African Methodist Episcopal Church In Charleston, SC - USA.

This time is it really that different?

Jesus Christ and His Father, God, have always been absent in the mass shootings that have become a prosaic fact of death in America.

Only last year there were 283 shootings in which four or more people were killed. Jesus and His Father, God, were nowhere to be found. The US as a whole, meanwhile, has become newly sensitized to a new wave of racial violence, with growing activism around white police shootings of African Americans.

In April, video of a white policeman shooting Walter Scott – an unarmed African American – eight times in the back as he ran away in North Charleston, South Carolina, went viral. During that shooting too, Jesus Christ and His Father, God, were both absent.

Members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church gather to pray and mourn for those who died in the carnage.
Members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church gather to pray and mourn for those who died in the carnage.

Now, you get the point. Let us get to the reality.

Does the shooting of nine Black Christians in Charleston, not far from where Scott was killed by a white police man, in what the majority-white police there are now treating as a “hate crime” mark a doubling down on America’s twin pathologies of racism and guns?

Both are deeply rooted in America’s history since its founding – racism and guns: and it seems that neither one is going anywhere anytime soon.

The timing of this particular tragedy, given the heightened consciousness and activism around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, provides a particular lens through which to view this massacre.

But, what has racism got to do with guns?

Many African Americans however, are becoming fully aware that what they face in the 21st Century is not just racism, but White Terrorism itself. That new understanding may have everything to do with guns!

In the same way that Slavery, Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration terrorized the everyday lives of African Americans in centuries passed, White Terrorism reminds Black Communities that that threat to their lives since the founding of America has still not gone away.

But has the threat been made even more violent with the over-proliferation of guns in American society?

There are two issues here: Racism and the Second Amendment of the American constitution.

Racism isn’t just a social issue, it is an institutional one as well. The Second Amendment is a political issue and by implication, as much an institutional issue just as much. This is where Racism and Guns lock horns and where Jesus Christ and His Father, God, are nowhere to be found.

Objectively, they have as much of a connection as Monsanto, Carcinogenic weedicides and Cancer.

The analysis of the causes and solutions to racism is perhaps another subject that needs to be left to white Jesus and his father, the white God.

The concern is with the American Constitution and the way in which a certain class, Conservatives in America, ceaselessly and meretriciously seeks to separate the Second Amendment from the gun culture that continues to claim African American lives due to racism.

The other issue is the Liberals of America. They too seem to conflate every single societal issue with the Second Amendment under the guise of extending a helping hand to the African American communities that suffer most from both havocs – Racism and Guns!

When an individual crashes a car and kills one or more pedestrians through say, drug use, or what is later established to be irresponsible behaviour (using a mobile ‘phone, etc.), no sane observer would turn around and claim that, “The car killed those people.”

For two very good reasons: firstly, to avoid a free trip to the nearest mental hospital and, secondly, to avoid alignment with those medieval jurists who put pigs, horses and other farm animals on trial for injuring humans. It is the individual driving the car criminally/irresponsibly who has killed the pedestrians using a tool called a car.

A straightforward and incontrovertible argument, one might think, but one would be both wrong in the midst of either Conservatives or Liberals in the US.

Because as soon as the tool becomes not an everyday object which may be converted to deadly use by an individual’s criminal or irresponsible behavior, but a firearm, a strange thing happens in the camp of US Liberals: they turn around and claim that, far from being an inanimate object, a ‘gun’ is actually sentient and capable of volition: not the white man who did the hate crime – not the white man who did the killing!

Let’s see if they are right.

Since we are dealing with criminal acts, perhaps America’s legal apparatus could help us here: where does it see sentience and volition residing? Well, firstly, recollect how many times you have seen the firearm used in a shooting incident in the dock facing assault or manslaughter or murder charges?

Now, how many times you have seen the person who used that firearm facing those same charges?

Surprise: the sane have it by two falls and a submission – people kill people.

So, it seems that all those white inbred, redneck retards in the United States of America have one over on the metropolitan, sophisticated, and well-educated Libertards – people kill people!

Now let’s see why the Conservathieves of America are also delusional.

Of course, the US Libertard argument has never amounted to anything more than a transference mechanism to avoid talking about criminal white men who are terrorizing Black people, which is the real issue – firearms in the hands of crazy white people.

But the Conversathieve’s contention that ‘guns don’t kill people’ is neither always true.

Take the US Police Force for instance: an institution imbued with vast rights to carry and use any weapon, baring a nuclear bomb on citizens – at will of course, so long as they fear for their lives at any moment.

Take Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown, a Black boy of only 17, was shot dead by another white police man for absolutely no law enforcement reason.

Ferguson was more than 65 percent African American demographically, but its police force of 58 officers included only 2 African Americans. That is racism – an institutional one, of course! That Ferguson Police Force were not your regular white rednecks gallivanting the town for Black people.

Now, throw in weapons to these racist cops: all weapons, baring Atomic Bombs, and armored vehicles like the ones we saw in vigilante footages during the Ferguson protests, and you have a fine recipe for a racist institution to harm and kill innocent people, Black people, for absolutely no law enforcement reason.

So, yes, unlike what the Conservathieves and the Libertards would like to believe, Racism and Guns do cross paths and they both kill people at the same time!

Too many guns kill people, Black people too. White terrorist, ordinary or State/Federal uniformed, also kill Black people too many times with too many guns.

On the streets, in the Churches and in other public areas in the US, two things are still not absent: racists and guns. They don’t have to mix to cause the greatest harm. But when they do, and Jesus Christ and His Father, God, are absent, they cause unimaginable deaths to African Americans!

Racism and the Second Amendment’s Guns can be discussed as separate issues, but they are not mutually exclusive, because Jesus Christ and God are never ever there to stop the carnage when they mix. Ever!

5 COMMENTS

  1. When I first saw your article, I was amused. When I read it I was surprised. You combine your humour well with explaining away the over zealousness about Africans in Christianity. Your point is well made and perhaps this is the day I stopped going to Church and started doing something noteworthy of my Godgiven time. THANKS.

  2. Jesus and his Angels are missing whenever evil befalls the innocent. Why? Why? If Jesus and his father cannot come out and explain thus away then I am sorry, it is no faith to keep believing in people who never show up to protect me.

    • I think the rule of thumb in this world has always been – protect yourself. That I dont think has ever changed even before Pharaoh Akhenaten first introduced the world to a Supreme one God. If you were or are thought otherwise, you should by now know that you have been terribly lied to.

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