#Or fears of perpetuating the cycles of violence that have been enacted on me

[coralineandthesapphicfantastic]

having OCD is the worst. For instance, did you know that I have recurring fears that if I step on a crack in the sidewalk, or the combined angle of a crack where it meets another, that I might lose all feeling in my legs, leaving me paralysed from the waist down or dead? Like I'm living a child's superstition game for my life? Every time I leave the house?

[sophiamenet]

Naruto

I had never watched Naruto before this and given how extensive it is I don’t think I’ll ever watch it in its entirety. I did however enjoy the few assigned episodes. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the show in all honesty. I of course knew of it and its popularity, but the popularity of the show and its fanbase made me not really keen on ever trying to watch it. The first episode changed my mind, as it immediately began with complex ideas of Naruto’s social exclusion and prejudice he experiences. He is excluded and ridiculed because of something he cannot control. He is a child ostricized by adults and children alike, a conditioned prejudice within those around him that mimics discrimination in our real world - most comparably racial discrimination and the socialized generational hatred and misunderstanding of minority groups in society. Naruto experiences this because he has the spirit of the Nine-tailed fox sealed within him, which are often depicted as evil and extremely powerful beings. Naruto is then treated differently from the rest, isolated due to the fear of others and the misunderstandings of society. This fear is difficult to uproot and reform. I think it is because of this that rather than radically changing society and their flawed view of him, Naruto grows into a powerful individual to rise above the preconceived notions others have of him. He experiences extreme hardships and difficulty to gain the recognition and respect of others, giving into the inflexible boundaries of the society in which he exists. This to be resembles module two and the anti-utopian argument against emancipation from capitalism, in which freedom from the system feels impossible because a capitalist system is all we know. In Naruto a similar idea in conveyed in which the challenging and disbandment of society’s prejudices feels like an impossible thing, and not something Naruto even considers. He functions properly within the system.

This is countered by Nagato or Pain who because of his own trauma as a result of their society resolves to fight against the system of hatred and violence. As this is all he knows and was raised within, Pain recognizes the pain he has experienced and been caused and then perpetuates this same hatred and violence back onto the system and innocent people. Instead, he continues the cycle of abuse, as he is unable to precieve an alternate way to enact justice and heal outside of continuing the cycle. Naruto breaks this cycle in his opposition to Pain, which I found to be interesting given that his main character arc and his progression from childhood fails to break or even oppose the system/cycle. In relation to himself and the discrimination he experienced no cycle is broken and no significant social change is made.

[gatheringbones]

[“This is how childhood works for so many men, and John was no different. His father valued “discipline,” much as my grandfather, who punished my dad when he was a kid, and beat into John the sense that to be a man was to be unemotional, and that any violation of that expectation was to be met with retribution.

That violence then serves as the acceptable means of communication for men, which is problematic because, as one of the world’s foremost experts on violence, Dr. James Gilligan, has maintained, “the emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence.” Because men are taught that they should not have emotions, and that any violation should result in violent reprimand, they are caught in a perpetual cycle. They socialize their children with violence, thus perpetuating the violence moving forward. Then, when they suffer inevitable strain due to their inability to hold themselves up to impossible standards, that shame manifests itself in violence.

They are left with only the ability to express themselves through anger and violence because, as Victor J. Seidler writes in Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory, “a whole range of ‘softer’ emotions like sadness, tenderness, fear, are often displaced into anger because this can be seen as affirming rather than threatening our masculine identity.” With emotions like sadness, tenderness, and fear being gendered, not to mention a whole range of more complicated actions that rely on those baseline emotions’ being not only accepted but put into action, like empathy or intimacy, men who practice traditional masculinity are left with little way to express themselves other than to lash out. In fact, a term has been coined to explain the condition: normative male alexithymia. The argument here is that men have been taught and conditioned so much to hide and deny their feelings that they’ve actually lost the ability to communicate them, meaning they are more likely to express themselves through anger and violence than words.

Again, this is in no way an excuse for what my stepfather, John, did. If I were to see him in real life now, I’d love nothing more than to beat the living hell out of him. In researching this book, I was reacquainted with an intense hatred I’d held for years, and wanted to find him and seek retribution for what he had done to my mother and me, but it’s important to examine the factors that contributed to his behavior in an effort to address these issues in a real and meaningful way because, as long as we raise our boys to believe that emotions are unmasculine, or that they are signs of weakness, and as long as we use violence as a means of enforcement, we’re going to continue raising men who abuse their partners and their children, and who often react to economic shame by enacting violence against others.

John was a living embodiment of just how messed up a working-class man could be. He went to a job he hated, suffered indignities he couldn’t process psychologically for fear of being less of a man, and then brought home that stress and took it out on his family. In the process, to make up for his own inadequacies, he controlled his wife socially and economically, ensuring that his male privilege and patriarchal entitlement, those saving graces of an untenable masculine system, were still entrenched. He suffered in silence and then made damn sure those around him suffered as well.”]

jared yates sexton, from the man they wanted me to be: toxic masculinity and a crisis of our own making

[djgblogger-blog]

The American public has power over the gun business - why doesn't it use it?

http://bit.ly/2Exdvoa

Attendees attend a candlelight vigil for the victims of a shooting at a Florida school. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee

As teenagers in Parkland, Florida, dressed for the funerals of their friends – the latest victims of a mass shooting in the U.S. – weary outrage poured forth on social media and in op-eds across the country. Once again, survivors, victims’ families and critics of U.S. gun laws demanded action to address the never-ending cycle of mass shootings and routine violence ravaging American neighborhoods.

The fourteen children and three adults shot dead on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were casualties of the nation’s 30th mass shooting this year – defined by the Gun Violence Archive as involving at least four victims including the injured – and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. A question on many minds is whether this massacre will finally compel Washington to act. Few commentators seem to believe so.

If advocates for reform despair, I can understand. The politics seem intractable. It’s easy to feel powerless.

But what I’ve learned from a decade of studying the history of the arms trade has convinced me that the American public has more power over the gun business than most people realize. Taxpayers have always been the arms industry’s indispensable patrons.

Gun maker Simeon North made this flintlock pistol around 1813. Balefire/Shutterstock.com

Washington’s patronage

The U.S. arms industry’s close alliance with the government is as old as the country itself, beginning with the American Revolution.

Forced to rely on foreign weapons during the war, President George Washington wanted to ensure that the new republic had its own arms industry. Inspired by European practice, he and his successors built public arsenals for the production of firearms in Springfield and Harper’s Ferry. They also began doling out lucrative arms contracts to private manufacturers such as Simeon North, the first official U.S. pistol maker, and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin.

The government provided crucial startup funds, steady contracts, tariffs against foreign manufactures, robust patent laws, and patterns, tools and know-how from federal arsenals.

The War of 1812, perpetual conflicts with Native Americans and the U.S.-Mexican War all fed the industry’s growth. By the early 1850s, the United States was emerging as a world-class arms producer. Now-iconic American companies like those started by Eliphalet Remington and Samuel Colt began to acquire international reputations. Even the mighty gun-making center of Great Britain started emulating the American system of interchangeable parts and mechanized production.

This is an advertisement for a Remington rifle in the Army and Navy Journal in 1871. Army and Navy Journal

Profit in war and peace

The Civil War supercharged America’s burgeoning gun industry.

The Union poured huge sums of money into arms procurement, which manufacturers then invested in new capacity and infrastructure. By 1865, for example, Remington had made nearly US$3 million producing firearms for the Union. The Confederacy, with its weak industrial base, had to import the vast majority of its weapons.

The war’s end meant a collapse in demand and bankruptcy for several gun makers. Those that prospered afterward, such as Colt, Remington and Winchester, did so by securing contracts from foreign governments and hitching their domestic marketing to the brutal romance of the American West.

While peace deprived gun makers of government money for a time, it delivered a windfall to well capitalized dealers. That’s because within five years of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the War Department had decommissioned most of its guns and auctioned off some 1,340,000 to private arms dealers, such as Schuyler, Hartley and Graham. The Western Hemisphere’s largest private arms dealer at the time, the company scooped up warehouses full of cut-rate army muskets and rifles and made fortunes reselling them at home and abroad.

A soldier fires the Sig Sauer P320, which the Army has chosen as its new standard pistol. U.S. Army

More wars, more guns

By the late 19th century, America’s increasingly aggressive role in the world insured steady business for the country’s gun makers.

The Spanish American War brought a new wave of contracts, as did both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the dozens of smaller conflicts that the U.S. waged around the globe in the 20th and early 21st century. As the U.S. built up the world’s most powerful military and established bases across the globe, the size of the contracts soared.

Consider Sig Sauer, the New Hampshire arms producer that made the MCX rifle used in the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre. In addition to arming nearly a third of the country’s law enforcement, it recently won the coveted contract for the Army’s new standard pistol, ultimately worth $350 million to $580 million.

Colt might best illustrate the importance of public money for prominent civilian arms manufacturers. Maker of scores of iconic guns for the civilian market, including the AR-15 carbine used in the 1996 massacre that prompted Australia to enact its famously sweeping gun restrictions, Colt has also relied heavily on government contracts since the 19th century. The Vietnam War initiated a long era of making M16s for the military, and the company continued to land contracts as American war-making shifted from southeast Asia to the Middle East. But Colt’s reliance on government was so great that it filed for bankruptcy in 2015, in part because it had lost the military contract for the M4 rifle two years earlier.

Overall, gun makers relied on government contracts for about 40 percent of their revenues in 2012.

Competition for contracts spurred manufacturers to make lethal innovations, such as handguns with magazines that hold 12 or 15 rounds rather than seven. Absent regulation, these innovations show up in gun enthusiast periodicals, sporting goods stores and emergency rooms.

An activist is led away by security after protesting during a statement by NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, left, during a news conference in response to the Connecticut school shooting in 2012. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

NRA helped industry avoid regulation

So how has the industry managed to avoid more significant regulation, especially given the public anger and calls for legislation that follow horrific massacres like the one in Las Vegas?

Given their historic dependence on U.S. taxpayers, one might think that small arms makers would have been compelled to make meaningful concessions in such moments. But that seldom happens, thanks in large part to the National Rifle Association, a complicated yet invaluable industry partner.

Prior to the 1930s, meaningful firearms regulations came from state and local governments. There was little significant federal regulation until 1934, when Congress – spurred by the bloody “Tommy gun era” – debated the National Firearms Act.

The NRA, founded in 1871 as an organization focused on hunting and marksmanship, rallied its members to defeat the most important component of that bill: a tax meant to make it far more difficult to purchase handguns. Again in 1968, the NRA ensured Lyndon Johnson’s Gun Control Act wouldn’t include licensing and registration requirements.

In 1989, it helped delay and water down the Brady Act, which mandated background checks for arms purchased from federally licensed dealers. In 1996 the NRA engineered a virtual ban on federal funding for research into gun violence. In 2000, the group led a successful boycott of a gun maker that cooperated with the Clinton administration on gun safety measures. And it scored another big victory in 2005, by limiting the industry’s liability to gun-related lawsuits.

Most recently, the gun lobby has succeeded by promoting an ingenious illusion. It has framed government as the enemy of the gun business rather than its indispensable historic patron, convincing millions of American consumers that the state may at any moment stop them from buying guns or even try to confiscate them.

This helps explain why the share price of gun makers so often jumps after mass shootings. Investors know they have little to fear from new regulation and expect sales to rise anyway.

A question worth asking

So with the help of the NRA’s magic, major arms manufacturers have for decades thwarted regulations that majorities of Americans support.

Yet almost never does this political activity seem to jeopardize access to lucrative government contracts.

Americans interested in reform might reflect on that fact. They might start asking their representatives where they get their guns. It isn’t just the military and scores of federal agencies. States, counties and local governments buy plenty of guns, too.

Take Smith & Wesson, maker of the AR-15 Nikolas Cruz just used to kill his teachers and classmates at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Smith & Wesson is well into a five-year contract to supply handguns to the Los Angeles Police Department, the second-largest in the country. In 2016 the company contributed $500,000 (more than any other firm) to a get-out-the-vote operation designed to defeat candidates who favor tougher gun laws.

Do voters in L.A. – or in the rest of the country – know that they are indirectly subsidizing the gun lobby’s campaign against regulation? Concerned citizens should begin acting like the consumers they are and holding gunmakers to account for political activities that imperil public safety.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Oct. 9, 2017.

Brian DeLay receives funding from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.