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Paddock owned multiple properties in Nevada, where police found more weapons, approximately fifty in all, half of which Paddock had purchased during the previous twelve months in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California. Every weapon and device Paddock owned was legal and registered under his name, including the “bump stock.” For gun enthusiasts and those familiar with them, the number of weapons Paddock possessed was far from shocking.16
During the days following the mass murder in Las Vegas, the N.R.A. and Republican leadership, as well as President Donald Trump, cautioned those who immediately demanded gun control legislation not to “politicize” the tragic event during a time of mourning. Yet, on October 5, 2017, in an unprecedented move since its extreme radicalization, the N.R.A. announced its support for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to consider firearms regulation: “The N.R.A. believes that devices designed to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.”17
Meditating on five major undeclared wars perpetrated by the U.S. since World War II—Korea, Vietnam, Central America (1981–89), Iraq (1991; 2003, continuing) and Afghanistan (1979–89; 2001, continuing) and not counting the dozens of brutal interventions and coups in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia—with flashes of historical memory of Jamestown, the Ohio Valley, and Wounded Knee, brings us to the essence of U.S. history. A red thread of blood connects the first white settlement in North America with today and the future. As military historian John Grenier puts it: “U.S. people are taught that their military culture does not approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and know little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of warfare—before and after the founding of the U.S.—that reduced the Indigenous peoples of the continent to a few reservations by burning their towns and fields and killing civilians, driving the refugees out—step by step—across the continent… . Violence directed systematically against noncombatants through irregular means, from the start, has been a central part of Americans’ way of war.”18
Just why these events, horrific as they are, and tragic for the families and communities traumatized by senseless violence and loss, loom so large in the public mind is a mystery, when, during the entire period since the 1966 Whitman massacre, the United States has perpetrated massive amounts of violence around the world, responsible for killing millions of people and families. Rather than the interpretation that mass shootings, gun hoarding, and popularity of military-style firearms among civilians are a product of the gun lobby or the gun industry, it may be more clearly framed as a domestic expression of “the new American militarism.”19 Military historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich, who is also a West Point graduate and veteran of the Vietnam and 1991 Gulf Wars, does not make that connection in his important book by that title, but he does see the rise in militarism and endless wars as a backlash to the U.S. military defeat in Vietnam, in which he was an Army officer. It could be added that the defense contracting corporations that had profited mightily during the decade of war in Southeast Asia played a significant role in bringing Ronald Reagan to the White House, and that this industry escaped deindustrialization and relocation while many others moved their operations off shore.
Concerted attention to mass shootings has increased since the 2001 bombings of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers, followed by the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which continue to this day. It may be that the mass killings at home are easier to grasp, condemn, and mourn than those perpetrated as military operations in the name of the people of the United States, paid for with their taxes, and soldiered by their children. Thus we had prominent Democratic Party officials, including Barack Obama in an eight-year presidency, urgently calling for gun regulations and banning some weapons in the United States, while fully supporting the unlimited production of bombs, bombers, and drones to kill people on a daily basis. And it only got worse in 2017, when the new president, Donald J. Trump, proposed an $18 billion increase in the Defense Department budget, only to be outdone by Republican Congress members, who drew up a 2018 budget that increased defense spending $37 billion more, totaling $640 billion.20
Since 1990, there has been no serious political effort to reduce the Defense Department budget; yet, in response to mass shootings, no money can be found to finance mental health facilities, mental health problems being the one attribute that nearly all the mass shooters share. Nor is it suggested by advocates of gun control or even mental health specialists that mass shootings, invariably carried out by mentally troubled individuals, may be related to the actual killing, bombing, and warfare the country has engaged in since 1965.
British journalist Ian Overton’s assessment of international arms transfers can be found in his 2016 book The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms.21 Overton heads a nonprofit organization in London, Action on Armed Violence, to research and lobby against the proliferation of firearms and gun violence against civilians all over the world. There are nearly a billion firearms worldwide, many more than ever before, in large part due to U.S. wars in the early twenty-first century. However, more than a hundred countries have their own gun manufacturers, and Overton did not expect his project to focus on the United States. When he began, his research and focus were particularly concerned with gun proliferation and violence in less developed countries, but he realized that most media information related to the United States. In part he blames the media for focusing on the superpower: “But it is also because the U.S. has, quite simply, the most unique relationship with guns of any other country I know.”22 He also traces the source of the world’s burgeoning acquisition of firearms to Pentagon sales and use. Using the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, Overton collected fourteen years of Pentagon contract information, 412 contracts in all, concerning firearms for U.S. soldiers, as well as for their proxies and allies. He found that the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols, and almost 112,000 machine guns. These transfers included all types of firearms—AK-47s left over from the Cold War, newer NATO-standard M16s and M4s, sniper rifles, shotguns and various kinds and calibers of pistols, including a large order of Glock semiautomatic pistols.
The United States is also the largest exporter of military weapons in the world, totaling nearly $40 billion in sales in 2014, far greater than the second-biggest weapons dealer, France, at $15 billion.23 The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported in February 2017 that transfers of major weapons had reached their highest volume for any five-year period since the end of the Cold War. Of the Earth’s ten top weapons manufacturing companies, seven are in the United States: Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamic, and United Technologies, together employing nearly 800,000 workers. Thirty-five other U.S. corporations also manufacture weapons, including General Electric, better known for electrical appliances, and Hewlett-Packard, which specializes in consumer electronics.24
The International Arms Trade Treaty took effect in 2014, with the United States as a signatory.25 Its mandate is modest—to promote and monitor transparency and responsible action in the transfer of arms, including preventing losing track of them. Those who support firearms control, especially lawmakers, should support implementation of the terms of this treaty. It is possible that education about the treaty could have an effect on gun proliferation and violence within the U.S. while raising questions about the Americanism of the Second Amendment and the violent racist legacies of colonial-derived militarism.
EIGHT
WHITE NATIONALISM, THE MILITIA MOVEMENT, AND TEA PARTY PATRIOTS
On Wednesday evening, June 17, 2015, perhaps the most historically symbolic, specifically targeted, and racially motivated U.S. mass shooting took place in Charleston, South Carolina. The site of the slaughter of nine people was a church. For evangelical Protestant congregations in the United States, Wednesday evening is p
rayer meeting and Bible reading in gatherings of the most dedicatedly faithful. But this was a very specific Protestant Church that was targeted, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church of Charleston—“Mother Emanuel”—the oldest historically Black church in North America, also a historical site of slave resistance, being the church co-founded by Denmark Vesey.
Denmark Vesey was born into slavery in 1767, but at age thirty-two in 1799, he won a lottery and purchased his freedom. He never was able to raise enough money to purchase the freedom of his wife and two sons. Vesey was literate and a skilled carpenter who operated his own business. In 1818, he co-founded Emanuel AME church, which quickly attracted nearly a thousand members. Vesey was free, and respected by his white clients and white clergymen. But Vesey also continued to identify and socialize with those who remained in bondage, including his own family. In 1819, as Congress debated whether slavery would be permitted in the new state of Missouri, Vesey may have had hope that the end of legalized slavery was on the horizon, but the decision went the other way, and the 1820 Missouri Constitution allowed white settlers to buy, sell, and own enslaved Africans. It is not known if this disappointment led Vesey to organize a revolt, or, more likely, it had been longer in the planning. The Haitian Revolution, 1791−1804, carried out by enslaved Africans, ended in national independence and the abolition of slavery, which struck fear in U.S. American slavers and inspiration in Black people—free and enslaved—throughout the hemisphere. Over a period of time, Vesey secretly organized enslaved and free Africans, borrowing from the Haitian revolution’s strategy. At the time of the planned revolt, 25,000 people lived in Charleston, only 11,000 of whom were white. Before the date set for the uprising—June 16, 1822—slavers learned about the plan and immediately mobilized all the armed white citizens, arresting Vesey and dozens of others. Vesey and five enslaved Africans were hanged on July 2, 1822. One of Vesey’s still-enslaved sons was arrested and deported to the Caribbean; his other enslaved son, Robert, survived to be emancipated during the Civil War and helped rebuild the war-damaged AME church his father had co-founded.
Later explaining that he sought to ignite a race war by his vile deed, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof, who is white, arrived at the Wednesday prayer meeting and was welcomed by the twelve African-American attendees, including the nationally and internationally known and respected AME senior pastor, who was also a South Carolina state senator, Clementa C. Pinckney. After an hour of Bible study, Roof pulled out a Glock 41 and a .45 caliber pistol, both loaded with hollow-point bullets,1 reloading five times, killing all but three people present. He may have been expecting a larger attendance as he was carrying eight magazines filled with bullets. Roof fled the bloody scene and was later apprehended and arrested. The date Roof had chosen to hatch his plan was obviously premeditated—it was the 193rd anniversary of the Vesey-led revolt.
Images circulated on social media quickly made clear that Roof was a white nationalist. First there was his manifesto—loaded with slurs on African Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Asians—that claimed he had become “racially aware” following the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012. He said that while searching the web to learn about the case, he concluded that the killer, George Zimmerman, was right; what convinced him was the information he came upon at white nationalist websites and chat rooms. One picture on Roof’s website showed him wearing a jacket with two white nationalist symbols sewed into the fabric—the flag of the former apartheid South African state and the flag of the former white Rhodesia Republic (before it was overthrown by the Zimbabwe liberation movements in 1980). Roof even had a website registered under his name that he called “The Last Rhodesian.” What stood out for most of those who had never even heard of Rhodesia, was the picture of him posing with a pistol and a Confederate Battle Flag.
The widespread attention given to Roof’s Confederate affinity and espousal of white nationalism, which he had made no secret about, together with the growing presence of white nationalists during the following months at Donald J. Trump stadium rallies, thrust the topic of white supremacy out in the open nationwide. Such exposure drove home the fact that most of those who propagate white nationalism were not mentally ill, but rather ideologically driven, and way beyond the Confederate Battle Flag, the Lost Cause, or limited to the South, although those tropes remained integral to the anti-Black and anti-Mexican racism that are at the core of present-day white nationalism in the United States.
This became clear as Trump installed white nationalists and military men as his closest advisers and cabinet appointees, and continued to hold rallies where he demonized Muslims and Mexicans. A new breed of white nationalists, self-identifying as “alt-right” and fed through online commercial operations like Breitbart News, began supporting insurgent “Trumpist” politicians to destabilize “establishment Republicans.”
Since the issue of Confederate statuary received nationwide attention following the Charleston, South Carolina, massacre by a self-proclaimed Confederate-loving fascist, members of the alt-right joined forces with neo-Nazis, Lost Cause Confederate fetishists, including the KKK, to storm the University of Virginia campus in support of maintaining the prominent monument to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general of Confederate Virginia. In the opening gesture of their “Unite the Right” weekend rally, they marched to the Robert E. Lee monument bearing tiki torches, chanting, “You will not replace us” and “One People, one nation, end immigration,” many giving the Nazi salute. University students, local anti-racist activists, and Black and white clergy who organized a huge presence to oppose the racist gathering were attacked by the intruders, and on Sunday, one of the self-identified fascists plowed his car at high speed into a group of locals demonstrating against the rally, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, a well-loved member of the Charlottesville community. President Trump refused to hold the fascists accountable for the melee, injuries, and killing, saying “both sides” were to blame.2
A strong anti-fascist movement developed in the late 1980s and 1990s to oppose the resurgence of racist intolerance and fascist violence. The movement was already three decades old when it sprang to oppose the aggressive spread of pro-fascist forces coinciding with the rise of Donald Trump, former White House adviser Steve Bannon, and Trumpism.3
As suggested earlier, the rise and institutionalization of the Ronald Reagan political clique, first in California as governor, 1967–75, and then as U.S. president, 1981–1989, a major green light for the development of white supremacist groups, from marginal and obscure to mainstream, by the dawn of the twenty-first century. Reagan and his cronies and political descendants were masters of the device that came to be known as a “dog whistle,” using certain tropes and symbolic actions that telegraphed toxic white supremacy and anti-Black racism. As Reagan’s “free market” economic and anti-union policies, accompanied by rapid deindustrialization and job shrinkage, produced homelessness and insecurity of the most vulnerable, they also increasingly affected white workers, making them easy prey to the white nationalist and politicized evangelical groups that had their own narrative about the causes—big government (including mysterious black helicopters), secularization, banks (always implicating Jews), poverty programs (always identified with African Americans even though the majority of recipients were in fact white), and Mexican migrants and women taking their jobs.
One example that broadcast Reagan’s racist agenda took place three months before the 1980 presidential election, when Reagan chose the significant date of August 3 to give a campaign speech extolling “states rights” near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, at the Neshoba Country Fair in Neshoba County. There, on June 21, 1964, three organizers for the Congress of Racial Equality, one being a local African American, the other two northern Jewish young men—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—had been abducted by the local Ku Klux Klan with the cooperation of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office and the Philadelphia Police Department. Their bodies, riddled with
bullets, were found buried in a dam near Philadelphia on August 3, 1964, sixteen years to the day before Reagan’s speech on states-rights, another trope for segregation. Donald Trump Jr., campaigning for his father in the 2016 presidential campaign, also spoke at the Neshoba Country Fair, speaking to a crowd of two thousand:4
[Trump Jr.] drew large applause … when he said he is an avid outdoorsman and competition shooter and believes strongly in Second Amendment rights. The crowd also waved flags at his speech, mostly American, but with at least one large rebel flag and a “Don’t Tread on Me” one. Trump Jr. before his speech was asked about the controversy at the Democratic National Convention over taking the Mississippi flag down because of its rebel canton. “I believe in tradition,” Trump Jr. said. “I don’t see a lot of the nonsense that’s been created about that. I understand how some people feel but… . There’s nothing wrong with some tradition.”5
Anti-Semitism was integral to anti-Black racism for the Klan and newer Christian terrorist groups such as Richard G. Butler’s Aryan Nations, which in 1976 began referring to the federal government as ZOG, that is, Zionist Occupation Government. These armed groups flourished and new ones sprouted, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the Posse Comitatus group claimed in 1985 that “our nation is now completely under the control of the International Invisible government of World Jewry.”6 The Reagan administration signaled a thumbs-up to this movement three months into his second term in May 1985; on the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the president visited the Bitburg cemetery, where dozens of Nazi Waffen SS men were buried.
At the same time, Reagan, as he had promised while campaigning, was intent on destroying the Soviet Union and all perceived communist governments or movements, communism also being attributed to Jews. This meant ramping up the possibility of nuclear war and led to mammoth increases in the Defense Department budget, all of which went to private Defense Department contractors and weapons manufacturers. Not only was military spending increased, but so too was militarization of the culture, as the Reagan-Bush administrations sought to destroy what they called the “Vietnam syndrome” of anti-war sentiment. There were also “dirty wars,” clandestine operations with Reagan’s “freedom fighters” against, among others around the globe, the governments of Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola, and Mozambique, and support for the apartheid regime in South Africa in fighting the liberation movements there and in Namibia. The largest CIA operation was in Afghanistan, where the Reagan administration armed Muslim fundamentalist jihadists with portable shoulder-to-air missiles and other weaponry to overthrow the elected government there, because of its friendly relations with its neighbor, the Soviet Union. This eight-year proxy war ended with Soviet withdrawal, leaving Afghanistan smashed, with millions of refugees and various warlords competing for power. It also led to the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, an action the Central Intelligence Agency immediately identified as “blowback” from those jihadists the United States had armed and empowered. Of course, the Reagan administration escalated the ongoing counterinsurgency and boycott of Cuba. While most Latin Americans were living under or escaping from brutal military and authoritarian regimes installed or sustained by the United States, peoples in the Caribbean and Central America had ousted such governments in Nicaragua and Grenada in 1979, while the Socialist government of Michael Manley had won elections in Jamaica, all of which Reagan promised to reverse if elected. The Reagan administration also sent military advisers and mercenaries to support death-squad regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala in the attempt to wipe out leftist guerrillas, mass mobilizations, and political formations in those countries. Despite a sizable and widespread anti-war movement, the Reagan-Bush administrations realized their objectives, capped by the 1989 invasion and regime change in Panama and the 1991 invasion of Iraq.