This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Hey, it’s not just the number of guns Americans continue to buy (about 20 million a year) in a country already armed to the teeth, but what they can do. First, it was those AR-15 semi-automatic weapons the National Rifle Association dubbed “America’s rifle.” They let ordinary citizens turn places of everyday life into slaughterhouses. Now, as the New York Times recently reported, a “small and illegal device known as a switch” can be added to semi-automatic handguns and turn them into yes, “makeshift machine guns”! Those “Lego-like plastic blocks, about an inch square” can “be easily manufactured on a 3-D printer” and only cost around $200, while promptly turning you into a potential mass murderer.
What a strange, increasingly heavily armed land we now live in. Since September 11, 2001, this country, while funding an arsenal of weaponry and war unlike any other the Pentagon budget is soon expected to hit a trillion dollars annually has itself become a frightening arsenal. And the problem isn’t just the resulting mass shootings that have already hit 400 yes, 400! in 2023 (eclipsing the totals in any year from 2013 to 2018), but the growth of largely right-wing militias armed with semi-automatic weapons and supporting You-Know-Who.
Today, TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of the remarkable Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, considers just how Washington’s response to the 9/11 attacks war and more war globally ended up putting this country on what increasingly looks like a war footing at home (in the worst sense imaginable). And if our versions of Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine disaster the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proved catastrophic, what the war on terror brought home could prove no less so. But let Mazzarino explain. Tom
How War Divides Us
The Ways Our Twenty-First-Century Wars Have Polarized Americans
Blame Donald Trump and all too many of his followers, but don’t just blame him or them. Yes, he was indeed responsible for the nightmare of January 6, 2021, and, in his own fashion, for the incitement of right-wing militia (terror!) groups like the Proud Boys. (“Stand back and stand by!”) But in this country, in this century, violence has become as all-American as apple pie. In these years, it’s been violence and more violence all the way, literally in the case of the Pentagon. But let me start a little more personally.
Having lived several years in rural Maryland along the Virginia border, I’ve watched the local political landscape gain ever-deepening fault lines (as is true in the United States at large).
In election season 2020, in my enclave of largely well-educated political liberals, many with at least one public servant in the family (like my military spouse), you saw a sea of blue “Biden/Harris” signs as you drove among fields of corn and grazing cattle. However, as you approached the Virginia border, a smattering of black, white, and blue pro-police flags like so many photographic negatives of the American flag began popping up in response to growing protests elsewhere in the country against police brutality and violence toward communities of color. And the farther you traveled into Virginia, the more likely you were to see former President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” signs, as well as occasional Confederate flags, on houses and lawns. After President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, those Biden/Harris signs disappeared or were occasionally replaced by American flags, but the pro-police flags and MAGA signs remained, signaling an increasingly split nation.
Such changes in the landscape are still all too visible. A newcomer to our region might even assume that such a split between those still dreaming of a country reminiscent of the Old South, or perhaps a future Trumpland, and American democrats like me (who would generally rather ignore the existence of the first group than grasp why they came into being) was how it had always been.
America the Violent
These days, it’s anything but surprising to note that this country has become remarkably polarized. According to a recent Pew survey, 63% of Democrats view Republicans as immoral (up from 35% in 2016), while 72% of Republicans feel the same way about Democrats (up from 47% seven years ago).
In truth, there’s nothing that new about an American tendency to reduce our fellow countrymen to their political leanings. According to a 2014 Vox article citing sociological research, in 1960, just 5% of Republican parents said they would be against their children marrying someone who supported a different political party. By 2010, nearly half of such respondents reported that they would be displeased.
Such an atmosphere of increasing division is reflected in recent trends in gun purchases. In 2020, more firearms were sold than in any previous year on record and, in the years that followed, those sales would only increase. By now, almost one in five American households have a weapon, nearly 400 million of them, and that weaponry is only growing more deadly. In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country. And indeed, he responded (as he never thought he would) by purchasing a gun, fearing a future militarized coup the likes of which almost arrived on January 6, 2021.
Even some of our youngest citizens have caught this fever of fear and violence. At a recent neighborhood party, a young child reported that if Donald Trump were ever to go to jail, she would bake a giant orange Trump-shaped cake, cut off the head, and eat it to celebrate. I had to laugh and then, instead of saying what first came to mind that it would feel great to do so! I found myself piously telling her that we probably shouldn’t dream of that kind of proto-violence, even when it comes to leaders who have caused as much suffering as Trump.
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