many Americans confronted their fears and understand, once and for all, that a world in which profits from gun manufacturing and killing is no longer tolerable for the raising of another generation of humanity?

Apparently, not too many. In the American psyche, a commitment to profiteering runs deep. So eight months later, just 27 miles from the Sturm Ruger headquarters, 20-year old Adam Lanza turns up at Newton’s Sandy Hook Elementary with a Bushmaster, “a semi-automatic rifle and a 30-round magazine” (Harkinson). When Lanza was done making his point, he’d gunned down 20 children and six adults - as if he’s at the firing range.

And still, Americans cried. Others shook their heads and left flowers near the school. Others, still, established memorials to the murdered. Then most went on with their lives.

Before the Parkland school shooting on February 14, 2018, between January 4th and February 9th, to be exact, 17 school shootings occurred in the US (“Killing by the Numbers: How Much More to Follow,” Counterpunch, March 1, 2018). In the meantime, the article provides this statistic: the firearms industry in the US, consisting of 464 producers of weapons and ammunition, generates $11 billion in revenues!

In connection to the US foreign policy, it’s core, trade in weaponry, we’re talking about a kind of domestic violence… What do we label that that was made explicit in those teepees or in those cabins beyond the fields?

It should come as no surprise to the Black American population that during the Obama years, gun owners purchased more guns, stockpiling the weapons in their homes. White America has always had a vivid imagination. I have studied literature and the representations white Americans put forth to refer to themselves and those not them. The relationships are froth with ghosts, except there are real consequences. Real people are mistaken for hulks and monsters and shot dead. Often, they are only carrying a cell phone, if that! But they are Black or Brown. Let’s not forget that prediction about the racial make up of the United States by the year 2050 has white America extremely edgy.

Trigger happy!

Stockpile the weaponry!

That’s how capitalists do it: Racism isn’t alien to them! White supremacy is the name of their game! (See, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz). As William Faulkner would say, this isn’t about love!

In the meantime, the Parkland shooting survivors are invigorating their generation to say #Never Again! A new world by thinking about new ways to live free of guns. Anti-air craft and drones. And hypersonic missiles, too!

Maybe this generation of young people won’t turn their backs and walk away. Maybe they care now - and will go one caring until there’s change.