Another American atrocity

Two more mass shootings in the United States and at least 29 people dead… It would be easy – indeed clichéd – to say that such acts defy description when what is happening in America is so very clear to everyone.

The massacres at a Walmart in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio, are again bringing attention to the Second Amendment and the language used to describe gun rights in America. People are back to asking if the Founding Fathers could have ever imagined a world of body armour and automatic weapons, where 100-round magazines could be emptied into innocent shoppers in a few seconds. The answer, of course, is that they couldn’t but, obviously, we can. And if American lawmakers were loyal to a model of a living constitution, they would amend those words to cater to that modern reality.

The fact that they won’t is the reason that American remains at stalemate with itself. It is why, in the face of these tragedies, people call for action but so very little gets done. The question of amending the Second Amendment is as mute as the prayers, the protests, the marches. It is as mute as #NeverAgain sounds in the event of yet more bloodshed. The only thing of value that isn’t mute is the despair. It remains the only constant throughout all of this.

What also won’t be mute over the coming days are the meaningless words, the cable news talking points, and the constitutional politics wrapped up in spiritual hokem. Much of it will be about delay and distraction. The gun lobby has always been very good at throwing out language. Some Republicans are already suggesting that video games are the problem, but we should see that for what it is. It’s another of the generational changes that some American conservatives refuse to acknowledge. Anybody who has played those games knows they’re not the issue here, any more than “video nasties” were the problem in the 1980s.

Websites too will take some of the blame from politicians who wouldn’t know a “www” from an @ symbol. The blame will be more reasonably apportioned but, again, the answers are not easy and it suits some if the debate turns into one about technobabble. Cloudflare has said it will stop providing services to the 8chan website where mass killers have been pushed deeper into their radicalisation. It’s a good move by Cloudflare but of limited use. As with so much about the Internet (and even more so around the Dark Web), there are always other places and ways for these message boards to survive. Like 4chan before it, 8chan would re-emerge elsewhere. “16chan” apparently already exists, somewhere.

“How” hate spreads was never been as significant as “why” and that cannot be answered without describing the American problem as defined by immigration, demographic change, climate science, and, indeed, “post-capitalism” as our technological future is now so often described. America needs to change in other ways before America can change in the most meaningful ways. It needs to fix a democracy that, as it stands, is heavily gerrymandered, riddled with technological vulnerabilities, and weighted towards corporations and the super-rich. Trump promised to drain the swamp but, as so often reported, it has only got a lot swampier.

Yet as much as the weekend’s shootings bring us back around to where we were so impotent last time, a few dynamics have altered in the past couple of days.

Donald Trump is already talking of strengthening background checks on those buying weapons, though that is probably meant to drag the atrocities back into the realm of politics. He has also suggested that the gun reforms might be tied to reform around immigration. If he’s effectively saying “we can stop the shootings but only if you stop the border crossings” then it deepens the cultural schism ahead of the election next year. That’s a big play given his language in recent months has so obviously foreshadowed these tragic events. He was seen laughing and joking with an audience in Florida in May, when somebody cried “shoot them” in response to Trump asking “How do you stop these people?” meaning immigrants. His talk in recent weeks of sending his critics “back to where they came from” is a part of the same dialogue. Trump had doubled down and now triples down. It should make it harder for moderate Republicans to follow him.

That’s not to say that Republicans have been showing much disloyalty to this president but, certainly, there are signs that the pressure is getting to a few of them. For a time on Monday, the hashtag #MassacreMitch was trending on Twitter. It is not the first time that Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, has been reduced to a catchy insult. Last week, pundits started to use the name “Moscow Mitch” to mock McConnell for his unwillingness to do anything about Russian meddling. It is the sort of silly summer story that wouldn’t have been worth noting except Mitch McConnell decided to do just that, on the floor of the Senate. Incensed by the idea that he was colluding with Moscow, he went public in his condemnation of the pundits. You could almost hear him say “ouch”.

Why is that important? It shows that words do matter and righteous anger can have an effect in American politics. The most immovable Republican has proved vulnerable to insults of the kind that Donald Trump has been pedalling for the past four years. It should remind Democrats that they are sharpest when they are driven by moral convictions. Beto O’Rourke, born in El Paso and now Texas’s 16th congressional district representative, has been one of the weakest of the Democratic candidates but today he sounded properly motivated when he turned to the press corps: “You know the shit [Trump] has been saying. He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals… Members of the press – what the fuck?”

O’Rourke might be condemned for reducing the tone of the debate but this is about finding the right words for the right situation. American politics is too susceptible to filibusters, prolix, and the interminable obscurantism of the congressional process, but it is also amenable to plain speaking. It explains some of Trump’s appeal as well, sadly, and the manifesto of every white supremacist. “Build a wall” is always easier to sell than “create a legal path to citizenship”. It’s why Democrats are hindered by arguments that are inherently complex but made even more complicated by their ideological mindgames. Where they aren’t hindered is in expressing their moral outrage. It’s just a shame that it takes events like El Paso and Dayton before they seem to remember that.