Each culture has its blind spots as it is part of our humanness to get used to ways of being within a lot of unspoken social norms and constructs. Just as sometimes it can be helpful to get feedback from a friend (or even a stranger) to hear an alternate story from the one we’ve become used to telling about ourselves, my hope is that my views as an immigrant who grew up in Germany and has lived in the US for most of my adult life might be valuable to some Americans looking to break out of the status quo of accepting mass gun terror as an inexplicable yet accepted price we pay for living in this country.
After Columbine in 1999, I was at first perplexed about why Americans seem to be so hopelessly lost on dealing with a problem for which there is an obvious, proven, and relatively straight forward policy solution that most other countries in the world have either figured out or never had to worry about in the first place. From a rational standpoint, it makes zero sense that a civilized nation would continue to allow its citizens to get massacred when you could just regulate these military style weapons to stay out of civilians' hands.
But the longer I've lived in this country and the more I absorb the almost spiritual dimension that guns inhabit in the collective consciousness, the more obvious it seems that there is a lot of unresolved trauma lodged deeply in the violent history of this nation and passed on through generations. Seeing a significant amount of the public discourse after each mass shooting seamlessly shift towards escalatory "solutions" such as arming teachers and fortressing schools rather than eliminating civilian access to weapons of mass murder feels like such a red flag to someone not born into this mindset that there is something in the cultural psyche that is paralyzing this nation into reliving and acting out the same unresolved trauma over and over.
At its very core, I see fear. Lots of it and all the time, symbolized by 400 million guns, purchased presumably due to some perceived threat to protect oneself against. The deadly guns seem like a perfect way of turning the fear of the other into threatening, dominating, and conquering others — fear is still at the root, but it can now be turned outward.
Threats, domination, and conquest are, of course, also at the root of this country's European genesis, from genocide of Indigenous peoples to the brutal subjugation of African slaves to the very construct of white supremacy to the racist compromises in the constitution. And this violent, frightened, and oppressive mindset has never been honestly processed for healing or reconciliation to occur on a broad societal basis.
That is not for trying. Every time there is a reckoning — from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement to BLM — there's a huge white backlash, rooted in... fear. Fear of the other, fear of losing control and power, fear of fear itself. And ever since there have been guns, they have been a great tool for the nervous oppressors to wrest back the power and control they're so afraid of losing. Sometimes, just as in Buffalo, it's quite literally a white man living up to the oppressed aggressor archetype by acting out his fear of being replaced with lethal deadly force.
But massacres like the one in Uvalde, where the shooter profile is less ideological, are still incubated within the much larger organism of conquest: from the NRA droning on and on about (assumed to be white) people's absolute right to be armed to the teeth (to hell with the well regulated militia!), to Cruz, Abbott and all the other shameless Republican power brokers invoking "good guys with guns" to justify passing laws to get even more guns into people's hands, to the town spending 40% of its budget on arming cops, to the gun shop owner selling an AR15 to a fickle 18 year old, to that 18 year old mowing down 19 innocent children, to media talking heads wondering how to better "harden" targets, train police, and if lucky very meekly ask for "common sense" gun reform, it's all part of an operating system that runs on an endless supply of fear, denial, and destruction.
So while in the past I thought it was just a matter of getting a few reasonable lawmakers together to pass some sort of gun reform bill to stop these massacres, I now believe that the only way this can happen is if there's also a significant shift in the collective psyche, a backlash to the backlash, if you will, a bending of the arc on all the other interconnected issues, from racial justice to money in politics to democracy reforms.
The good news is that I think the majority of Americans are interested to varying degrees in breaking the vicious cycles of fear and violence. But to break the stranglehold of power held disproportionately by the fearmongers whose minority rule was written into the country's DNA from the beginning, a lot of people will have to overcome the political inertia and resignation they have learned to internalize and get some skin in the game.
It's time, especially for white Americans, to shout that the emperor — including the one within — has no clothes, and to sustain that noise until a deeper transformation towards a more perfect union becomes inevitable.