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More than a few of America's Founding Fathers bought and sold children like livestock, worked and raped them to death, and ordered them starved, burned, and killed by American soldiers. This tweet is ahistorical navel-gazing nihilism masquerading as profundity.
Sandy Hook was a threshold point for many USers b/c it was an obvious breach of containment from where most mass shootings actually happen - inside American homes and in poor, urban spaces. Because for many Americans, that's where they "should" happen - inevitably if lamentably.
It also happened to people who occupied the center of the charmed circle of American innocence - the people to whom gun violence is also implicitly not supposed to victimize - young children and teachers, overwhelmingly white, in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the US.
The lesson in political inertia and human disposability it taught - that even such people can be killed, that even their futures can be caught short, and that structures of exploitation and profit are ultimately indifferent even to them - was not news to many, many Americans.
You know what else happed in 2012, besides Sandy Hook? The killing of Trayvon Martin. That these two events are thought of and remembered as fundamentally separate by many Americans speaks volumes. For more on this, here's me in @nplusonemag nplusonemag.com/online-only/on…
Moreover, the massacre at Sandy Hook itself was also - like many mass shootings - first a domestic murder of a woman. And - which cannot be stated enough - the Sandy Hook massacre was made possible - at practically ever stage - by white supremacy and the impunity of white wealth.
I broke this down systematically way back in in 2014. My argument here is exhaustive but it is ultimately not particularly radical - since *authorities in Connecticut itself* said as much. carteblanchfield.com/2014/12/11/san…
Yes, it's dysphoric to see America normalize high-profile mass shootings in public space. To watch it not just normalize them, but monetize them, train children to expect them, even be in many ways responsible for them. For more on this, in @splinter_news splinternews.com/the-market-can…
@splinter_news Yes it is dysphoric to see these "keep happening." But the thing, this normalization is just the latest iteration of something that's already *been* happening, in many ways for a long, long time, and that America metabolizes and monetizes every damn day.
@splinter_news But until USers are willing to seriously confront how gun violence at all levels implicates hierarchies of oppression & inequality that are all about race, gender, & capital, all we'll do is develop an ever-more refined, decadent lexicon of despair, disavowal, & depoliticization.
