Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora
Last week, our politically charged port town of Oakland, east of the San Francisco Bay was sent into state of shock. This time, it was not another assault on protestors but a cold-blooded killing of seven persons and injuring of three others, at a small Korean Christian College, called Oikos University. The perpetrator was a 43-year-old naturalised citizen of South Korean descent, called One L. Goh, a former student at Oikos University. The national media in the US went into overdrive to express their sense of outrage about how innocent persons were killed and injured. Given the fact that Oikos University attracts low-income students from different parts of the world, the story about the victims became a better, more poignant one to tell for the media. The issue of race, though implicit in the references to the Korean perpetrator and his non-white victims, was underplayed to a certain degree.
In addition to the shootings in Oakland, public opinion the US has been stirred by another senseless killing of a young African American man, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Martin was returning home to his father’s fiancé’s house on February 26, 2012, when the George Zimmerman, who was in charge of the local neighbourhood watch that day, fatally shot and killed him. The case has since assumed greater visibility in the public sphere with President Obama weighing in, on behalf of Trayvon Martin and his grieving family. In this case, there was no getting away from the issue of race, since Zimmerman is reported to have used racial epithets against Martin while reporting back to the police.
The United States has a very tragic history of gun misuse. In 1999, two students of Columbine High School in Colorado went on a shooting spree, killing 13 people and injuring dozens of others before shooting themselves. The incident pushed filmmaker Michael Moore to produce an in-depth documentary on the preponderance of gun-related disasters in the US. In the film Bowling for Columbine, Moore talks to a cross section of persons, including proponents of unfettered gun ownership, to paint a complex picture of the militarisation of everyday life in the US. Moore rightly points out that there is an overwhelming climate of fear in the US and links this to the country’s innumerable military interventions in foreign affairs, as well as the media’s uncritical reproduction of stereotypes about threats posed by people of colour.
Gun ownership by citizens is a constitutional right in the US. It was apparently inserted into the constitution by the founding fathers of the country, since they feared military defeat by superior armies. This added another dimension to the modern axiom of the state being the only authority to have a monopoly over the means and methods of violence. This principle of distributing the right to bear arms to citizens may sound radical, but it has had terrible consequences as well. Proponents of liberal gun ownership regimes have lobbied with lawmakers to ensure that it is easy for small arms manufacturers to produce and sell guns. In order to make for a more conducive environment for this, certain states like Florida (where Trayvon Martin was shot dead) have enacted owner-friendly laws to ensure that there are not too many high rates of conviction for gun possession and fatalities that might occur due to the proliferation of guns.
Our contemporary world has its fair share of arms and it does not help that there is an unprecedented movement of people, goods and ideas that force us to confront differences almost everyday. Most readers of this papers will have known the effects of violence and impunity arising out of political conflicts between the armed state and those aligned against it. In the industrialised democracies of the west, there is a belief that the way to deal with differences arising out of multiculturalism, is to insist upon tolerance. Yet, in countries like the US, this insistence on tolerance is paradoxically subservient to corporate interest, giving rise to a culture of profit making and impunity. The outcome of such militarisation, where difference of opinion (political or otherwise) is in question, is not dissimilar to what happens in Nagaland, or Assam. Only, in the US, there is a greater show of public anger and debate when the issue of impunity is brought into question.
