Society on edge of anarchy

Jay Kuten

"AMERICA grieves, tense and wary" reads the headline of the New York Times.

This time it is the police, themselves, officers sworn to protect the citizens, who were the targets.

This latest mass shooting raises the dire question that must be addressed. Will the killing of police officers inspire what the killing of children and of others has not? Will this latest outrage herald a return to sanity? Or -- God help us -- will we be looking back at this moment to declare it as the opening shots of a war on home soil between the citizens and those we trust to protect us?

These shootings have become all too common, enough to be referred to by name: Virginia Tech, Columbine, Aurora, Charleston, Orlando, now Dallas. The common theme is one of hatred of the other, whether by white Christian extremists, or Muslim extremists, or by psychopaths or the mentally ill.

Mass killings are becoming so regular a part of American life that the behaviours which follow have become macabre routine. There are the services of mourning, as often as not, headed by the appearance of the President as mourner-in-chief, offering a soothing shoulder to the families of the victims. Mourning is accompanied by assurances of communal solidarity, not only in grief but in determination to live lives unhampered by fear. Putting the lie to the last is the succeeding demand for heightened methods of security to "keep our people safe".

What politicians will not admit is that the mediate cause of gun deaths in the US is guns. Worse is that the failure to even look at the problem makes it appear intractable. That's because the solution to gun violence is known -- think Dunblane or Port Arthur -- but by common consent it has thus far been beyond the political process.

The gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA (National Rifle Association) have effectively closed off normal political channels toward solution and silenced critics, kept researchers from disclosing the facts of this public health crisis.

From an economic point of departure this makes no sense. The entire gun industry contributes $49 billion to the economy. That is 0.27 per cent of the GDP. The annual cost of gun violence, fatal and non-fatal, is $229 billion or 1.4 per cent of GDP. Yet this relatively tiny tail can wag the mighty dog that is the American polity and its economy.

By applying selective pressure on individual Congresspersons, the NRA achieves its goals.

Police forces in America have become militarised. The defence Department has been empowered since 1990 to give away billions of dollars of surplus weaponry designed for use against foreign enemies on the battlefield.

Increasingly, those weapons are showing up in confrontations between police and otherwise law-abiding protesters. Putting into the dangerous mix the facts that police shootings in America have reached epidemic proportions -- 571 thus far in 2016 alone -- that many victims are unarmed and that blacks are five times as likely as whites to be victims of police shootings and you have a situation that is ripe for disaster.

The mix of racism or religious fanaticism or mental illness and three million available assault rifles with a police presence widely separated and distrusted by communities they should serve makes almost inevitable social demolition.

What will be the outcome of this latest mass shooting? Of police, themselves? Will Americans, most of whom -- gun owners included -- favour at least a modicum of gun control, see their representatives enact such legislation, laws to keep known suspected terrorists ("no-fly listees") from legally purchasing military-style offensive weapons? Will there at last be a move towards sanity and decency in a society on the edge of anarchy?

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else," said Winston Churchill. Churchill was an optimist. I'm not sure that either past history or the data of the present bear him out.

Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.