U.S. Institutionalized Bang-Bang, A White and Protestant Declared War
"We're here because my daughter has no voice - she was murdered last week, shot nine times. How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here, with this administration and me." Andrew Pollack to Donald Trump at the White House; a U.S. citizen whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was killed at Stoneman Douglas in Florida, on February 14.
Edu Montesanti
"Rather than the ruling party, the Republicans, self-examining their domestic gun policies, of trying at least to come to grips with the causes of these appalling shootings of children by children, the world has stood aghast at their 'spin': defending guns, defending the powerful lobby of the N.R.A., and Trump coming up with the immoral 'solution' of arming teachers: making sharpshooters out of them. Rambo to the rescue", Sociologist Maria Páez Victor.
James Eric Davis, Jr., a Central Michigan University (CMU) sophomore student, allegedly shot and killed his parents Friday morning in a fourth-floor dorm room.
Police said Davis' parents had contact with him late Thursday night and took him to a local hospital, where the 19-year-old student was turned over to the medical staff for what police believe may have been some sort of drug-related issue.
Davis was released from the hospital on Friday morning, shortly before the shooting. Sources told the Detroit Free Press his parents arrived on campus in the morning to pick him up for spring break and were shot, and killed.
C.M.U. is a university of about 25,000 students, located in mid-Michigan, in the Northern United States of America.
The attack happened 16 days after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that claimed 17 lives.
Perpetrated by the former Stoneman Douglas student Nikolas Jacob Cruz with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle on February 14, it was the eighth shooting that resulted in injury or death during the first seven weeks of the year in the U.S.
On Thursday, a day after a surprising support for gun control measures during a televised meeting with members of Congress, President Donald Trump retreated from the idea after a meeting with National Rifle Association (NRA) officials and Vice President Mike Pence in the Oval Office.
The N.R.A. lobbyist, Chris Cox, posted on Twitter just after 9 p.m. that he met with President Trump and Mr. Pence, saying that,
"We all want safe schools, mental health reform and to keep guns away from dangerous people. POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don't want gun control. #NRA #MAGA."
President Trump tweeted about an hour later, "Good (Great) meeting in the Oval Office tonight with the NRA!".
In the meeting with lawmakers Wednesday, U.S. President had called for comprehensive legislation that would, among other things, expand background checks to firearms purchased at gun shows and on the internet - a measure favored by Democrats but totally rejected by the N.R.A. and most Republicans.
Donald Trump also stunned lawmakers from both parties by suggesting that he would support measures to allow the authorities to seize guns from mentally ill people or those who could pose a danger without first following due process, like appearing before a judge. N.R.A.'s allies on Capitol Hill reacted fiercely the next day, as conservatives vowed that such measures would not become law regardless of U.S. President's declarations.
In an interview with Pravda, U.S. historian Peter Kuznick states that elected officials like Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, are running scared. "The right-wing Republicans were already on the defensive over their reprehensible policies and defense of Donald Trump," the expert says.
An Institutionalized Bang-Bang in the Land of Free
President Trump has suggested Wednesday that at least 20 percent of teachers should get special weapons training so they can include "shoots to kill" under the "special skills" section of their resumes. "I want my schools protected just like I want my banks protected."
But a 2008 Rand Corporation study of New York City police officers found their "average hit rate in situations in which fire was not returned was 30 percent." So the unavoidable question is, what could one expect from armed teachers?
John Kiriakou, a whistleblower, and former CIA agent says Pravda that President Trump's ill-conceived idea to arm teachers is a non-starter. "Teachers are state employees and as such do not fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government on issues such as this one.
"Second, the teacher's unions -The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association -- are adamantly opposed to arming teachers, which would likely cause even more violence than what we are currently seeing."
Early last week, teachers used the #ArmMeWith hashtag to request that instead of guns, Trump provide them with everything from "students with full stomachs.
In an interview with Pravda, the Venezuelan Canadian sociologist Maria Páez Victor points out to the Republican hypocrisy, of not meeting the nation's real problems, but favoring a millionary lobbyist like the N.R.A., this way rewarding violence among U.S. citizens:
"Rather than the ruling party, the Republicans, self-examining their domestic gun policies, of trying at least to come to grips with the causes of these appalling shootings of children by children, the world has stood aghast at their 'spin': defending guns, defending the powerful lobby of the N.R.A., and Trump coming up with the immoral 'solution' of arming teachers: making sharpshooters out of them. Rambo to the rescue."
In the presidential campaign, while the then-Republican candidate promised to support the N.R.A., and oppose any limits to Americans' right to own guns, Donald Trump twitted, on May 22, 2016: "Crooked Hillary said that I want guns brought into the school classroom. Wrong!".
During the campaign, Professor Kuznick told Pravda Report: "Trump is a wildcard. No one knows what he will do - probably including him."
A White and Protestant Shooter Is Never a Terrorist
Comparing the U.S. media approach in both shootings, it is interesting - but not surprising - that Nikolas Cruz skin color (white), has not come into question, while Davis has immediately been generalized reported as "a 19-year-old black male". What if Davis were a Muslim? That is the question, whose answer the whole world tragically knows very well, especially since the 9/11 attacks.
Whenever a white and protestant U.S. citizen is the shooter, never the mainstream media names him or her as a terrorist, but as a mentally ill. And it never refers to his or her skin color and religion, as an FBI survey shows that only a small percentage of terrorist attacks carried out on U.S. soil between 1980 and 2005, were perpetrated by Islamic people: 6%.
Assault-style weapons were used to kill 17 students and teachers in Parkland, last month and, before that, to end 26 lives in a Texas church in November, 58 lives at a Las Vegas concert in October, and 26 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. Every shooter was white, and U.S. citizen.
Cruz, a 19-year--old adolescent with mental illness, was expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School years ago for "disciplinary reasons", and investigators are looking into a possible connection to the Republic of Florida, a white supremacist group in Florida.
The leader of the group, Jordan Jereb, confirmed to the Associated Press after the shooting, that Cruz was a member.
Emery Wright, Co-Director of Project South, tells Pravda that,
"The Trump administration relies on provocation to draw its adversaries into ridiculous debates while it methodically dismantles the public sector and uses fear, ignorance and white supremacy, to build a base of dispossessed citizens that will accept and support autocratic and proto-fascist governance in the interest of the 1%."
In an interview with The Real News on February 23, U.S. author Gerard Horne said, also pointing out the racial supremacy issue:
"You can't understand the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution [which serves as justification to those who defend the unrestricted possession of arms in the U.S] without understanding that the settlers wanted to continue moving westward, seizing the land of the Native Americans and stocking that land with enslaved Africans to endure free labor. And that involved, as they saw it, arming the European civilian population."
An Endless Terror Made in the U.S.A.
The United States has the world's highest rate of gun ownership: according to a September 2011 Small Arms Survey, there were nine guns to every 10 people at the time in the country.
In 2015, The Washington Post estimated the number of firearms nationwide at 357 million. " There are now more guns than people in the United States," said the Post as the country's population at that time was 317 million.
"There are approximately 100 people killed every day by guns in the U.S., most of the apparently are suicides," says Professor Kuznick, director of Nuclear Studies at the American University in Washington D.C. According to a 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine, firearm-related suicide rates were 8.0 times higher in the United States than other developed countries.
Homicide rates are six times higher in the U.S. than in other developed countries, and unintentional firearm deaths are six times more common in the U.S. than comparison countries.
Professor Kuznick comments on the Second Amendment and the allegedly unrestricted U.S. citizens' right to own guns:
"These gun owners are not members of a 'well-regulated militia.' They are America's cowards.
"What are they so afraid of? They fear immigrants. They fear minorities. They fear terrorists. Now they fear the media," he says.
And continues speaking out the co-author with the filmmaker Oliver Stone, of Untold History of the United States:
"If they take pleasure in shooting defenseless animals, let them own rifles. I wish we could arm the animals to make it a fair fight. But are they such incompetent hunters that they need assault rifles?".
Victor mentions Michael Moore's documentary about the horrible 1999 Columbine shooting, called Bowling for Columbine (complete film):
"In that film, Moore highlighted that the town of Columbine was home to a huge factory that produced missiles for the USA army, and showed how a local bank gave away rifles to people who opened up a new account.
"Moore connected the dots: the gun loving, military adoring, war mongering, Rambo idolizing, world "policeman" had its violence-loving chickens come home to roost to visit death and horror on its own children."
In the appalling Columbine school massacre occurred on April 20, 1999 in Colorado, an event that shocked the USA and the world, two high-school seniors, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris used a Hi-Point 995 9mm carbine with thirteen 10-round magazines, a sawed-off Savage 67H 12-gauge pump shotgun, and a sawed-off Stevens 311D double-barreled shotgun enacted an assault on Columbine High School killing 12 students, one teacher and injured 21 other students, and then committed suicide.
"It is a sobering thought that the students at the most recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where 17 were killed, were not born yet in 1999. Since Columbine there have been 211 school shootings in the U.S.A.," observes the Venezuela-born sociologist.
Global Research's Jay Jonson recently observed:
"Everyone in socialist Cuba has a gun issued by the Cuban government to use in case of another U.S. invasion, but in Cuba, gun crime is virtually nonexistent. Maybe that's because Cuba's kids don't invade other people's countries.
"In Cuba, there are no killer role models such as there are in the U.S.A., where members of the military are hailed in U.S. media as heroic for 'serving their country' in other people's country, more often than not, uninvited and in mortal combat with its citizens trying to expel them.
"Just as there are laws against breaking into someone else's house, there are laws against invading someone else's country."
So why does exactly the United States, though the unrestricted guns law, faces such a chaotic state? Are there any problems which go beyond the gun law?
According to Victor, violence begets violence - the US big problem today.
"This is a universal truism, whether person to person, country to country, society to society. The U.S.A., purporting to be a leader among nations does not have the most minimum understanding of this. They wallow in sentimentality with "thoughts and prayers" for the dead and wounded, and cannot see what is in front of their eyes:
"The militarization of their foreign policy (bombs, death, occupations, illegal prisons, military exercises to intimidate other governments, deposing governments, and making war under false pretenses), militarization of their police (military grade weaponry, harassment and imprisonment of black and Latino citizens beyond the average, expulsion of immigrants), militarization of their domestic policies (military recruitment at universities, arms manufacturers subsidies).
"Hollywood continues to churn out movies and TV series where violence and murder, seasoned with a good dose of exploitation of women and salacious sex scenes, keep the fiction going of how guns and violence are some sorts of an acceptable solution. The age-old fallacy of "the end justifies the means."
In Victor opinion, the key leaders of the U.S.A. political, economic and cultural spheres are sadly missing any sort of moral compass.
"They are dragging the rest of the world into war, chaos and misery while babbling platitudes about "democracy" "humanitarian aid" "nation-building" - all hypocritical excuses for the expansion of the power of their corporations."
Something very similar to other shootings and the 9/11 itself, is that Broward County deputies received at least 18 calls warning them about Nikolas Cruz from 2008 to 2017, including concerns that he "planned to shoot up the school" and other threats and acts of violence before he was accused of killing 17 people at Stoneman Douglas.
At least five callers mentioned concern over his access to weapons, according to the documents. None of those warnings led to direct intervention. It's not clear what, if anything, Sheriff Scot Peterson, 54, did with the information
Peterson, the only armed sheriff's deputy at Stoneman Douglas, has been retired after an internal investigation was launched into why he sat outside the school for about four minutes and never entered as the shooter killed students and staff.
In this state of chaos, a civil war scenario (programmed by the deep state?).
Project South's Emery finishes his view, encouraging social engagement as the only way to change the current situation his country struggles:
"Our only hope against this agenda is to build strong, autonomous social movements from the bottom up that are led by people most impacted by the multiple forms of oppression that persist throughout our society and are committed to the principle that civil rights veteran Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi said best, 'nobody is free until everybody is free'."
The same way the C.I.A. killed John and Robert Kennedy, the F.B.I. surveilled and killed, too, Martin Luther King, Jr., the deep state boycotted and dismantled Black Panthers, and other social movements in the U.S. through history, not to mention the false flags such as the 9/11, several war crimes overseas, and the creation of terrorists abroad such as Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS, the engagement Emery proposes is a hard fight to be battled - in the "land of free".
Photo: By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H25224 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5434009