Texas School Shooting: Guns Don’t Kill People, Gun Culture Does
It’s too late to do the right thing about guns
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Now hear this: It’s too late to do the right thing about guns in America. The Robb Elementary School shooting that claimed 21 lives in Uvalde, TX. on Tuesday is the 27th attack on schoolchildren in the US this year. And it could have been prevented.
Following the murders, Texas Governor Greg Abbott was quick to find a TV camera and credit law enforcement with a swift and courageous response that saved lives. I, too, commend them.
If nothing changes, though, Texas will test law enforcement courage again soon. Still, Governor Abbott seems oblivious to the danger. His summary of the killings? “It could have been worse.”
Predictably, Abbott failed to mention that Tuesday could have been “a lot better” at Robb Elementary if not for the broad proliferation of easily accessible guns in Texas and in America more generally.
Abbott also flatly refused to consider any talk of new gun regulations in Texas. Despite the horror in Uvalde, 18-year-olds will still be able to stroll into Texas gun shops and legally carry out AR-15s going forward. And if they buy privately or at a gun show, they won’t even have to pass a background check.
Abbott vaguely referenced Chicago crime as proof that gun laws don’t work. He might be surprised to learn that 8 of America’s 10 most dangerous cities are in traditionally red states with enthusiastic gun cultures and that Chicago is not on the list.
Now 21 lay dead in Uvalde, 19 of them elementary school children. Yes, the shooting could have been prevented, but it was nurtured instead. And the next attack won’t be stopped at the sales register or the legislature floor, either.
Because America apparently loves guns more that children.
Abbott on abortion
Abbott, like most other Republicans, is staunchly anti-choice and gleefully signed Texas’s fetal heartbeat law in 2021. That law outlawed abortion in Texas after 6 weeks, even in cases of rape.
Never fear, though — Abbott vowed to “eliminate all rapists” in Texas to protect women who otherwise might be forced to carry their attackers’ children. So, you can relax, ladies.
That’s frustration talking — I don’t want to be flippant. Clearly, to criminalize women in the name of human life and then open doors for mass murderers who shoot schoolchildren by the dozen is so morally warped that it’s hard to know where to mount a challenge to the underlying logic.
But the difficulty quickly becomes obvious: there is no underlying logic.
No, only culture can support such contradictions. So, culture is where the philosophically inclined — like me — have to respond.
Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony
Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci hypothesized that cultural hegemony was the key to social and political control in capitalist nations.
He argued that because of the inherent injustices of capitalism, only mass indoctrination can explain the ready consent to exploitation of so many European and American workers.
Gramsci observed that political power in capitalist nations performs ideological training through cultural institutions — schools, churches, courts, and most importantly for our purposes, the media.
Whether you subscribe to the broader claims of Marxism or not, Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony can help us understand how gun culture took root in America. Here’s why:
One of the most effective means of social control is fear. In the US, the threat of foreign invasion and the consequent need for unfathomable military might made a compelling narrative at the turn of the 20th-century for American workers otherwise unsatisfied with the capitalist order.
American President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, used “big stick” rhetoric to frighten the US public regarding Japanese military prowess and to thus elicit broad nationalist sympathy. The media — primarily print — eagerly relayed Roosevelt’s message to the public.
At the same time, America’s military — Roosevelt’s testament to the “American Way” of capitalism — relied heavily on private gun manufacturers for arms.
Problem was, by their own admission, gun producers couldn’t “remain in business waiting for wars.” They needed reliable profits to operate — something only consumers could provide.
For that reason, the US War Dept. opposed all domestic gun regulations on the grounds that supporting the gun industry was “vital to national defense.”
Thus, the American people, already convinced that foreign threats necessitated an indominable military, eagerly agreed that buying guns was more than a right — it was a civic duty.
So, just as Gramsci might have predicted, Roosevelt used the media to orient American culture towards guns and in so doing invigorated a capitalist institution essential to his own power.
So, in the same way that racist “Buy American” propaganda united proletarians in common cause with greedy industrialists against Japanese competitors in the 1930s, so gun culture married exploited US workers to capitalism and the political power protecting it in the early 1900s.
That history begs the question: What vital national interest does the gun industry underwrite today? If nothing, then what can we do to pry free from its grip on our culture?
Times have changed since Roosevelt
The US gun industry is no longer a precarious venture. Today, American gun manufacture and retail clears a whopping $2 billion in profits annually.
Neither does the US Treasury still need consumers to prop up weapons dealers until the next world war. The government spends lavishly on defense — and by defense, I mean offensive weapons of war.
Thankfully, there’s enough money in the national coffers now to keep vital defense industries afloat without selling AR-15s to teenagers.
Cultural sentiment is changing, too. Polls indicate that less than 20% of Americans oppose stricter gun laws on principle. The public confrontation with small, bullet-ridden bodies may finally be effecting the cultural change that rational appeal never could. Slowly, though — far too slowly.
Furthermore, given the size and sophistication of modern US weapons of war, it’s easy to see that although the US Government is still essential to the success of the gun industry, small arms manufacturers serve no vital American interests anymore.
That is unless you think American interests are served when schoolchildren are shot dead in their classrooms, cowering in terror in the arms of their teachers.
Guns don’t kill people, gun culture does
Watching the news at work today, my gun-loving colleagues scapegoated everything in sight for the Texas shooting except for guns. Violent movies, video games, pornography, poor mental healthcare, bad parents, no prayer in schools, on and on.
Never mind that you could show Pulp Fiction 8 hours a day in every school in America and invite the students to play Grand Theft Auto with Satanist parents and, so long as no one brought in a real gun, there would never be a single shooting.
And, of course, I heard that old, sweet gun worship hymn more than once: Guns don’t kill people — people kill people.
Well then, the morning after pill doesn’t kill people, either.
And by the same infantile logic, Agent Orange doesn’t kill people.
Heroin, surely, doesn’t kill people — but hand it over to teenagers and see what happens.
Heroin (and pills, etc.) lacks volition, of course, so technically, it can’t be a murderer. The same is true for handguns and AR-15s. Heroin cultural hegemony, though, would still make for perilous, miserable, deadly society.
I think you get the picture.
For more from Dustin T. Cox, follow Plato’s Gymnasium: a journal of everyday philosophy
