Azzi: American Dystopia: From Greensboro to Waco to Nashville
The Nashville Covenant School massacre, the 131st mass shooting in America this year, has rightly outraged most Americans. Cries across much of the political spectrum condemning the murders of three of our babies, alongside three of their guardians, abound, calling for an end to the seemingly endless carnage threatening our future.
Carnage erupting at a rate of more than one-a-day.
Enough, voices cry and echo from sea to shining sea. Impassioned pleas, some preposterous, from pulpits, pundits, and politicians demanding something be done about gun violence.
Enough, they cry, something must be done to save our children; waiting periods, background checks, red-flag laws, bans on assault style weapons, common ground with deer hunters and sportsmen, etc., are offered and considered. Most, I believe, are good ideas.
The response is equally preposterous - guns don't kill people; people kill people. That argument is absurd but arouses NRA die-hards and makes them feel perceptive and potent.
Critically, I have come to believe all such debates ignore the fundamental threat to America's very existence.
Violence and destabilization is the point.
Guns are but tactics within this existential struggle to redefine who we are as a nation.
Tactics in a battle as to whether all people are truly created equal in America.
This isn't about the right to own a gun. That right is assured by the Second Amendment and has been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. This is about Americans who choose to abuse those rights.
Gun violence has become the instrument to disrupt civil discourse, create civil unrest, and unleash vainglorious so-called patriots - who believe that a post-civil rights America abandoned the white race - to reclaim the nation as the white supremacist Christian evangelical theocracy they believe it was intended to be.
This supremacist revival has been especially true since 1979, when in Greensboro NC members of the KKK and the American Nazi Party (ANP), shot and killed five protestors in a "Death to the Klan" march organized by the Communist Workers Party.
Five Klan and ANP members were charged with murder. All were acquitted.
That moment in Greensboro heralded the public rebirth of aggressive white nationalism as a supremacist movement in America.
That movement is about embracing Waco, which has become a point of pilgrimmage for white nationalists, and Ruby Ridge; about Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City; about the Aryan Nation, (declared by the FBI a domestic terrorist threat in 2001); it's about Charlottesville where Confederate flags marched alongside swastikas as racists marched with tiki torches chanting, "Jews will not replace us."
It's about an American president describing an assemblage of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and militia groups in Charlottesville as including “some very fine people.”
It's about Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters.
It's about the Insurrection of January 6, 2021, about what happens when Klan and Nazi ideologies, fused into an amalgam of racism, antisemitic, white supremacist, anti-government rhetoric, try to overthrow our democracy.
Today, in an America where there are citizens more fearful of libraries and drag shows, of Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye, and of Michelangelo's David than of Nazis and Klan members who joined the January 6th insurrection, there is a renewed call to be vigilant, to know that all that is transpiring is connected.
It's all connected.
It's not about the guns; it's about the destabilization they cause, about the confrontations that follow.
It's not about guns being legally embraced as a birthright but about the fact that some people, while ostensibly advocating for unlimited 2nd Amendment Rights, don't really care about the victims or the shooters.
They don't care if the killers are Muslim or Christian, Hispanic or LGBTQIA peoples; whether the victims are nine or ninety.
They care that the AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in America; that about 1 in 20 adults — or roughly 16 million Americans — own at least one AR-15, according to The Washington Post.
They don't care that ten of the seventeen deadliest mass killings in the U.S. since 2012 involved AR-15s ... they care only that it works; that it remains available.
Available to kill more innocent Americans, more children, more worshippers in Mother Emanuel Church or at the Tree of Life Synagogue.
Today, as Ramadan continues to unfold, as Christians celebrate Palm Sunday, as Jews anticipate Passover, I sympathize with the salvific impulse to try and bring people together on issues of community safety and respect, to find common ground with people who send out Christmas cards displaying photos of their children bearing assault-style weapons, common ground with people who believe that only a Christian "Revival" will save America.
That's never going to work.
First, even if one wanted to claw back the millions of guns already in private hands it would never happen and in most cases would not even be legal.
Second, the gun extremists are winning. Why should they give anything up.
Why should they?
Today, I believe, not only are extremist white Christian evangelical impulses more deeply embedded throughout America than at any time since before the Civil War, but that they are connected as never before; in person, online, in summer camps, employed in local, state, and federal governments and occupying positions in State Houses, and Congress.
They are winning. Why should they?
Who among you believes they would willingly give up any of that power and privilege in order to spare a child's life?
It's all connected.
Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: American Dystopia: From Greensboro to Waco to Nashville
