Fear, Guns, and the Myth of Persecution
Justified violence, too many guns, and how the right plans to take advantage
The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun."
Wayne LaPierre (former NRA CEO)
In 2008, Texas man Joe Horn called 911 and reported he suspected there were two men burglarizing a neighbor's home. He told the dispatcher he had a shotgun and was going to go over to the house and kill the intruders. The dispatcher begged the man not to take matters into his own hands and to stay home while the police handled the situation. Instead he went outside with his gun and shot both men in the back, killing them. A grand jury eventually cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Later his attorney said he wasn't a vigilante and that he was scared for his life. Texas law allows people to use deadly force to defend themselves if they believe they are in mortal danger, or if they are defending property. On the 911 call the man was very clear of his intent, despite the warnings to remain inside..."Don't go outside the house," the 911 operator pleaded. "You're going to get yourself shot if you go outside that house with a gun. I don't care what you think."
"You want to make a bet?" Horn answered. "I'm going to kill them."
The two men who were killed were undocumented Colombian immigrants. The shooter, Horn, is white. Texas, which has a stand-your-ground (SYG) law, and a robust gun culture, has passed more than 100 bills since 2000 that have weakened gun regulations. According to the CDC, the 2021 deaths by firearm rate in Texas was 50% higher than in 1999. In 2021 they even passed a law that allows for handgun carry without a permit or training. Texas has also had a number of high-profile mass shootings in recent years, including the killing of 19 children and 2 adults in the Uvalde school shooting, 8 shoppers killed in an outlet mall in Allen, and 23 shoppers killed in a Walmart in El Paso.
In Missouri (another state with a SYG law) in the summer of 2023, a black teenager was shot in the head through a storm door by an elderly white man, who then shot him again on the ground, claiming self-defense. The boy, who survived the shooting, had simply gone to the wrong house trying to pick up his younger brother. The shooter in this case will stand trial, but the question remains; without a pervasive gun culture and this idea of justified violence, could this tragedy have been averted?
In another recent incident, a 20-year old woman was shot and killed inside a car by a 65-year old man who fired from his porch after the woman and three friends had accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway in upstate New York. The driver, quickly recognizing it was the wrong house was pulling out and trying to leave when the fatal shots were fired. The man is charged with second-degree murder but plead not guilty. The shooter's attorney said his client felt that the situation “created an atmosphere and a fear that there was menace going on.”
When there are guns at hand, everything looks like a threat. A threat that needs to be met with violent force. In all three of these cases there was no immediate threat to the shooters. There was no real justification for using violence. Arguably had there not been weapons available, these incidents wouldn't have happened and these victims would be going about their normal lives today.
According to an analysis by the Rand Corporation who evaluated 16 peer-reviewed, statistically significant studies of the effects of stand your ground laws (from 2000 to 2010) on homicide rates, "...they found stand-your-ground laws to be associated with significant increases in homicide rates of 6 to 11 percent, a result that is relatively robust across model specifications." These laws reflect polices that "remove the duty to retreat in some place outside the home."
A Journal of the American Medical Association article published in 2022 that looked at the effects of stand-your-ground laws and their effects on homicide and firearm homicide showed that these laws "were associated with an 8% to 11% national increase in monthly rates of homicide and firearm homicide. State-level increases in homicide and firearm homicide rates reached 10% or higher for many Southern states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana." This study looked at 41 states, 23 with SYG laws and 18 without them, from 1999 through 2017.
Not surprisingly, the gun safety group Everytown for Gun Safety found that “homicides in which white shooters kill Black victims are deemed justifiable five times more frequently than when the situation is reversed.” In a review of Florida's SYG law and it's impacts, in 79 percent of cases the assailant could have retreated to avoid the confrontation. In 70 percent of the cases, the person killed was unarmed.
According to the ATF, in America there are about 377 million guns in circulation. For a population of around 330 million Americans, that means there are more guns than people. In 2019 the United States had about 37,000 firearm deaths, the highest by far of any nation outside of the global south.
Dr. Dan Burkhuff, a former Navy Seal, discussed guns and the lost generation of young men in our society right now on an episode of the Burn the Boats podcast in the spring of 2023. One point that really resonated was about the illusion of freedom we have when carrying a gun and more broadly in the fetishization of guns and military culture. He related that all the conservative politicians and pundits claiming you're more free with more guns, and that we can't be safe unless we have more guns, is a lie on many levels, but particularly when it comes to this illusion of carrying a gun with you in public.
This fantasy that Hollywood and the GOP sell us of the likelihood of justified, righteous violence is a myth. And it's a dangerous myth. When you carry a gun with you, you see everything as a threat. You are not just a person out in the world, you are now a person with the capability to easily take a human life in an instant. It prevents you from going certain places, it encourages you to see every person passing you on the sidewalk as a threat, and it changes your entire mindset. This is fear and paranoia, not freedom.
Burkhuff said "You're not stopping to wrestle with your kid in the living room, you're not picking up groceries at the grocery store. You're carrying a weapon and your entire being while you have that weapon on, you're looking for threats. You're like, it's this mindset of, “Well, if I have a gun, then I'm good to go and if something bad happens, I'll be ready.”
The incidences of a civilian with a gun stopping crime or mass shootings is extremely low. It also adds confusion and chaos in those rare situations when suddenly you have multiple civilians with guns, shooting or potentially being a threat. Burkhuff went on to say, "And it's like well, there’re very, very rare instances where (and they're exceedingly rare) something “bad” is going to happen and you're going to stop it with a firearm, let's call it like 1/10th of 1% of the time, which is a gross over exaggeration."
This plays into this fantasy of justified violence, because if Liam Neeson (whose characters in movies are always highly-trained experts in violence) can do it, why can't I? Who doesn't want to be a hero? But going back to fear instead of freedom, and the broader tactics of the right, we see fear and persecution and victimhood all rolled together in one neat package. Designed to amplify inherent prejudices, lack of purpose or value, desire to use justified violence, and to see everything as a threat. It's a coordinated attack on the minds of the vulnerable among us. They're turning an entire generation of people into a standing army of disillusioned, fearful, aggrieved, and angry people...and they're armed to the teeth, waiting for the opportunity to employ justified violence.
After they prime them with propaganda, fear, and misinformation, the right hands them a script for who their enemies should be: the woke mob, the satanic Democrats, the trans and gay communities, those pushing the CRT agenda trying to indoctrinate our school children, the immigrant minorities coming to take their jobs and replace them in society.
The think tanks and billionaires and wannabe fascist autocrats in this country are working together to assemble their army, indoctrinate them with fear and a sense that they're all victims, arm them with weapons of war, and then hand them the enemies that they crave. What good is an army without an enemy? This plan has been carefully crafted and implemented over the last half century or more. Piece by piece we're losing our democracy, and it's no accident.
Conservative thinkers and legal strategists laid the foundation for neo-liberalism in the middle of the 20th century. They then stacked the courts with sympathetic, activist judges who proclaimed corporations are people, and money equals free speech. Republican presidents stopped enforcing anti-trust laws and went after unions. Suddenly legal political bribery was everywhere and corporate profits were prioritized over the people. After Nixon and his corrupt administration was shamed into relinquishing power, Roger Ailes created Fox News with the express intent of ensuring that this would never happen again. He built a propaganda empire that worked exclusively for big business and the Republicans. The NRA was radicalized in the 1970's and went from being a sportsmen's and gun safety organization, to a hardline 2nd amendment advocacy group that lobbied for the gun manufacturers. The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society were created to influence conservative political and legal agendas respectively. We've seen the shift from a representative democracy to a plutocracy with designs on Fascism right before our eyes.
The supreme court, dominated by aggressive conservative and religious ideals, installed at the behest of the Federalist Society, create doctrines and decrees out of whole cloth. They no longer simply interpret laws and rule on constitutionality, they essentially create laws of their own. They created the protection for police out of thin air with qualified immunity. They ignored the formerly sacred concept of precedent when they overturned Roe v Wade. They overturned President Biden's student debt relief plan based on an arbitrary judgement that $400 billion is just too much money, not actually ruling on the principled basis of the plan in the first place. They granted corporations personhood, not based on any law that declared it, there have never been any state or federal laws ever passed to that effect. Yet they simply made it so, and codified it in 2010 with their Citizens United ruling. And of course there are no ethics rules or accountability function for the supreme court, unlike all other federal courts in our country. So we have an unelected body with a dangerous agenda with no accountability and the power to shift and shape this country.
They have the courts firmly in their grasp and they've opened the door for corporations to operate with impunity through deregulation, dark money political contributions, and not enforcing laws meant to ensure an open, competitive marketplace. Now they are attempting to destabilize and demonize the very institutions of government that they serve or have direct influence over. And once people lose trust in our institutions, the foundation for everything crumbles. If people think that pedophiles and devious, racist elites are everywhere in our education system then that institution is doomed and we must privatize education to save our children and our country. If the economy struggles or we go into a recession, regardless of all the factors that cause it, but all you hear is that it's the workers fault, and it's ESG, and it's because some companies are too woke, and it's the reckless spending of the Democrats that caused inflation, then you have your scapegoats. Then you vote them out and you boycott, and you punish your enemies.
If you hear that the EPA is crushing opportunity and prosperity with their regulations and rules, then you defund them and paint them as climate change radicals. If you rant against the IRS (which is an easy target to begin with) and convince people they're coming to audit you and your $50k family income, with guns drawn, then they can dismantle and defund it. The end goal is so they and their mega-wealthy donors can continue to cheat our country by using our resources and infrastructure, and then make average Americans pay for it.
In the 1930's after the roaring 20's collapsed in on itself, the death rattle of the industrial revolution, and laissez faire capitalism was exposed for what it is; an impossible, greed-fueled fever dream, we were fortunate to have FDR elected. He saved our economy, built the launchpad for our middle class, laid the structural foundation for massive American growth, and saved our country. But today if the banks collapse, we go into a recession, or something similar happens, we won't elect another FDR. Our foundations have been compromised by the silent, insidious sappers of big business, conservative politicians, and fascists in waiting...they've been working hard underground for decades, tunneling and planting their charges. As soon as the time is right, they'll detonate them and stand back as the walls crumble, and the army they've assembled finally sees the chance to use justified violence against these enemies they've been led to believe are responsible are now exposed. Of course this army will need a leader, a strongman, an alpha male with the will to marshall the masses, unite the 'patriots', and usher us into a new golden age of American exceptionalism.
They already have their propaganda machine in place with Fox News. They have what has become a fully militarized, unaccountable police force with access to plenty of capacity in the newly constructed jails across the country. They have the judicial system under control to lend an air of credibility and legality to their takeover and oppressive edicts. They have the oligarchy that controls the vast majority of wealth and production capacity in this country as their benefactors. They have weakened trust in and effectiveness of our public institutions so much to the point where faith in government is at an all-time-low and through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and intimidation, voter turnout is pathetically low.
They have handpicked their domestic enemies (the others, responsible for all our problems) in our teachers, the Jewish elites, the LGBTQ and trans communities, the 'radical' left, the unions, the intellectuals, the rest of the press, and the black and brown communities that are trying to replace the white majority. It doesn't matter if it's Donald Trump, all the mechanisms are in place, the explosives are primed, and all they have to do is point this army of patriots at their 'enemies' and watch the country eat itself alive. Then when the flames are dying down, the smoke is clearing, and the embers are still hot, they can step up to the pulpit and proclaim they're the only ones that can save us. All we have to do is give up our freedoms, submit to their authority, rat out our neighbors, worship their god, and fall in line.
With media, politicians, and pundits spreading fear and narratives of victimization and oppression, combined with the excessive amount, and easy availability of guns here, violence and death are an inevitibility. The foot soldiers of the fascists and those seeking unchecked power are primed and ready with their arsenals and their grievances. Once it becomes normalized to shoot whenever you feel threatened or afraid, it's not much of a leap to channel those fears and actions into an organized assault, directed by a strongman promising retribution and a path to power.
Violence is rarely justified. The people in power and the corporations don't care about human life, they care about profits and control. They are incentivized to ignore death and suffering in order to get and keep what they want. They are incentivized to sell you guns, make you afraid, and point your rage and disillusionment at a manufactured enemy. They've effectively sold the lie that guns equal freedom and safety, while the opposite is the actual truth.
Once those inside and outside the institutions degrade them to the point where they're no longer effective and/or trusted: once the citizenry feel they are surveilled, policed, and controlled to an unreasonable extent: once the plutocracy has gained us as a desperate, compliant workforce: once people feel no security and safety in their day-to-day lives: once it feels like there are no other options, one simply has only one choice; fight the 'enemy'. Suddenly there's not only the neighborhood criminal to use justified violence against, it's now the government and society at large. Primed, afraid, angry, and armed...what could go wrong?