But No Defense For Us

These posts are usually scheduled to publish in advance of the date. Yesterday I was barely awake before I saw the news from Las Vegas. By then my post for the day was up and running. But I can’t just put up another nature post today. It’s been too awful a week, another nadir in the Trump kakistocracy.

The massacre in Las Vegas was one of the deadliest in our violent history, although, unlike the pogroms at Colfax, Wounded Knee, and Tulsa/Greenwood, this was just one person with unbelievable firepower at his disposal, all evidently purchased “legally.”

Nauseatingly, the gun industry thrives on these mass-shootings. Stocks surge; stores put more weapons on display; sales go up. Everybody’s happy, right? Capitalism is a marvel. But don’t forget the state! The U.S. is the world’s largest arms dealer. The Pentagon, and the departments of State and Commerce, all foster this domestic death industry. State capitalism is completely complicit with the flood of guns and ammunition out there.

We should actually think of all these military-grade weapons as “military surplus” dumped on the home front. Much is spent helping the gun industry provide weapons abroad. Billions in “defense” spending bloats an industry to ever more production. And then some of our tax dollars ricochet back to us in form of industry lobbying, to prevent sensible notions like keeping weapons of mass slaughter out of civilian hands.

We are essentially subsidizing the lunatic fringe that is the NRA and the berserk industry they represent.

Yes, Republicans are, in word and deed, perfectly fine with dead Americans, from Puerto Rico to Las Vegas. Their dreams for a savage “libertarian” oligarchy have been common knowledge for more than a generation now. They like to say all this is the “price of liberty,” but what they mean is that death is the price of their profits and power.

At the same time, I don’t see the ostensibly gun-control Democrats being able to do much about commonsensical gun regulation as long as they continue to foster and subsidize the arms industry in the name of “defense.” Their candidate last time, you may recall, was in charge of State, meaning one of her jobs (in that famous resume) was to sell weapons abroad and therefore coddle the death industry here at home.