The Malignancy Devouring America

The Guardian editorial today explores the horror that permeates America and the horror story, its president.

The mass shooting of a concert crowd in Las Vegas is deeply shocking. It seems to have shocked even President Trump. But the oleaginous teleprompted piety with which he responded could not be further from his contemptuous indifference to the plight of Puerto Rico. At least 58 people are known to have been murdered in Las Vegas. Hundreds are wounded and the death toll will undoubtedly rise. But it will never approach the toll caused by hurricane Maria in the Caribbean island a fortnight ago. Although the official death toll there stands at only 17, the morgues are full in hospitals all over the country: it is only the lack of electricity, water, and transport that prevents them from being tallied. Sixty of the island’s 69 hospitals are still cut off from power; half the 3.4 million inhabitants still lack safe drinking water.

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The differing responses to the two catastrophes is a stark illumination of racialisation of first- and second-class citizenship in the US. The Puerto Ricans are brown-skinned Spanish speakers. Although they are American citizens, they have no political representation in Congress and no votes in presidential elections. The crowd in Vegas were predominantly white, celebrating a form of music that is also largely white, and where the iconography, by a sour irony, is all in favour of the right to bear arms. They get the treacly appeals to Jesus; the Puerto Ricans were dismissed as “ingrates”.

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Mass shootings are so common that the satirical paper the Onion has run the same headline four times in the last two years, each time prompted by a different mass murder: “‘No way to prevent this’ says the only nation where this regularly happens”. Yet the dramatic headline-catching slaughter is not the only dreadful aspect of the situation. Eighty or more people are killed by gunshots every day across the USA. So far this year, there have been 11,565 gun deaths in the US; 545 children under the age of 11 killed or injured, and 273 incidents classified as mass shootings.

There is a desolating pointlessness to these statistics. A third of the gunshot deaths are suicides, as it appears the Las Vegas gunman’s was too. In a country where guns are so freely available, legally or otherwise, and the nearest thing to a state-funded and universally available mental health service is the prison system, the figure for suicide is hardly going to diminish. The desperation of the suicidal and the rage of the homicidal are not the only forms of derangement around the subject of guns. The persistent refusal of Congress even to consider restrictions on the right of gun ownership is now so much part of the political landscape that shares in gunmakers rose at the news of the massacre. The two tragedies in Puerto Rico and Las Vegas are dreadful in themselves, but taken together they suggest a systematic weakness in American democracy which is more threatening than either.