October 11, 2017
Page 13
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O PINION
America’s Calling Card of Violence
Gun control
laws are not
enough
r oberT c. K oehler
In the wake of the Las
Vegas massacre, as in the
wake of all the high-profile
mass shootings that preced-
ed it, the big question looms:
Why?
John Whitehead puts the ques-
tion this way: “What is it about
America that makes violence our
nation’s calling card?”
This is the enormous question
— you might call it the $700 billion
question, which is the size of the
2018 military budget recently ap-
proved by the Senate — that most
media and law enforcement per-
sonnel do not ask or acknowledge,
as they search for clues about the
motive behind Stephen Paddock’s
rampage on the night of Oct. 1 amid
the scattered wreckage of the kill-
er’s life.
He was a “lone wolf.” He was a
“psychopath.”
He was an American.
And he was in possession, in
his various dwelling places, of 47
firearms, some of which were used
to kill at least 59 people and injure
more than 500 others as they attend-
ed a country music concert. And
by
some of these firearms were mod-
ified by “bump stocks,” a cheap,
legal device that allows a semiauto-
matic rifle to fire like an automatic.
Why?
Whitehead puts the
answer out there with
terrifying clarity: “Per-
haps there’s no single
one factor to blame for
this gun violence. How-
ever, there is a common
denominator, and that is
a war-drenched, violence-imbued,
profit-driven military industrial
complex that has invaded almost
every aspect of our lives.”
This is America, a global empire
engaged in endless war, with an
entertainment and news media that
sells violence as a spectator sport
and a consequence-free solution
to pretty much every problem you
can think of. We believe in having
enemies — not in a personal sense
but in the abstract: people who are
different in some defining way and
symbolize, in their differentness,
the cause of our troubles. In oth-
er words, we dehumanize. We call
people gooks or ragheads or . . . we
all know the list of obscenities, past
and present.
Sociologist Peter Turchin, in the
wake of the Sandy Hook killings
nearly five years ago, wrote: “On
the battlefield, you are supposed to
try to kill a person whom you’ve
never met before. You are not trying
to kill this particular person, you are
shooting because he is wearing the
enemy uniform. . . . Enemy soldiers
are socially substitutable.”
And mass murderers behave the
same way as soldiers, except the
“orders” they are obeying are their
own or those of some marginal
hate-community. The defining char-
acteristic of mass murder is not that
it’s senseless or random, but that,
to the murderer, the victims sym-
bolize evil. This sort of behavior,
in other circumstances, is publicly
celebrated. Suddenly, for instance,
I’m thinking about the outpouring
of praise Donald Trump generated
from much of the media when the
U.S. dropped a MOAB bomb — the
most powerful non-nuclear bomb in
the American arsenal — on Afghan-
istan. Some commentators declared
that he became “presidential” after
this action. The poor slobs who died
because of it couldn’t have mattered
less to the cheering spectators.
And a serious segment of the
national economy depends on the
continual flow of enemies and their
elimination. It depends on selling
weapons.
For instance, William Hartung,
director of the Arms and Security
Project at the Center for Interna-
tional Policy, pointed out in a recent
Democracy Now! interview that
the Trump administration has elim-
inated human-rights restrictions on
small-arms exports, putting them
under the control of the Commerce
Department rather than the State
Department, as well as “restrictions
on fighter planes and bombs and
the large weapons, the kind that are
being used by Saudi Arabia to kill
civilians in Yemen.”
Remarkably, domestic gun sales
had slumped after Trump’s election
— gun owners apparently became
less fearful that the government
would take their weapons away —
so “gun manufacturers are desper-
ate for more foreign sales. And they
don’t care who the guns go to,” Har-
tung said. “And I think that’s really
the problem.”
He concluded by quoting Martin
Luther King’s speech against the
Vietnam War: “I can’t in good con-
science fight violence at home if I
don’t stand up to my own govern-
ment, which is the greatest purveyor
of violence around the world.”
Only in this context does it be-
come relevant to talk about gun
control legislation. By themselves,
such basic regulations as universal
background checks, a reinstating
of the assault-weapons ban and re-
quired permits for gun ownership
feel like a frail wall against Amer-
ican violence and the ease with
which the next “lone wolf” can plan
his assault.
Indeed, gun control laws are basi-
cally just stopgap measures perpetu-
ally debated by a violence-addicted
society. They swell in significance
because they’re so viciously op-
posed by the NRA. I’m not against
them, but they’re not enough.
“And I awoke Monday hoping
that maybe this shooting is the one
that will persuade America to re-
claim the mantle of global leader-
ship that has been at our core since
our origin,” Connecticut Sen. Chris
Murphy wrote in the Washington
Post the day after the Las Vegas
massacre, calling for sane gun con-
trol legislation.
Yes, this is crucial. But I can’t
help but note that Murphy was one
of the 89 senators, including, of
course, most Democrats, who vot-
ed last month for the 2018 National
Defense Authorization Act, bestow-
ing $700 billion on the U.S. military
next year, an increase of $80 billion,
which is even more than the Penta-
gon or Trump requested.
“Mass shootings,” Murphy ac-
knowledged, “happen almost no-
where else but the United States.”
This is not because of tepid gun
laws. It’s because the country funds
— and benefits from — endless
war and violence of all sorts. Occa-
sionally the violence comes back to
haunt us.
Robert
Koehler,
syndicat-
ed by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago
award-winning journalist and editor.
Congress Holding CHIP and Children Hostage
Vital insurance
program in crisis
mode
m arian W righT e delman
Dr. Lanre Falusi knows
firsthand the anxiety fam-
ilies face when the future
of their child’s health in-
surance is in jeopardy. A
pediatrician at Children’s
National Medical Center
in Washington, D.C., Dr.
Falusi recently had a routine visit
from a seven-year-old patient with
asthma. For the last few months
this little girl has been fairly stable
thanks to her daily controller and
rescue medication covered through
D.C.’s Children’s Health Insurance
Program (CHIP). But she often has
tough winters and her mother was
trying to plan ahead having heard
CHIP’s future funding was uncer-
tain.
States and families across the
country are in this crisis mode
because Congress let the deadline
by
to extend funding for CHIP pass
at midnight on Sept. 30h leaving
nine million children like Dr. Falu-
si’s young patient uncertain about
their health coverage. For months
Congress has been busy debating
whether or not to repeal the Afford-
able Care Act (ACA)
and destroy Medicaid
as we know it. While
the death of the Gra-
ham-Cassidy health re-
peal bill in late Septem-
ber was a major win for
37 million children who
rely on Medicaid for their health
coverage, in the midst of that major
fight, funding for CHIP was left by
the wayside.
There is bipartisan support for
CHIP. If Senate and House mem-
bers, Republicans and Democrats
alike, agree on what we need to do
for children’s health, let’s do it now
and for the children’s sake forget
the need for political wrangling.
Although the deadline has come
and gone, most states still have
some carryover funds to continue
to operate their CHIP programs
in the short term, leading many in
Congress to erroneously believe
the Sept. 30 deadline was arbitrary
when in fact it has immediate im-
plications for real children and
families. Some other states have
taken steps to put families on no-
tice and are even prepared to mod-
ify or end their CHIP programs
because of continuing uncertainty.
Every day Congress delays ac-
tion makes a difference.
Dr. Falusi added: “We haven’t
fallen off a cliff yet, but the uncer-
tainty that there is a cliff looming
ahead makes it harder to help par-
ents think proactively about their
child’s health. For me as an indi-
vidual provider, it can affect the
positivity -- the certainty of say-
ing ‘See you back in six months
for the two-year well-child visit,’
when I don’t know if they’ll still be
insured and able to afford it, or if
they’ll be trying to decide between
whether they can afford transporta-
tion to the pediatrician’s office or
transportation to work.”
The Minnesota State Health
Department was the first to send
a letter to Congress warning that
despite predictions that said other-
wise, its CHIP funding would run
out Sept. 30 and it would have to
take “extraordinary measures” to
continue coverage in October in-
cluding the possibility that preg-
nant women could “be at risk of
losing coverage all together.”
Utah officials have said they will
end their CHIP program if Con-
gress doesn’t provide new funding,
and officials in a growing number
of states have said they may need
to follow suit.
Parents are getting the message
and now that fear is showing up in
places like Dr. Falusi’s exam room.
“The urgency is palpable from
the family perspective . . . We
know kids have colds, flu and asth-
ma attacks that cluster in the win-
ter. Right now is really the worst
time for families to either fear or
know for sure their child is about
to lose their insurance coverage,”
says Dr. Falusi. “Even if there’s a
shortfall of a couple of months, in
a couple of months a child’s asth-
ma can go from controlled to the
intensive care unit, which I’ve seen
when kids go off of their medica-
tions…In the life of a child, even
a couple of months can have some
long-term lasting effects.”
Congress must not leave chil-
dren, families and their doctors in
this dangerous political limbo a
minute longer. CHIP has been be-
loved for 20 years and the CHIP
extension has bipartisan support.
Why are we letting it get caught
up in political posturing and de-
bates? Tell Congress to pass CHIP
now and not hold it hostage to par-
tisan disagreements over how to
pay for it or any other policy issues.
Both the House and Senate will
be back at work the week of Oct.
23 and passage of the CHIP exten-
sion must be first on their agenda.
Please let your members of Con-
gress hear from you why CHIP
must be passed now – children
need their health care! Congress
must stop playing politics with
children’s health.
Marian Wright Edelman is
President of the Children’s Defense
Fund.