The following comment was originally published on the Notes from Underground blog by a member of Internationalist Perspective. The second point was a reaction by another member of IP.
After hearing the horrific events of Connecticut on Friday, a guy I know at work summed up pretty much how I feel, “That shit is fucked up.”
If anything, it’s a little mild.
To butcher, there’s no other word here, children with a semi-automatic weapon is fucked up. To kill teachers who sought to protect those children is fucked up. Oh and yeah, to look at this tragedy and think that no it’s not the lack of available treatment for people who suffer from mental illness and the easy access to deadly weapons, but rather that it’s that God has been removed from public schools that’s to blame (thanks Mike Huckabee for that), that’s fucked up.
On Friday night I watched CNN’s coverage and saw Wolf Blitzer interviewing a former FBI official. Surprisingly, he made some of those same points. Mental illness is not dealt with. Neither is the easy access to weapons, but most chillingly, he calmly asserted it would happen again - no doubt. Actually, it almost happened again the next day. A man walked through a hospital in Alabama. no one was killed except for the gunman, but three people were wounded.
Now, it’s “not appropriate” to discuss the root causes. Later when it is. No one cares anymore.
Commentators will now try to fit the events in to their world view (I suppose I am too). For the religious right like Huckabee, a lack of God was the problem; more God the solution. The NRA and its supporters will likely argue more guns are the solution - after Columbine, they argued the real problem was teachers weren’t armed so they couldn’t fight back. For Liberals, it will be gun control.
So for me, I look at the general fucked up state of capitalism and think maybe that has something to do with it. This act was deeply irrational, much like the context in which it took place. A society where the profit motive is elevated to the highest principle. Where problems are personalized and resolved only to the extent that the money is there. In my “communist utopia” would tragedies like this never occur? Hard to believe that any society would have no problems, but I like to think that we might try to address those problems in advance.
And yes, I did hug my children a little more tightly that night.
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I think [the] blog on the Newtown massacre was just what was needed with a clear link to capitalism, as opposed to facile calls for gun control; calls coming from a President whose own determination to use drones to attack villages in Pakistan and Yemen with many hundreds, most often civilians, killed and wounded. We all need to think about the actual link between capital, its deepening crisis, which goes beyond the economy in the narrow sense, and incidents like this one. The connection is clearly there, but, unlike the Oslo massacre, which had a clear political basis, the connection here is not so direct.
