Violence is our Problem And it’s as American as Cherry Pie

Another school shooting tragedy. It seems like the current Congress is unwilling to budge on gun restrictions of any kind. There was a time was Congress was very willing to pass gun control laws. The time was in 1968 when the Black Panther Party was exercising its constitutional right to bear arms as it conducted police patrols and defended the party headquarters. White men making laws decided Black men bearing arms was not their idea of upholding the Second Amendment.

Then California Governor Ronald Reagan response to the Black Panthers was there is “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” Translation: Disarm Black people.

The years of 1967 and 1968 were particularly violent—Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, uprisings in major U.S. cities, etc. Then came the first major gun laws in about 30 years. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, and the Gun Control Act of 1968 were gifts from Congress.

It seems as if nothing can move Congress on gun laws. There was no action by Congress when one of their own (Gabrielle Gifford) was thrust into the national media story as a target of gun violence in 2011. No action when young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School became casualties the following year. The National Rifle Association doubled-down in its resistance and Congress bowed down to the NRA.

In the heat of the Black Power Movement, H. Rap Brown said that violence was as American as cherry pie. I thought about the provocative quote from the former chair of the Non-Violent Student Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as the news of the latest mass shooting broke in Parkland, Florida. We have come to accept this man-made condition as our reality.

We have accepted this reality because as we have refused to get to the roots of our violence problem. Instead, we choose to arm ourselves to deal with anticipated, inevitable violence that is happening all around us on so many levels. Face it: We are a violent nation.

It’s not just about the growing and more deadly massacres carried out by mainly white males with automatic weapons. I’m talking about police violence, military violence, state executions, domestic violence, sexual violence, gender violence, racial violence, religious violence, intra-race community violence. There’s bullying by all ages. There’s the mayhem and destruction caused by policy and legislation. Violence is most thought of in terms of physical violence, but it’s also verbal, psychological, cultural and social. We Are A Violent Nation.

If we really start to get to the root of U.S. violence, we will come front and center with the system of capitalism that relies heavily on working class people blaming the “other” while the One Percenters watch in delight all the way to the banks. Who gets the good-paying jobs, who gets the harshest prison sentence, who gets the substandard house in a hyper-segregated neighborhood, who gets access to quality education—all these indicators that affect quality of life are daily, controlled battles designed to keep us busy and stressed while a growing oligarchy dismantles any semblance of democratic structures and processes. It’s about being more sophisticated in our efforts to expose and root out patriarchal violence that lives in racism, homo/trans phobia, Islamophobia and poverty.

There’s over 300 million licensed guns in this country. For some, this is a big problem. However, when you have a violent person, not only does everybody and everything look like a nail, but anything can be used as a hammer. This is about our collective propensity towards violence. Violence against the other.

I understand people have a right to bear arms and to protect their families. I believe the debate will shift to the who and the why. Who gets to buy guns? Who gets to use them? Who are the targets? What would happen if the active shooters were predominantly young, Black men instead of white males? If Black people walked around openly carrying legal and licensed weapons, would our rights to bear arms be protected and upheld?

Let’s have a robust public conversation about violence, about guns, about legal protections. Let’s imagine that it’s 1968. Perhaps the imagery of those times could give us perspective.