Igor Volsky on Ending Gun Violence, Pat Elder on Junior ROTC

 

This week on CounterSpin: CBS News‘ website featured a story about the “grim task” of planning funerals for 19 children—shot dead, along with two teachers, in a Texas elementary school on May 24—right next to a story about Oklahoma’s governor signing the country’s strictest abortion ban, the prominent sign behind him declaring “life is a human right.” Welcome, as they say, to America—where these ideas are presented as somehow of a piece, where news media tell us day after day how exceptionally good and worthy we are, the world’s policeman and a global beacon for human rights and the good life.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in horror. BBC‘s North America editor explained to its audience that there is no expectation of anything being done to prevent things like the latest (as far as we know, as we record on May 26) mass murder in the US, because “the  argument over guns has simply become too politically divisive and culturally entrenched to allow for meaningful change.”

Reporter Eoin Higgins interviewed teachers around the country, who reported the psychological toll of not only actual shootings, but constant drills and lockdowns, on children, who, they said, “have largely given up on a better future.”  Teachers feel expendable and unvalued; it’s hardly lost on them that the same forces accusing them of poisoning children with curricula are also demanding they step between those children and a bullet.

That powers that be in this country have responded to school shootings not by toughening gun laws, but by loosening them, and responded to the failure of law enforcement to prevent such shootings by calling for more police. It’s a particularly demoralizing combination of devastating and unsurprising—from a country that promotes and perpetrates violence around the globe. As a response to violence, we try violence time after time.

There doesn’t seem to be anything new to say right now about gun violence in the US. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep saying the things we know—more loudly, more unapologetically and in more places.

As we record, we hear that students at schools across the country are walking out, in an effort to say simply, “We refuse to go on like this.” We owe them our action and effort, no matter how tired or disgusted or defeated we feel.

We revisit some conversations about gun violence and gun culture this week on the show. In March of last year we spoke with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns, about the possibility of passing common-sense legislation and misunderstandings about the power of the gun lobby.

Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’

And then: There are always multiple issues involved in a mass murder; elite media use the complexity as an excuse to simply trade accusatory explanations, and determine that in the interest of balance, nothing can be done. But if we’re concerned about young people getting high-grade weaponry and thinking it’d be cool to use it, maybe one thing to consider would be the government-sponsored program that gives young people high-grade weapons and tells them it’d be cool to use it? We spoke in 2018 about Junior ROTC—a feature at my high school, and maybe yours too—with Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which resists the militarization of schools, and author of Military Recruiting in the United States.

Transcript: ‘More Guns, More Gun Deaths—That’s Really It’