Politics of basic instincts

On January 24, a mass shooting occurred at two spots, both mushroom  farms,  in the US city of Half Moon Bay in the central Northern California. The  shooter, an employee of one of the targeted farms, killed seven people.

But it was not the sole incident of mass shooting on that day in the USA. In the west coast port city of Oakland in California, another incident of shooting took place resulting in one death and seven cases of injury.

Just one day before the Half Moon Bay tragedy occurred, a 72-year-old gunman had opened fire on a gathering of people who were celebrating the Lunar New Year at a dance studio at Monterey Park near Los Angeles in California. He claimed 11 lives.

Though the Oakland gas station shooters are still unidentified, the Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park shooters were lone gunmen. It appears they were settling scores, if any, with the people of their own kind. Strangely, they both were rather old-in their sixties and seventies-to have committed such deadly violence. For, according to the Rand Corporation, a think tank funded by the US government, 82 per cent of all mass shooters between 1976 and 2018 were aged below 45. Other researches have also  shown similar trend among the mass shooters. In fact, mass shooting in schools were perpetrated mostly by younger males in their late teens or early 20s.

However, there are also exceptions. For instance, the perpetrator of the Colorado Springs shooting in November 2022 at the LGBTQ nightclub was a youth of 22. He killed five and wounded dozens at that Club Q.

The exceptions apart, those opening indiscriminate fires on workplaces, retail stores and restaurants were mostly in their mid-40s. But the Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park shooters are a clear deviation from the pattern. And the development is quite new. What does it imply? If anything, the new trend points to the fact that the gun violence in the USA is getting wider, considering the age-group of its executors. Also, the frequency of the mass shootings is also on the rise. A  non-profit body of the USA, the Gun Violence Archive ---that keeps tabs on such indiscriminate or mass shootings defines an incident of gunfire as a mass shooting  if the number of deaths or the wounded is four or more-has tracked some 40 such incidents in January this year alone. So, it was the highest figure ever on mass shooting cases reported in the first month of 2023 in the US. And it was 37.5 per cent higher than the average number of mass shootings that took place in the eight years between 2014 and 2022.

The same non-profit body further revealed that, in all, 647 cases of mass shooting happened in 2022 and the number of casualties from those bloody incidents was over 44,000.

And the trajectory of the mass-shooting-curve is gradually going up rather than down.

The workplace-related gun violence can be traced back to a feeling of deprivation, frustration and anger on the part of its executor. One may also explain  school shootings in the same way.

But what about the Club Q shooting of Colorado Springs? If we go outside the USA, what about the 2019's Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand perpetrated by a 28-year-old white man that claimed 51 lives?Those were purely  ideology-based hate crimes. It was extreme conservative values and religious hatred that drove the two youths in the USA and New Zealand to commit such dastardly acts.

So the rise in the number of mass shootings both in the USA and outside it-in Europe, for example --- are mostly hate-related. It is the politics of hate under the sanitised, innocuous rubric of nationalism or populism that is behind the rise in this phenomenon worldwide.

Though in the USA, the spike in gun violence is being blamed on lax firearm law, yet over a week after president Biden signed a bipartisan bill on gun-reform into law on June 25, 2022, a 21-year-old gunman sprayed bullets on the participants of an Independence Day parade at the Highland Parkin, the state of Illinois, killing seven and injuring dozens. It was as though the mass shooter was brazenly defying the just passed gun-control law.

Stricter gun-control law can go into  reducing the number and use of guns in people's possessions. But how to control hate and the politics that nurture it?

To be frank, politics, generally, is getting more violent these days than it was before.

Evidently, it is the basic instincts of fear and prejudice in the garb of politics that drive some individuals to commit the gravest of crimes like mass shooting.  The responsibility, therefore, lies on the saner section of politicians to free politics of the discourses that feed on the public's fear and prejudice.

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