[Editor’s note: This column has been updated and re-published in light of the recent shooting in Orlando, Florida on June 12, 2016]
“IN watching the coverage of the murders that have taken place in Connecticut, the same arguments prevail from the last shootings we have witnessed: ‘the guy who did this was mentally deranged, mentally ill, evil’; this time the news reported the shooter had a mother who was ‘ridged’. All give reasons for what happened; but, the end result makes the mentally disabled community take the brunt of an act by someone they never met, while at the same time, blaming a woman for her son’s violence. The answers/reasons for such acts are recycled and regurgitated…’guns are to blame — we need new legislation to ban weapons’ while gun proponents will say ‘guns don’t kill people, people do’. The debate will begin again and nothing will really happen, as there is no way to empirically ‘prove’ what causes someone to murder in a rampage. I have had some intense conversations of late with loved ones and based on these, what I intuitively know, have experienced, and understand, I come to the conclusion that we need to shift, to create a new language and to come up with a new paradigm about rampage murder because nothing explains what we are witnessing anymore. The way we currently think of the murders in Connecticut – ‘a gunman with mental illness does this horrible thing because he is evil’ is linear thinking. What if we thought of mental illness as being part of a list of characteristics that might contribute towards someone moving towards being violent, and realizing that mental illness is not necessarily the main cause of his violence?,” — Jamie Marie Watson, 2012.
What if Jamie Watson’s thoughts on mental illness were part of a process of disassembling oneself? A fractured sense of self, enabled by the current American culture? A deconstruction away from one’s true gifts, precious talents and a God-given sublime self? A dying process to one’s humanity in America?
BBC News reports that America has 300 million guns in private hands, apart from the police and the military, enough to arm every man, woman and child in America. About 10 out of 100,000 people in America die from gun-inflicted wounds.
As of September 2015, 33,636 firearm deaths were reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For suicides, it was a higher number at 41,149 making it 13 out of 100,000 in the population; 21,175 of those were using firearms.
The Guardian reported 1,052 shootings in 1,066 days and called it, America’s gun crisis, from December 2012 to Dec. 2, 2015.
On Dec. 2, 2015, 14 perished at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California and 17 injured at the hands of a Muslim married couple. It was just days before the third anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20 children and six adults were killed by a white gunman in Dec. 2012.
President Barack Obama called it an unparalleled pattern that exists nowhere else in the world. That statement is bolstered by the FBI, which has reported an increasing pattern of mass shootings since 2000.
Most recently, the United States experienced yet another attack on June 12, 2016, which is regarded as the worst mass shooting in the country’s history. That Sunday morning, the 29-year-old gunman — who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State — opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded.
President Obama, again, had to address the nation.
“We are also going to have to have to make sure that we think about the risks we are willing to take by being so lax in how we make very powerful firearms available to people in this country. And this is something that obviously I’ve talked about for a very long time,” he said the day after the shooting occurred.
He and Vice President Joe Biden also traveled to Orlando on Thursday, July 16. This marked the president’s 10th visit to the scene of a mass shooting.
“Today, once again, as has been true too many times before, I held and hugged grieving family members and friends and they asked why does this keep happening. They pleaded that we do more to stop the carnage,” Obama said in his remarks. “They don’t care about the politics. Neither do I. Neither does Joe.”
Mother Jones has deconstructed the mass murders of 30 years, describing a mass murder, involving four or more. The author, Mark Follman, describes that seven occurred in 2012 alone, during the height of the election campaign between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. These massacres occurred in usually safe places: schools, universities, shopping malls and theaters, totaling to 62 in the last 30 years in the US. Yet, the shooters viewed these safe places, as their center stage theaters to perform on and vent out their accumulated tsunami of negative emotions.
While we are not psychotherapists, nor policy makers, we are activists involved in four decades of organizing folks towards positive outcomes of whole spiritual selves and community empowerment, we believe we can advance our own view of multiple factors towards a ‘death process of an inner humanity in America.’
Dying to oneself
In Asian American, African-American, Latino, Hawaiian and Native American cultures, this concept is celebrated as a selfless attitude of dying to one’s needs and to one’s self-centeredness, enabling one to care for the larger part of the community and family.
But taken to the extremes, one’s inability to focus on one’s inner needs is a recipe for building inner resentment, anger and bitterness. When that occurs, coupled with a death in the family, it translates to deep-seated rage that makes one mistakenly believe that one is alone to navigate the world and easily sets one up to explode, while externally manifesting their inner destruction and rage using drugs, alcohol, domestic violence toward their families, and a violence to the spirit to others, through emotional abuse, shunning, exclusion, and verbal abuse.
This dying to oneself is a disconnection from one’s humanity, no different from what we saw in Connecticut, easily enhanced by a process of homeschooling, making an autistic child unavailable for social interaction.
I have a cousin with an autistic daughter, Evan. Evan is so smart that she looks at a piano and easily makes music. She likes watching animated movies. By channeling Evan’s autistic mind, which gets super-charged by any environment, her parents found a school that could channel her to be productive with other children. When she comes home from school, she immediately puts on her headphones and dances. She is normalized by her parents (whose jobs allow them to be at home to supervise her after school) through inclusion, which exposed her to positive and productive activities like creating music, not using guns.
Access to weapons
Guns are easier to buy than cars. Cars are leased and bought with proof of driving literacy (driver’s education, passing a practical exam and proof of insurance), while guns require only a license identifying who will own the weapon, not training, literacy nor insurance.
Yet, guns are weapons that irrevocably destroy beasts, animals and persons, and now innocent first graders, under seven years old, just barely starting with their lives.
In America, 300 million guns are in the hands of roughly 1 in 4 Americans; some own multiple guns and even have cabinets full of rifles and various guns, used for target practice and hunting desert cottontails and quails.
If the US now requires those who have guns to undergo weapons training to understand the irrevocable harm that their actions may cause, including a steep price for each bullet to raise revenues for safe gun usage (say $100 per bullet) and a liability insurance in the millions, would that lead gun owners to safely use their rifles and handguns?
Would a better framework perhaps be a ban on civilian access to handguns and assault weapons, similar to England and Australia? When the ban was passed on handguns and ammunition, mass murders stopped in Great Britain and Australia. In Great Britain, 30 folks died last year, while in America, 200 folks die each week — equivalent to a Boeing plane crash every week. One television channel reported that 10,000 Americans die each year.
Assuming we succeed in banning handguns and rifles, what else can we remove in the death factory of inhumanity in America?
Self-control, self-restraint, and self-regulation
In Hawaii, social harmony is a valued practice. It is called the ‘Aloha Spirit.’ But aloha is more than social harmony, it is fueled by a deeper care and concern for another. In the Philippines and amongst Filipinos all over the world, it is called “Bayanihan,” where a Filipino will go out of his or her way to connect to another in need. You see how they save others during typhoons to their own self-detriment. In South Africa, it is called, “ubuntu”, I am because you are.
Amongst the Catholics, it is celebrating the God in you, the divine, sublime self, as Fr. Camilo Pacanza made me aware of after Simbang Gabi.
I watched this assemblage of priests one morning discussing their week’s schedule of masses, readily giving up one’s ease and convenience, in favor of easing the responsibilities of another. It is looking after the other and his needs for self-care, “go ahead and go sleep, I see you yawning.” The other responds, “No, I still have to make the announcements at 11 am.” “It is okay, I will do it for you.”
Watch how they make room for one another, easing the workload of their duties, sharing themselves to connect to the humanity of one another.
That is a solid relationship of give and take — “Go, I will take care of the family for you, while you make a living for us.”
It seems to reveal what Adam Lanza’s (the Sandy Hook shooter) mother did for him: dedicating her life to homeschooling and taking care of him, until she died from his hands, after being unable to deflect him from his fractured sense of self as he disconnected 27 others from their human lives on earth.
America has to build a new culture of progressive humanizing of one’s inner-self — one that harvests the best humanizing practices of multiculturally-empowered communities, who have been practicing them for many generations.
America must now take the aloha spirit amongst Hawaiians and Native Americans in Hawaii, the Bayanihan amongst Filipinos and the ubuntu amongst Africans, and nationalize these humane practices as America’s cultural, psychological and social practices, anchored in empathy and humanity. While we’re at it, emulate the Aloha practices, shown to us by our First Family, steeped in Grace towards their own family and families all over America.
Grace must now be Americanized and Grace must now be an American brand to be exported to the rest of the world, not wars!
* * *
Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz, J.D. writes a weekly column for Asian Journal, called “Rhizomes.” She has been writing for AJ Press for 9 years now. She contributes to Balikbayan Magazine. Her training and experiences are in science, food technology, law and community volunteerism for 4 decades. She holds a B.S. degree from the University of the Philippines, a law degree from Whittier College School of Law in California and a certificate on 21st Century Leadership from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has been a participant in NVM Writing Workshops taught by Prof. Peter Bacho for 4 years and Prof. Russell Leong. She has travelled to France, Holland, Belgium, Japan, Mexico and 22 national parks in the US, in pursuit of her love for arts.