Getting Off The Treadmill

It might be helpful when studying the proliferation of mass shootings to look at them in context. There are two components. Mass and shooting. As we evolved from lower forms of life we organized in ever-more-complex organizations, from families to hunter-gatherer groups to tribes to towns, cities, nations and international alliances. 

People organize in occupational specialties, by employment, through religion, political belief, recreational interests, by gender, and by sexual orientation. There are so many kinds of masses that any and all of them are vulnerable to attack.

Then there is the shooting. First, we evolved the use of tools. Then came crude tools of violence – rocks, clubs, then spears, bows and arrows, swords, lances, hatchets, clubs, catapults and vats of boiling oil.

Then came the gun – pistol, rifle and shotgun; the cannon, the bomb, the missile and the mine, both land and sea. As humans became more sophisticated in implements of destruction, the weapons became more complex, enabling the killing of ever-greater numbers of people in shorter amounts of time. The entire human species can be eliminated by just one nuclear bomb.

The combination of ever-increasing ways for humans to organize in masses with ever-more complex and deadly implements of destruction make for a toxic mix of cosmic proportions. One guy – always a guy – can kill hundreds of people with an AR-15 equipped with a "bump" stock. The gun is perfectly legal in America, though the sale of bump stocks is limited in some states. If you already have one, hmm, don’t use it.

Supposedly the reason it is legal to own an AR-15 is that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says it is our "right." It is legal all over this country to own a weapon whose sole purpose is to kill people because of a phony interpretation of the Second Amendment. There is no individual right to own a gun of any kind. As stated in the Second Amendment, the right rests on the notion formed early in our nation’s history, that in order to form a well-armed militia, blah, blah, blah.

This argument is well-formed elsewhere, so it would be needlessly redundant to re-invent it. What I would add, though, is that it is madness to have millions of people in a society armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. The AR-15 is a weapon of mass destruction, misinterpreted Second Amendment or no misinterpreted Second Amendment. We are a country that doesn’t know its elbow from a hole in the ground, and, by extension, everything in between. We are lucky we know how to breathe, when to defecate, urinate, eat, drink and when to call it a day. A mass shooting is what the military calls "asymmetric warfare" – the few, or one, killing the many. If we have enough of them only the few will be left, and they will have no one left to shoot but each other.

There is one more factor to consider. When people are concentrated in mass groupings and organizations they often need to act as a unit in order to get things done effectively. The way this is normally done is to choose a leader. This can be done by acclamation, appointment, heredity, physical size, or democratically. Or, power can be seized, as was attempted by our former president a year-and-a-half ago.

However power is attained, it tends to become entrenched. Gaining power is one thing, but keeping it, or the obsession with keeping it, can lead to corruption. A perfect example is the U.S. Congress – both "houses." Incumbents have a built-in advantage, because they can raise money from powerful business and other interests to finance propaganda efforts. The presidency is also a concentration of power that depends greatly on money in “election” and "reelection."

Money doesn’t talk, it swears, as Bob Dylan once put it. The president appoints the justices of the Supreme Court, giving them lifetime appointments – amplifying the power of the president, and to some degree the Senate, which has the power of approval the appointments.

This is the final ingredient in mass shootings. We have a mass society. We have the lethal technology to kill masses of people. And we have a corrupt leadership system, which enables gun manufacturers and ownership zealots to pay and threaten legislators, presidents and other public officials in a feedback loop whereby these politicians then profess belief in the sanctity of gun ownership and manufacture. We are stuck in madness.

Is there a way out of this mess? Yes. Time. Taking a systems approach, which I do whenever possible, I see mass shooting in a broader context. The Polar ice caps are melting. They will melt completely. Industrial, capitalist, infinite-growth human civilization is incapable of stopping this trajectory. The prospect of reversing the relentless advance of climate change and its warming of the planet is always placed as a secondary priority to infinite growth of output of production of goods and services. This infinite growth is antithetical to reversing the effects of climate change, so on we go. One we go, that is, until it finally goes bust. Add in the inevitability of human stupidity, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the denouement is guaranteed to happen even sooner.

The advance of human civilization has been going on ever since we became a species. We are now at the apex. It has gone as far as it can, and now is in the process of self-destruction. Like an addict, the human species is on a treadmill that it can’t stop or get off from. Unless it hits bottom, recognizes its addiction, and goes into treatment and recovery. It is unlikely that we can do this, but the choice is clear. Get off the treadmill or die. All of us.

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Here's a song.

This story tells how the AR-15 became so popular.

Here's a look at the "good guy with a gun" meme.

This is an example of the kind of people who oppose any restraints on their "freedom."