America, the Child Killing Country

By Jacob Weindling  |  September 10, 2024 | 3:15pm
Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images
Big Story School Shootings
America, the Child Killing Country

Another mass shooting. More dead children. More politicians telling us this death cult is the “fact of life” we must endure. Another day in America has come and passed with less children in it than the day before. With less laughter. Fewer smiles. More fear. And another day like it is surely around the corner.

The life the last generation of America has left for its children is one dotted by active shooter drills and lies about them to help keep everyone calm and quiet during the real thing. This is what the American vision of freedom looks like when put into action for our kids.

Gun deaths among children increased 50 percent between 2019 and 2021, and since 2020, guns have been the leading cause of death for American children and teens. According to KFF, “in no other similarly large, wealthy country are firearms in the top four causes of death for children and teens, let alone the number one cause.”

No matter what we tell ourselves, in practice, this is who we are.

America brings this fetid reputation to the rest of the world too, as the American bombs dropped on Gaza have helped kill “more than 13,000” children according to UNICEF back in March. The United States is shipping weapons to Israel who is starving children, violating both international and American law with each shipment. A March 18 IPC report revealed that “virtually all households in Gaza are skipping meals daily,” and polio is back, infecting a ten-month-old child in Gaza who has only ever known this war on children.

Yet the shipments of bombs have not abated, while weapons company Lockheed Martin’s stock price mirrors the up-only trend of child deaths in Gaza, as it is up 46 percent since it bottomed the day before October 7th.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies the American system’s indifference to this massacre of children better than Joe Biden refusing to do basic things past presidents like Ronald Reagan did to rein in the IDF’s bloodlust. You can plot our extreme rightward capital-induced shift to today on a direct line through the White House. This inertia of mass death has accelerated to a point where we are truly spiraling out of control while our modern aristocracy is wealthier than ever.

This is the madness of living under a system built by and for the slave trade. It was created by slave-owning aristocrats whose view of democracy was that land-owning white men were the only ones worthy of democratic representation, while others were three-fifths of a person at best.

This system is currently working as designed.

Smith & Wesson’s $551 million market cap speaks louder than all the terrified screams of America’s children combined. Capitalism is one giant enterprise to increase growth while lowering costs, and as Chiquita’s landmark case demonstrates, killing people can often align with one or both goals, especially for companies who make products designed to kill people.

This is not a recent reputation America has earned either, as Ronald Reagan can only look passable on this subject when viewed through the lens of Joe Biden’s utter incompetence. In 2021, Guatemalan authorities recovered the bodies of Indigenous children buried at the bottom of a well at a former military garrison during the country’s civil war in the 1980s. As Reuters reported on a genocide materially supported by Ronald Reagan:

Witnesses say members of the armed forces captured hundreds of residents and took them to the military garrison, where they separated the children from their parents. According to Arnulfo Oxlaj, a survivor of the massacre, 116 children between the ages of two and 15 were tortured and thrown into what was then a well inside the facility, where they drowned.

We, as Americans, of course, are largely not indifferent to this river of blood we are forced to watch on our screens every day. We all know the polling on both Gaza and guns is in favor of the anti-child killing coalition by now, yet many of us in this coalition are fighting on behalf of a candidate in some semblance of control over this system that’s currently killing kids at a historic rate in Gaza. This is the grim reality of the two-party duopoly, but history will not look at our electoral moral quandaries more sympathetically than the limp bodies of children being dug out of the rubble or carried out of a classroom.

Voting “the right way” once every two years has proven to not be enough to stop the massacre of children in America’s sphere of influence. Sandy Hook was twelve years ago. I was at school not far away from Columbine twenty-five years ago. This is not the kind of numbers game this capital-driven system is designed to lose. Until we as Americans try to influence this capital structure controlling our country from somewhere other than the ballot box (look to Israel’s general strike over Netanyahu’s policies killing yet more hostages as one example), then we will never be more than tools of an aristocratic system that’s currently breaking down and taking everyone’s kids with it.

 
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