Not a Green Bone in Their White Bodies - TomDispatch.com

Not a Green Bone in Their White Bodies - TomDispatch.com Stan Cox, Spreading Hate and Bullets April 25, 2023 Imagine a world in which one in every 20 of us, approximately 6% of the population, owns not just a gun but a military-style assault rifle. We're talking about a weapon like the one that killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, less than a year ago, or that just recently slaughtered five people and wounded eight at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky. Mind you, close to 30% of American adults evidently own at least one gun of some sort (48% of White men). When it's a matter of arming civilians, no other country comes close, not even Yemen, a land in a devastating civil war. So, who could be surprised that, by mid-April of this year, there had already been at least 160 mass killings (in which four or more people die or are injured) at places ranging from that bank to a birthday party, from a private Christian elementary school to a university campus, from a farm to a Metro station in Washington? And that's just to begin an endless and fast-growing list. In this country, you can no longer take a chance on being a Black teenager who ends up at the wrong door looking for his younger brothers or a 20-year-old White woman (who dreams of being a Marine biologist) in a car that accidentally turns into the wrong driveway. Now, if that isn't bad enough, imagine an ever-more-armed country in which the right wing -- those TomDispatch regular Stan Cox refers to today as ecofascists -- have begun turning the green crisis on this planet into an excuse to kill anyone they dislike. It's a scary prospect in a nation that simply can't seem to imagine putting meaningful limits on our weaponry from hell. Tom