Although in Havana this earlier February, I created the acquaintance of a guy in his mid-fifties, who hailed from the japanese Cuban province of Guantánamo and who in 1986 experienced endeavoured unsuccessfully to sail on a makeshift boat from Cuba to the so-called “land of the free”: my very own homeland, the United States.
Apprehended by Cuban authorities, he was sentenced to three years of labour on a espresso farm – exactly where, he claimed, he was treated in a fairly civilised trend, and in which he was capable to put his mechanical engineering degree to use by building a espresso de-pulping machine.
Although his really like for the Cuban system of govt has rarely grown over the previous a few-and-a-fifty percent decades, the man declared that the only spot on Cuban soil in which you would uncover items like institutionalised torture was the US army base at Guantánamo Bay. In spite of his personal tried abandonment of the country in favour of the epicentre of world-wide capitalism, he managed that there were being sure priceless benefits that corresponded to lifetime in Cuba, like totally free healthcare and the freedom to go to school or wander down the street without the anxiety of becoming shot.
To be guaranteed, US politicians and other involved citizens have expended significant strength around the a long time neurotically portraying Cuba as a uniquely oppressive country and a risk to worldwide security. The diminutive island even occupies a single out of only four places on the formal US checklist of Condition Sponsors of Terrorism – even though Cuba has under no circumstances, say, bombed the hell out of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, and even though Guantánamo constitutes a kind of terror in its own correct.
But though the US governing administration casts almost every thing the US by itself does as being in the title of “freedom” and “security”, the point of the issue is that Cubans have entry to a literal safety that is unavailable to people of the imperial superpower. When I googled “mass shootings in Cuba”, for case in point, the best result was an April 2020 Linked Press write-up about 42-yr-old Alexander Alazo of Aubrey, Texas, who, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, had opened hearth on the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC. As for each the law enforcement writeup, the episode was a “suspected detest crime”.
And however Mr Alazo’s escapades are simply the idea of the iceberg – or the suggestion of the rifle barrel – when it arrives to gun violence in the United States, humanity’s self-appointed position product. Over Easter weekend this April, CNN reported “at least 10 mass shootings” throughout the country – with the time period “mass shooting” referring to an “incident in which 4 or extra individuals are shot, not including the shooter”.
The Easter tally comprised two mass shootings in the state of Pennsylvania by itself, a person of which transpired at a residence occasion in Pittsburgh and resulted in the deaths of two 17-12 months-olds, in addition to many injuries. South Carolina hosted two mass shootings of its possess, a single at a buying shopping mall in the point out money of Columbia that left 9 individuals with bullet wounds. Mass shootings also took location in California, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, New York, and Oregon.
This especially bloody weekend came just days right after 10 individuals were being shot in the subway in Brooklyn on April 12. Rewind a several months to CNN headlines from March – eg, “At minimum 8 persons have been killed and far more than 60 hurt in mass shootings across the US this weekend”, revealed March 21 – and there does certainly show up to be a craze. Rapidly ahead again to May, and the Washington, DC-based mostly Gun Violence Archive had now recorded no much less than 173 mass shootings this yr as of May 2.
The catalogue of horrifying studies goes on. According to the US government’s Centres for Ailment Regulate and Prevention, the state registered 45,222 “firearm deaths” in 2020 – even a lot more than the 40,698 “motor car traffic deaths”. This was the best range of gun-associated fatalities on history for any single calendar year hence significantly, and represented a 43 p.c raise from 2010.
Of the 45,222 fatalities, roughly 54 p.c had been suicides and 43 per cent homicides. The remainder, the Pew Research Centre notes, had possibly been “unintentional”, entailed “undetermined circumstances”, or “involved law enforcement” staff – who definitely performed their honest share of extrajudicial killings of Black Us residents and other individuals in 2020. How’s that for “security”?
A current presenting on the BBC Information website, titled: America’s gun society – in 7 charts, reminisces ironically: “It was over 50 decades in the past when the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared that ‘firearms are a primary instrument of dying in American crime’ and that it was ‘primarily the result of our culture’s relaxed frame of mind in the direction of firearms and its heritage of the armed, self-reliant citizen’.” In actuality, the quotation – which basically describes firearms as an “instrument of personal injury and death”, not just loss of life – happened in the context of a 1969 congressional subcommittee hearing on firearms laws under Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon.
Media reality-examining incompetence aside, the quote stays valid – and the full “casual attitude” has no doubt proved valuable around the system of present-day US heritage in justifying massacres of civilians from Vietnam to Iraq and over and above. Naturally, however, the US political establishment has little fascination in connecting the dots – or the bullet holes, as the situation may well be – concerning militarised sociopathy abroad and at home.
The “armed, self-reliant citizen” has in the meantime turn out to be at any time far more so, in particular as a variety of states have enacted ingenious legal guidelines making it possible for inhabitants to carry handguns with no allow or training. As of 2017, there ended up now “more guns than people” in the US, the Washington Post described, citing a review according to which there ended up an “estimated 120.5 guns for each individual 100 residents” – by much the most outrageous ratio in the entire world.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic strike, prompting a surge in US firearms buys – since what improved than a gun to secure you from a virus and typical existential uncertainty? The attendant spike in gun-relevant suicides and homicides served to underscore how a lot extra preferable it would be – in phrases of, you know, human lifestyle – for the US condition to commit in the psychological and bodily wellbeing of its populace fairly than cultivating a cutthroat capitalist landscape that would make folks go ballistic.
Of course, a ill society is ultimately a lot more rewarding for these pillars of US capitalism as the arms and pharmaceutical industries, whose have protection definitively trumps the form of protection described by my Cuban interlocutor – like the liberty to not be shot whilst heading about your every day business.
I professional an inkling of this illness firsthand increasing up in the US, where I was taught that daily life was a opposition as opposed to a communal collaboration – a dog-try to eat-puppy arrangement that intermittently spawned in me inner thoughts of stress and anxiety, isolation, impotence, and directionless rage. Many years just before the pandemic exacerbated issues, I disentangled myself from the hostile atmosphere by simply just abandoning the place – and yet it is not hard to see how a violent and extensively alienating system may also elicit a lot more violent person responses.
On March 23, 2022, following a single weekend that showcased “at the very least 9 mass taking pictures events” across the US, the New York Instances warned that it was “an ominous harbinger for the warmer summer months months in advance, which is ordinarily America’s most violent time”. But as occasions get at any time more violent, it is not just this summer time that we have to dread.
The sights expressed in this write-up are the author’s personal and do not automatically reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.