Gun Culture in America

The shrinks are flagging their well-rehearsed psycho-babble, pointing to the ‘lone gunman’ theory, the ‘lunatic fringe’ theory, and all the multiple ‘conspiracy theories’ pulled out of the magic hat-box. This, of course, is the predictable propaganda machine of military intelligence networks aimed at disinformation, and misinformation. The objective is to get the public off-track with…

Written by

DR. FATIMA SHAHNAZ

Published on

June 16, 2022

The shrinks are flagging their well-rehearsed psycho-babble, pointing to the ‘lone gunman’ theory, the ‘lunatic fringe’ theory, and all the multiple ‘conspiracy theories’ pulled out of the magic hat-box. This, of course, is the predictable propaganda machine of military intelligence networks aimed at disinformation, and misinformation. The objective is to get the public off-track with diversionary strategies known as Psych-Ops (psychological operations) in military jargon. Now, the latest salvo in the mass-murder rampage of the shooter on the college campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, U.S.A, Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year old South Korean, is a ‘manifesto.’

This is a detailed self-analysis explaining his killing spree and psychopathic homicidal disorders mailed by him to the media in the interim of two hours between his two shooting incidents, one in a dorm and the other in a classroom. A total of thirty-three students and professors were shot and killed by the ‘lone gunman’ with a .22 caliber handgun and a 9mm handgun before he turned these on himself, according to the college authorities, local police and media. And if the coldblooded, premeditated modus operandi of the assassin isn’t chilling enough, the pathological self-description in the ‘manifesto’ should sound the alarm signal.

Worse, for those already acquainted with the warped workings of domestic terrorism in the United States, the trail should lead directly to blatant terrorism, which hasn’t been touched on by the well-tutored American media. Nor has anyone, within the prestigious New York Times itself harked back to an almost identical scenario in the 1990s when the terrorist known as the ‘Unabomber’ sent a ‘manifesto’ after mailing letter bombs to civilians. In both cases, then as now at Virginia Tech, the killer was ostensibly rational enough to analyse himself and his depraved mind in a lengthy document, which points to something far more sinister behind the killers: A network or group operating behind the ‘lone gunman’ that has pre-planned the propagandist disinformation to mislead the public from the truth.

In the case of the Virginia Tech shootings on an eminent campus full of 2,000 foreign engineering students from more than 110 nations, with around 1,800 Asians, the redundancies and parallels with former incidents are glaring. First, there is a long history in the United States of such shooting incidents from 1966 to October 2006: the killers range from demented children and teenagers (such as the heavily armed boys who killed 12 students and a teacher at Littleton, Colorado) to child-molesters or mailmen gone berserk.

THE GUN LOBBY
The first argument that is bandied about in the media by advocates of the powerful ‘gun lobby’ in the U.S, including The National Rifle Association and the Republican Party, is the Second Amendment of the American Constitution which states that the right “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. With the laxity of laws preventing the possession and procurement of fire-arms, politicians may break their careers by opposing the gun lobbyists, who are most vocal in the native state of the U.S. President George W. Bush himself, Texas, and other southern states.

Virginia, located right next to the capital, Washington, is (to mix metaphors) ‘right under the gun’ of Washington powerbrokers and ‘insiders,’ many of whom reside in the state. But this can barely explain how an Asian youth, diagnosed with a history of mental illness in 2005, could walk into a local store and buy a shotgun over the counter within ten minutes (with scarcely a computerised background check) as reported by the store-owner himself who sold him the lethal weapons. While this in itself is baffling, even more incoherent is the licence to kill freely available in the world’s foremost democracy. More insane still, of course, is the inevitable parallel between demented children raised in a culture of violence, a gun-culture, and a government on a mass-murder rampage in ‘other countries,’ from Iraq to Afghanistan and Asia.

After the smiling faces of young female soldiers at Abu Ghraib sadistically torturing Iraqi detainees flashed on digital cameras, one can only speculate on the next generation of bloodthirsty American children raised on a daily diet of murder and mayhem. Even more hair-raising are the arms cartels of the United States death-merchants sold abroad, used to instigate CIA-sponsored civil wars, and with the neocons in the Bush administration, the potential to detonate a genocidal nuclear war. Already, World War III has started. We are in it. This time around, unlike 9/11, the killer was not a Muslim ‘terrorist.’  Nonetheless, he was a foreigner, a Korean.

THE IRAQ SWAMP
Even more sinister are the escalating ground realities in Iraq almost simultaneous to the shooting rampage by Cho at Virginia Tech. Within two days, hundreds were butchered by car-bombs in Iraq. The nagging question which no doubt the dead victims of Virginia Tech were asking before their demise is:  Why are we in this war?  How many more will the U.S. kill? When are the lunatics in the White House, Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, planning to attack Iran, using nuclear weapons?

And of course, if you’ve been asking these questions, you have your answer:  Why did they die at Virginia Tech?  All you have to do is to flashback to the MO used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Remember Kent State under the Nixon administration, when American police shot dead students?  Remember what happened to dissidents who opposed the war? They were carted off to prison camps, ‘disappeared,’ murdered in custody.

THE NEOCON CAMPUS POLICE
Today, under the neoconservatives – the right-wing Christian-Zionist nexus in Washington – the crackdown on dissident professors and teachers since 9/11 has been ongoing; they have been subjected to ‘surveillance,’ secret espionage into their phone bills and bank accounts. Only, the U.S. media has been ‘co-opted’ into appeasing the government. A gag-rule has been placed on the media and journalists from reporting the insidious state machinery that has turned American campuses into police-states.  It is here that the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, was created.

It was in the six years since September 11, 2001, that minds have been crippled and distorted by an administration now infamous for its fraud and genocidal wars abroad. And because dissent has been growing within the American population itself, particularly on university campuses where the youth-vote is a growing lobby, there had to be a ‘summary execution,’ of the Nazi-style, when examples had to be made to punish dissidents.

The victims of Virginia Tech were, indeed, scapegoats in the ruthless brutality of a government that has gone out of control, with waning support for its insane wars. The arm of ‘state-terrorism’ has operated through its proxy killer, a seemingly innocuous South Korean adrift in the American Dream that turned out to be his hellish nightmare. Who was Cho Seung-Hui? Will we ever know?

What we do know is that his objective to terrorise the American population, and mute its youth, has been achieved. In this it is similar to the “9/11 syndrome,” that shocked and benumbed the American population for years, sucking it into its government’s lies regarding a threat from Saddam Hussein. As for the campus police, this has already been operating on U.S. campuses in the post-9/11 era. Since 2002, campuses across the United States were monitored by a network of neo-conservatives including the wife of Vice President Cheney, Lynne, under the pretext of enforcing Bush’s “war on terror”. “Campus Watch” under Stanley Kurtz media and other organizations have been running these operations repressing dissent. In one case an innocent Palestinian professor, Sami Al-Arian, was jailed a few years back accused by Campus Watch and right-wing forces of being a “terrorist professor.” Other cases include professors critical of the Bush administration’s policies. In this climate of state-terror, patsies (like Cho) would be easily manipulated and available to the powerful campus thought-police.

A WARNING TO INDIA
As India shares with the victims’ families in mourning two Indian citizens shot in the grisly killings in Virginia, Professor G V Loganathan who taught at the Department of Civil and Environment Engineering and Minal Panchal, a student, a sense of personal loss is felt in the Indian population. This is because almost every family has a member who has migrated to the U.S.; everyone has a child or relative who aspires to eat of the Big Apple of prosperity and affluence, to live out the American Dream.  Now, that dream has been shattered; the Virginia shootings were a wake-up call to Indians, perhaps even sending a warning to the Indian government about national security interests in cooperative adventures with the United States, a gun culture that has gone awry.