INHERENCY

Action is needed- America has reached a point where obsession with gun culture and violence is
now normalized; mass shootings have become routine. GIROUX1 15: Nine people were killed and seven wounded recently
in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Such shootings are more than another tragic expression of unchecked violence in the United States; they are
symptomatic of a society engulfed in fear, militarism, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos and a
growing disdain for human life. Sadly, this shooting is not an isolated incident. Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States this year alone,
proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed.
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here. In the United States, calls for liberal, Band-Aid reforms do not work in the face of the

more preschoolers are shot dead each year than police

officers are killed in the line of duty." (1) Mass violence in the United States has to be understood within a larger construction of the totality of the forces that produce it. Focusing merely
carnage taking place. "The United States sees an average of 92 gun deaths per day - and

on the more dramatic shootings misses the extent of the needless violence and murders that are taking place daily. US politicians now attempt to govern the effects of systemic violence while

war-like values have become the

organiz[ed]ing principles of [the] US society, producing an indifference to the common good,
compassion, a concern for others and equality. As the public collapses into the individualized values of a banal consumer culture and the lure
ignoring its underlying causes. State repression, unbridled self-interest, an empty consumerist ethos and

of private obsessions, US society flirts with forms of irrationality that are at the heart of everyday aggression and the withering of public life. US society is driven by unrestrained market values
in which economic actions and financial exchanges are divorced from social costs, further undermining any sense of social responsibility. In addition, a wasteful, giant military-industrial-

endless consumption of violence as entertainment and

its celebration of a pervasive gun culture, normalizes the everyday violence waged against Black youth,
immigrants, children fed into the school-to-prison pipeline and others considered disposable . US politicians now attempt to govern the effects of systemic
surveillance complex fueled by the war on terror, along with the United States'

violence while ignoring its underlying causes. Under such circumstances, a society saturated in violence gains credence when its political leaders have given up on the notion of the common
good, social justice and equality, all of which appear to have become relics of history in the United States. In the face of mass shootings, the public relations disimagination machine goes into
overdrive claiming that guns are not the problem, and that the causes of such violence can be largely attributed to people living with mentally illness. When in actuality, as two Vanderbilt
University researchers, Dr. Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish, publishing in the American Journal of Public Health, observed that: Fewer than 6 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings
in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness. Our research finds that across the board, the mentally ill are 60 to 120 percent more likely
than the average person to be the victims of violent crime rather than the perpetrators.... There are 32,000 gun deaths in the United States on average every year, and people are far more likely to
be shot by relatives, friends or acquaintances than they are by lone violent psychopaths. (2) It may not be an exaggeration to claim that the US government has blood on its hands because of the
refusal of Congress to rein in a gun lobby that produces a growing militarism that sanctions a love affair with the unbridled corporate institutions, financial interests and mass-produced cultures
of violence. The Oregon community college shooting is the 41st school shooting this year while there have been 142 incidents of violence on school properties since 2012. Yet, the violence
continues unchecked, all the while legitimated by the cowardly acts of politicians who refuse to enact legislation to curb the proliferation of guns or support measures as elementary as
background checks - which 88 percent of the American people support - or for that matter, ban large-capacity ammunition magazines and assault rifles. In part, this cowardly refusal on the part of
politicians is due to the fact that gun lobbyists pour huge amounts of money into the campaigns of politicians who support their interests. For example, in 2015, the gun lobby spent $5,697,429
while those supporting gun control paid out $867,601. In a New York Times op-ed, Gabrielle Giffords pointed out that the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the 2012 election cycle "spent
around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending."(3) Outside money does more than corrupt politics; it is also responsible for people being shot and killed. The culture of

Americans are obsessed with violence [and ]. They not only own nearly
have a love affair with powerful weaponry

violence cannot be abstracted from the business of violence. Many

300 million firearms, but also

such as 9mm Glock semiautomatic pistols and AR-15 assault rifles.
Collective anger, frustration, fear and resentment increasingly characterize a society in which people are out of work, young people cannot imagine a decent future, everyday behaviors are

a recipe for both random violence

and mass shootings; it makes such acts appear routine and commonplace. Fear has become a public relations
strategy used not only by the national security state but also by the gun industry. When you live in a country in which you are constantly bombarded by the
assumption that the government is the enemy of democracy and you are told that nobody can be trusted, and the discourse of hate, particularly against Black
youth, immigrants and gun control advocates , spews out daily from thousands of conservative radio stations and major TV networks, a climate of fear engulfs the country
reinforc[es]ing the belief that gun ownership is the only notion of safety in which people can believe in order to
criminalized, inequality in wealth and income are soaring and the police are viewed as occupying armies. This is not only

live as free human beings. Under such circumstances, genuine fears and concerns for safety are undermined. These include the fear of poverty, lack of meaningful employment, the absence of
decent health care, poor schools, police violence and the militarization of society, all of which further legitimate and fuel the machinery of insecurity, violence and death. Fear degenerates into
willful ignorance while any semblance of rationality is erased, especially around the logic of gun control. As Adam Gopnik observes: Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end
bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measles - not perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that it's been taken seriously and tried at length. These
lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party won't allow that to change, and the party won't allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid

the violence we see in the United

is "a political choice we make that allows this to happen." While taking aim at the gun lobby, especially the NRA, what Obama fails to address is that extreme violence is systemic in US
society, has become the foundation of politics and must be understood within a broader historical, economic, cultural and political context. To be precise,
fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns. (4) President Obama is right in stating that
States

politics has become an extension of violence driven by a culture of fear, cruelty and hatred legitimated by the politicians bought and sold by the gun lobby and other related militaristic interests.
Moreover, violence is now treated as a sport, a pleasure-producing form of commerce, a source of major profits for the defense industries and a corrosive influence upon US democracy. And as
such it is an expression of a deeper political and ethical corruption in US society. As Rich Broderick insists, US society "embraces a soulless free-market idolatry in which the value of everything,
including human beings, is determined by the bottom line" and in doing so this market fundamentalism and its theater of cruelty and greed perpetuate a spectacle of violence fed by an echo
chamber "of paranoia, racism, and apocalyptic fantasies rampant in the gun culture." (5) The lesson here is that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from the business of violence.
Murdering children in schools, the streets, in jails, detention centers and other places increasingly deemed unsafe has become something of a national pastime. One wonders how many innocent

the revenue made by the $13.5 billion gun industry, with a $1.5 billion profit, are
fuel[s]ing a national bloodbath by using lobbyists to pay off politicians, wage a mammoth propaganda campaign and induct young children into the culture of
children have to die in the United States before it becomes clear that

1 Giroux, Henry A. Murder, Incorporated: Guns and the Growing Culture of Violence in the US. Truth-Out. October 7, 2015. // LHP MK

violence. (6) What is clear is that as more guns are on the streets and in the hands of people a savage killing machine is unleashed on those who are largely poor, Black and vulnerable.

The

widespread availability of guns is the reason for the shooting and killing[s] of children and adults in Chicago, Boston, Ferguson,
New York City and in other major cities. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports that "in 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional
shootings. This is the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour. [In addition], 73,505 Americans were treated in hospital emergency departments for nonfatal gunshot wounds in 2010." (7) And the toll of gun violence on young people is truly heartbreaking with almost 30,000 young people killed in a 10-year period, which amounts "to nearly
3,000 kids shot to death in a typical year."(8) According to a Carnegie-Knight News21 program investigation, For every US soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13
children were shot and killed in the United States. More than 450 kids didn't make it to kindergarten. Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a
car. Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead. A News21 investigation of child and youth deaths in the United States between 2002 and 2012 found that at least 28,000 children and
teens 19-years-old and younger were killed with guns. Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in the United States. (9) Even worse, the firearms
industry is pouring millions into recruiting and educational campaigns designed to both expose children to guns at an early age and to recruit them as lifelong gun enthusiasts. Reporting on such

The industry's strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on
sponsor[es]ing semiautomatic-handgun[s]
competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game[s] that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the Web sites of
their makers.... Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while
efforts for The New York Times, Mike McIntire writes:

hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for "junior shooters" and

invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs: that firearms can teach "life skills" like responsibility, ethics and citizenship. (10) As the United States moves from a
welfare state to a warfare state, state violence becomes normalized. The United States' moral compass and its highest democratic ideals have begun to wither, and the institutions that were once
designed to help people now serve to largely suppress them. Gun laws, social responsibility and a government responsive to its people matter. We must end the dominance of gun lobbyists, the
reign of money-controlled politics, the proliferation of high levels of violence in popular culture and the ongoing militarization of US society. At the same time, it is crucial, as many in the
movement for Black lives have stated, that we refuse to endorse the kind of gun control that criminalizes young people of color. Gun violence in the United States is inextricably tied to economic
violence as when hedge fund managers invest heavily in companies that make high-powered automatic rifles, 44-40 Colt revolvers, laser scopes for semiautomatic handguns and expanded
magazine clips. (11) The same mentality that trades in profits at the expense of human life gives the United States the shameful title of being the world's largest arms exporter. According to the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "Washington sold 31% of all global imports during the 2010-2014 period."(12) This epidemic of violence connects the spreading of violence
abroad with the violence waged at home. It also points to the violence reproduced by politicians who would rather support the military-industrial-gun complex and arms industries than address

Rather than arming people with more guns, criminalizing every aspect of social behavior,
militarizing the police and allowing the gun lobby to sanction putting semiautomatic weapons in the hands of children and adults, the most immediate action that can
be taken is to institute effective gun control laws. As Bernardine Dohrn has argued: We want gun control that sanctions
manufacturers, distributors and adults who place, and profit from, deadly weapons in the possession of youth. We want military-style
the most basic needs and social problems faced by Americans.

weaponry banned. We want smaller schools with nurses and social workers, librarians and parent volunteers - all of which are shown to contribute to less disruption and less violence. Let's
promote gun-control provisions and regulations that enhance teaching and learning as well as justice and safety for children, not those that will further incarcerate, punish and demonize young
people of color. We've been there before. (13) And Dohrn's suggestions would be only the beginning of real reform, one that goes right to the heart of eliminating the violence at the core of US
society. The United States has become a society that is indifferent to the welfare of its citizens, as the drive for profits has replaced any vestige of social and moral responsibility. Violence has
arisen from the breakdown of public space, the erasure of public goods and a growing disdain for the common good. Gratuitous violence is no longer merely a sport or form of entertainment; it
has become central to a society that trades on fear and fetishizes hyperviolent and punitive practices and social relations. Brutal, masculine authority now rules US society and wages a war

When violence becomes an organizing

principle [and] of society, the fabric of a democracy begins to unravel, suggesting that the United States is at war with itself. When politicians
against women's reproductive rights, civil liberties, poor Black and Brown youth and Mexican immigrants.

refuse out of narrow self and financial interests to confront the conditions that create such violence, they have blood on their hands.

Impact:
The idea of warfare shapes policy making and epistemic knowledge production- it is engrained
within our societys culture. Before we can debate ethics we need to get rid of this dark cloud.

OFFENSE
Ownership of a handgun relates to broad structures of militarism that prime us to act violentlywe need to view the handgun as a symbol of violence.

TRIVAGO2: Habitual gun carrying may serve to prime[s] us to experience anger. Priming is a psychological phenomenon that describes
much research has
demonstrated that even seemingly innocuous encounters with material that has a hostile
meaning can give rise to hostile ideas. The habit of carrying a gun may repeatedly trigger the non-conscious activation of
the way that some initial thoughts or cues are apt to bring about certain other related ideas or conceptual schema; in the case of anger and aggression,

thoughts and images-say, of armed violent criminals preying on old ladies-that are either associated with or partly constitutive of anger. Such repeated non-conscious activation may
function as a primer for experiencing anger. In addition, the repeated exposure to the gun itself may also lead to increased anger . In a well-known and
controversial study, researchers discovered what is known as the weapons effect, that is, the increase in aggression that is experienced by those
from whom guns have an aggressive meaning. In other words, the theory holds that people who associate guns with violence will experience an increase in
aggression upon being exposed to a gun. Such anger-priming stimuli may lead to a disposition to experience anger either too intensely, too quickly, too frequently, or all of these. The first point

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about intensity may be easier to see if we examine, for a moment, the relationship between anger and harm. The ancient perspective on anger focuses on the desire for revenge, which, though
questionable qua definition of anger, does seem to get something right about the phenomenology of anger.

Anger provokes in us, even when one does not act upon it, a desire to

inflict harm. In the case of someone motivated to carry a gun, the anger is likely directed at some criminal, and the imagined vengeance involves a reversal of victimization scenario:
the criminal is at the mercy of the gun-carrying law-abiding citizen. When the desire to inflict harm is part of a persons anger, it is reasonable to suppose that the greater the harm one is willing
to imagine inflicting, the more intense ones anger is. Thus, it would seem that

a willingness to threaten or to commit deadly violence will involve a high level

anger, and associated thoughts may prime one for intense experiences of anger. The second and third points about the quickness and frequency with which one becomes angry are related
to the fact that thought associated with or constitutive of anger are close to conscious awareness. Since this is the case, other, perhaps even unrelated, triggers might generate an
angry reaction in cases when anger is not warranted, triggers might generate an angry reaction is cases when anger is not warranted, or not yet warranted, because, for
of

example the agent does not yet have sufficiently complete information. Thus, one might become angry too quickly. This anger reflex may result in experiencing anger too frequently, since a
person may become angry in cases when he or she shouldnt. Further, occasionally one may experience actual anger in putting on ones guns, and so in that minimal sense, the habit will increase
the experience of anger. The habit may thus lead to the development of bad character traits and hinder the development of objective goods. One may, in short, develop a vicious disposition with
respect to anger, namely, irascibility. Not only will a[n] chronically angry person [will] have trouble developing certain other virtues, but [and] the experience of anger is itself painful and can be
damaging [damage his/her] to ones relationship as well. Some studies have indicated that these negative emotions have a king of mutually reinforcing relationship to one another. In addition, the
negative affect, or bad feeling that accompanies these emotions may serve to cause aggressive behavior. Assuming the aggressive behavior is inappropriate, in virtue ethical terms, the bad feeling
that accompanies negative emotions may inhibit virtue or lead to vice. As I say above, anger is sometimes an appropriate response, but one can also see that anger is a dangerous emotion to be

anger is appropriate, it may nonetheless hinder[s] eudaimonia-consider the case of oppressed

people, who are just angered by their oppression, yet are still blocked from eudaimonia in part because the appropriate
level of anger is so high as to be morally debilitating. This means that, even in cases where the anger may be justified, if the level of anger is high enough, there is
still good (virtue ethical reasons to forestall ones anger, or at least, to attempt to moderate it.
courting in oneself. It may be that, thought

Private ownership of handguns fosters violence and invokes individuals to dehumanize

those who appear to be threatening. Affirm to deconstruct the symbol of handgun
ownership. TRIVAGO3: For the virtue ethicist, virtue is not something that I can accomplish by myself; rather, it involves cultivating certain kinds of
relationships and living in a certain kind of community. For example, a person could not flourish if everyone she knew used her for profit, or if she lived in a deeply
repressive and sexist society.56 What effect does cultivating the willingness to use a gun in self-defense have on one's attitude toward other people, most of whom will not in fact be criminals? As

the willingness to kill is enabled by a number of mechanisms that serve to dehumanize the potential
target." The habit of carrying a gun may involve[s] non-conscious representations of a generic "criminal" as evil and/or subhuman.
Such repeated dehumanization may have deleterious effects on one's character by inhibit[s]ing the development of
virtuous character traits, enabling the development of vicious character traits, and adversely affect-ing moral deliberation and perception. This dehumanization
can be seen as operative in two ways. First, the discourse surrounding justification for gun carrying
refers to "criminals," not as individual moral subjects, but as subhuman threats to the safety of moral agents. As I note above, these attitudes are
likely to be mediated by social identities , that is, one will be more likely to dehumanize African Americans. Thus, the "criminal" is likely to have
a certain "look." Consider Lott's description of what criminals are like: To put it bluntly, criminals are not typical citizens. As is well known, young males from their mid-teens to
much research has demonstrated,

mid-thirties commit a disproportionate share of crime, but even this categorization can be substantially narrowed. We know that criminals tend to have low IQs as well as atypical personalities.
For ex-ample, delinquents generally tend to be more 'assertive, unafraid, aggressive, uncontrolled, unconventional, extroverted and poorly socialized'. . . Other evidence indicates that criminals
tend to be more impulsive and put relatively little weight on future events. Finally, we cannot ignore the unfortunate fact that crime (particularly violent crime and especially murder) is
disproportionately committed against blacks by blacks." This picture assimilates criminals and psychopaths, who lack empathy and as a matter of fact have no qualms about harming other
humans.59 The criminal is thus so deeply different and "other" that heand it is almost always a "he"is simply not afforded the same moral consideration as "regular" humans. Collins claims

Second, in order
for handgun[s] carrying to be effective, one must be willingor think one is willingto use deadly force should it
become necessary. In On Killing, Grossman argues that successfully training someone to become willing to kill involves several distancing mechanisms, all of which
that this picture of the criminal, while picking up on certain statistically relevant correlations, is grossly overdrawn and unhelpful for predicting violence f

involve[s] dehumanizing the potential target[s].6' The distancing mechanisms include "cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences"; "moral distance, which takes into consideration the
kind of intense belief in moral superiority"; and "social distance, which considers the impact of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human.-62 These distancing mechanisms are

the psychological
mechanisms that enable killing bypass the resistance by dehumanizing, in one way or another, the
potential "target:. In order to become willing to kill another human being even in self-defenseit is
psychologically enabling to see that person as sub- or non-human.64 The core point here is that to the extent that one is
meant to overcome our strong resistance to serious violence, and this resistance is a significant feature of our moral psychological makeup.63 In short,

successful, on one's own, at distancing oneself from others in preparing to commit serious violence, one is thereby and to that extent morally harming oneself. One does so precisely by
compromising one's own ability to recognize the humanity in others, thereby undermining one's capacity for empathic concern. A reduced capacity for empathic concern will affect all sorts of
other-regarding virtues, since they depend on perceiving the other as a fellow human. One may become callous and insensitive, when confronted with the suffering of these others; one may
become cruel and malicious in what one says about them and hopes for them; one may become spiteful and vindic-tive when confronted with wrongdoing that "they" have committed.

3 Franco V. Trivingo Guns and Virtue: The Virtue Ethical Case Against Gun Carrying Public Affairs Quarterly Volume 27 Number 4 10/2013 //
LHP JN

Conversely, several virtuous character traits may become harder to develop and impossible to fully realize: compassion, sympathy, benevolence, and kindness come to mind. A practiced attitude
of dehumanization toward a certain set of people, the violent criminals, whoever one imagines them to be, is likely to have deleterious effects on moral deliberation and moral perception, which
may end up fostering vicious character traits and inhibiting the development of virtuous character traits. In short, one will not be able to afford others the proper amount of moral consideration.
To recognize basic human dignity from a virtue ethical perspective means that one affords others due consideration in one's moral outlook and deliberations about what to do. One must perceive

The deleterious
effects of gun carrying [are] on moral deliberation and moral perception can be seen as operative on two levels. First, such
dehumanization cannot be done with sufficient fineness of grain to avoid dehumanizing those who are only
superficially similar to the violent criminals. Since one's notion of the "criminal" is likely to be mediated
by social identity and thus drawn in an overly broad way, one will develop bad habits of deliberation with respect
to those who may "look like" one of "the criminals." These mechanisms are also likely to be operative at the non-conscious level, that
others and their goals, values, and ideals as morally relevant and salient features of one's own moral situation. One needs to see them as having some basic moral value."

is, one may not be aware that one is, in moral deliberation, implicitly denying the humanity of those who are only superficially similar to the criminal. One's moral perception may be affected in

Second, even if one's notion of the criminal is accurate

and somehow manages to avoid[s] undue generalization, it is clear that the criminal deserves some moral consideration.
The dehumanization that enables violence would seem to go too far in the den[y]ial of moral consideration to
the criminal. This may be manifested in expressed attitudes of indifference to what happens to criminals, how they are or have been treated, or, as we have seen, the belief that they
such a way that one simply fails to see certain groups of people as human moral agents.

ought to be treated more harshly or even killed.

Even benign motivations for private handgun ownership like self-defense construct the world as
a violent and threatening place from which defense is required, normalizing militaristic violence
and eroding the intersubjective ethics that are key to ending structural violence.

TRIVAGO4:

Habitual gun carrying seems not only to manifest[s] social distrust , but to contribute to it as well, thus further
damaging the community. It is a manifestation of social distrust in that the motivation for gun carrying
assumes at the start that there are dangerous and untrustworthy people out there who are likely enough to
attack that one is warranted in carrying a concealed weapon. Habitual gun carrying contributes to social distrust because the agent will not participate in society as a trusting member, refuses
to accept a certain level of vulnerability, denies that trust is warranted, and makes no effort to cultivate trust. As I noted above, carrying a gun produces a bias that
increases the likelihood that one perceives others to be armed . Research suggests that this bias is not distributed evenly it seems that people
are more likely to perceive African Americans (than others) as armed. In short, one ends up distrusting certain socially or racially identifiable groups of people more than others. Since a
number of social, cooperative goods are enabled by social trust, it is no small observation that gun carrying erodes it . Social trust seems to stand[s] in a
causal relationship with institutional trust, or trust in institutions. Some theories of social trust indicate that efficient institutions produce social trust and that socially trusting individuals

. Gun carriers are more likely to believe that the police are ineffective
they therefore need to depend on themselves. The relationship between a lack of trust in societys protection measures
and the perceived likelihood of crime are interdependent . In a telling observation, Lizotte and Bourda claim that [e]ven in the context of a high crime
contribute to efficient institutions. One sees this manifested in the research on gun carrying
in protecting them and that

rate, large-scale reductions in gun ownership for protection could [happen] be brought about by convincing individuals that the criminal justice system can and will protect them. This shows that
trust in institutional effectiveness and social distrust are related, and it seems that at least some gun carriers are responsive to the perception of increased institutional effectiveness. However, it
suggests that gun carrying also contributes to the perception of institutional ineffectiveness, such that social distrust and distrust in institutions seem mutually reinforcing. The question of whether
social distrust is warranted, or what level of social trust is warranted, is a tricky one precisely because of the difficulties with establishing the conditions for reasonable trust. One can imagine that

If accepting vulnerability is a necessary condition of social

trust, then the person who thinks that vulnerability is per se unacceptable will not be capable of trusting.
some gun carriers will be impervious to evidence about institutional effectiveness.

The handgun is a belligerent symbol that justifies independence from those around us, from
adolescence we believe they represent independence from others which justifies violence.
BRAMAN5: Used to wrest national independence and to tame the western frontier, guns are thought to resonate as
symbols of "honor," "courage," "chivalry," and "individual self- sufficiency."' ; These same associations also make gun
possession an evocative token of masculinity; the custom of awarding an adolescent boy his "first
4

Franco V. Trivingo Guns and Virtue: The Virtue Ethical Case Against Gun Carrying Public Affairs Quarterly Volume 27 Number 4
10/2013//LHP JN

Kahan, Dan M. & Braman, Donald. More Statistics, Less persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions. University of
Pennsylvania Law Review. April 2003. //LHP MK

gun" has been characterized as "the bar mitzvah of the rural WASP,"" a "veritable rite[] of passage that certifie [s] [his] arrival at
manhood. ''38 As the tools of the trade for both the military and the police, guns are also emblems of state authority, increasing the
appeal[ing] of owning them to individuals who hold harshly condemnatory attitudes toward social
nonconformists and law breakers."' But inverting these meanings, other individuals find guns repugnant. Just as they signify traditionally
masculine virtues to some citizens, so too guns signify patriarchy and homophobia to others.0 While some see the decision to own a
gun as expressing an attitude of self- reliance, others see it as express[es]ing distrust of and indifference toward others:
"Every handgun owned in America is an implicit declaration of war on one's neighbor .""' For
those who fear guns, the historical reference points are not the American Revolution or the settling of the frontier, but the post-bellum period, in which the privilege of owning guns in the South
was reserved to whites, and the 1960s, when gun-wielding assassins killed Medgar Evans, John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. To these citizens,

guns are

emblems not of legitimate state authority, but of racism and reaction."' From the historical and ethnographic literature, one can infer not only that the gun
control controversy is culturally grounded, but that the cultural fault lines that divide Americans on this issue overlap sub- stantially with the ones featured in the cultural theory of risk. The
association of guns with traditional gender roles and with state authority should make gun control anathema to individuals of a relatively hier- archical orientation. Those of an egalitarian
orientation, in contrast, should support

gun control as a means of affirm[s]ing gender and racial equality. Persons of a relatively individualist

orientation should op- pose gun control, which they are likely to see as denigrating the ideal of individual self-reliance. By the same token, individuals who are less inclined toward individualism

gun control in order to express[es] trust in, solidarity with, and collective responsibility for
the well-being of their fellow citizens. These are the hypotheses that we decided to test.
should favoi

The handgun culture of America normalizes violence and silences movements vote aff to reject
the handgun as a symbol of violence.
RAPOPORT6: In this process, the transformation of means into ends is especially noteworthy. Thus, violence, which initially may have been a means (of survival or
of imposing dominance or of seizing plunder) becomes a value in its own right by being constantly reinforced, while inhibitions of violence
(which may be natural to human beings) are themselves inhibited by social disapproval . If professional fighters occupy a high position in a stratified society
so that membership in the profession is a matter of pride, additional positive attitudes toward violence are reinforced internally as well as by approval of peers. For example, in feudal Japan only
noble families and the Samurai were permitted to have surnames. The Samurais sword was more than a weapon. It was a symbol of status that set the warrior totally apart from common people.

A similar mentality [has] seems to

have gripped a large sector of the American population , except that the handgun rather than the sword has
become the fetish. For example, attempts to restrict the possession of handguns have been
energetically existed by well-organized lobbies opposing gun control. Perusing the literature put
out by these groups, one gets the impression that a pistol or a revolver is identified by the American male with his
manhood and that being deprived of one is something like castration. In the 1980s, one southern town eventually making it mandatory for each
When firearms were introduced into Japan, the Samurai did not adopt them. Swordsmanship had become a passion, a focus of the libido.

family to own a gun. Status, pride, and glorification of violence frequently go together. Conceptions of gentlemanly behavior appropriate to an army officer in nineteenth-century Europe usually
involved an obligation to defend ones honor (or the honor of a lady) by violence. Challenging to a duel in response to an insult was obligatory, as was the acceptance of a challenge. The
penalty for shirking this obligation was ostracism. However duels could be fought only with social equals, implying that deigning to fight with someone to the death, if necessary, was a gesture of
respect.

For clarity, I defend the res word for word; all handguns ought to be banned in all parts of the
United States. I might concede to reasonable T interpretations in cross-ex, but I wont concede to
anything that makes my case offense void.

FRAMEWORK
Therefore, the role of the judge is to reject militarism and the normalization of violence. The
judge should use the ballot to vote for non-violent discursive presentations- we need to use
discourse to get rid of militarism, silence just allows the violence to persist-the 1AC allows us to
6 Rapoport, Anatol. The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict. 1997. Transaction Publishers. Page 178. // LHP MK

get closer to solving the issue. WILLIAM7: From a pacifist perspective or, even more generally, from a nonviolent perspective, much
discourse that calls for an end to violence and war or that calls for the establishment of
peace and social justice actually places a primacy on ends over means. When the end is
primary, nonviolence may be practiced only so long as it is effective. For the pacifist and
the practitioner of nonviolence, the primary commitment is to the means. The commitment
to nonviolence requires that the achievement of political goals is secondary. Political goals
must be foregone or at least postponed when they cannot be achieved nonviolently . Various activities
promote the pursuit of the respect, cooperation and understanding needed for positive peace and social justice and for the genuinely pacific discourse that is an integral part of them.
Linguistically, these activities go beyond the mere removal from discourse of terms that convey biases based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Open dialogue, especially face-to-face
conversation, is one of the most effective ways of experiencing that the other is not so alien or alienating. Beyond having political leaders of various nations meet, we need cultural and
educational exchanges, as well as trade agreements among businesses and foreign travel by citizens. We can come to regard cultural diversity in the expression of race, gender, class, and sexual
orientation as making up the harmonies and melodies that together create the song of humanity. Just as creative and appreciated cooks use a wide variety of herbs and spices to keep their dishes
from being bland, so too can we move from an image of a culture with diverse components as in a melting pot to one of a stew that is well seasoned with a variety of herbs and spices. A pacific

While linguistic violence often relies on

authoritarian, monological, aggressive and calculative methods, a positively nonviolent
discourse is democratic, dialogleal, receptive, and mediative. A positively nonviolent
discourse is not passive in the sense of avoiding engagement; it is pacific in the sense of
seek[s]ing to actively build, from domestic to international levels, lasting peace and justice.
A positively nonviolent discourse provides a way of perceiving and communicating that
frees us to the diversity and open-endedness of life rather than the sameness and
senselessness of violence. A positively nonviolent discourse can provide the communicative
means to overcome linguistic violence that does not contradict or compromise its goal at
any point during its pursuit. The first step is breaking our silence concerning the many
forms of violence. We need to recognize that often silence is violence; frequently, unless we
break the silence, we are being complicitous to the violence of the situation. However, in
breaking the silence, our aim should be to avoid counter-violence , in its physical forms and in its verbal forms. Efforts to
discourse that expresses such an affirmation of diversity needs to be an understood language of inclusion.

advance peace and justice should occupy the space between silence and violence. Linguistic violence can be overcome, but the care and vigilance of the positive practice of physical and
linguistic nonviolence is needed if the gains are to be substantive, rather than merely formal, and if the goals of nonviolence are to be equally operative in the means whereby we overcome
linguistic violence and social injustice.

This means we look to the structure and intent of actions since discursive representation doesnt
care about consequences only the intent and the way about carrying out an action. Intent over
consequence since we need to analyze the structure of action through discourse in order to rid
ourselves of the dark cloud that is militarism before we can focus on the outcomes of our
policies.
Fighting against militarism needs constant discussion to break the barrier that has been formed in
pedagogy as well as our culture.
Alternatives to this role of the ballot are not necessary, since that would moot 6 minutes of the
AC and give the neg more ground.
Militarism is the worst impact- it normalizes other forms of structural violence and proliferates
oppression.

William C. Gay, Professor of Philosophy at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1998 (The Practice of Linguistic NonViolence, Peace Review, Volume 10, Issue 4, December, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Elite)

SCHEPER-HUGHES8: This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to this anthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized,
bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in
Mayor Dalys version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly
working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal
bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US inner city to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class,
racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34).

Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between

wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the little violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our
attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are
often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence
continuum comprised of a multitude of small wars and invisible genocides (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics,
emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which

humans are capable of reduc[e]ing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and
assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies
that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990;
Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal
times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of genocide into spaces and

and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to

sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily
enacted as normative behavior by ordinary good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the
corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (

mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39),
constitute the small wars and invisible genocides to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC,
and New York City. These are invisible genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to
perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieus partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his
concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of normal social practices - in the architecture of homes, in
gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the
violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglias notion of peacetime crimes - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime

Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary,
everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme
context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization
and peacetime violence.

border raids on illegal aliens versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence
make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal stability is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied strangle-holds.
Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the
government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial
complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of
the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure
for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the normative socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African
American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a
defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocid[[e]al acts and policies possible (under adverse political
or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization,
depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is,
perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamins view of late modern history as a chronic state of emergency (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that
enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e.,
between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other total institutions. Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of
violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against
categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently
abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and
ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to pseudo- speciation as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to
genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and
misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands
of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who
celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and
routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by symbolic violence, the violence that is often
nus-recognized for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the
hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes. Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in
courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social
practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor
sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42;
see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and
physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to
be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of
illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes (Nader 1997b) that assault basic
human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the
discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass
violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators,
collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the
family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military.

They harbor the early warning signs (Charney 1991), the

(Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of
Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)

priming (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the genocidal continuum (as we call it) that
push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support
and humane care to vulnerable social parasites (the nursing home elderly, welfare queens, undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximumsecurity prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).

And, discussion of structural violence comes first- people are often excluded and their agency is
often seen as irrelevant. Before we can discuss ethics, we need to ensure everyone has a seat at
the table.
WINTER AND LEIGHTON9:
Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it,
questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to
structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that

processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups.

our normal perceptual/cognitive

Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be

. We do not seem to be
able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who
are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in
some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome
of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to
oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point
out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation , and build systematic ways to mitigate its
instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant

effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to

the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed
structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by
reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that

reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism,
and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace.

9 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter "Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century." 1999