Shootings in the US: Insecurity and Structural Violence

According to the information available, the shooting that took place yesterday [Nov. 1, 2013] in Los Angeles International Airport, which left one police officer dead and seven wounded, was perpetrated by a 23-year-old California resident, who at the moment of the attack was carrying a written threat against the members of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and who was gravely wounded during the events.

Beyond the obligatory condemnation of these types of episodes, which present themselves with lamentable frequency in our neighbor country, yesterday’s aggression in the LA airport puts the topic of U.S. domestic security on the table. In the name of protecting this security, various administrations have established a bellicose and catastrophic foreign policy, curtailed civil liberties and violated human rights within and outside of its territory and spent millions of dollars in public funds, without any of this translating into better security for the superpower’s inhabitants.

It should be remembered that directly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, that government succeeded in imposing an agenda of authoritarianism and paranoia on its country and the world. This agenda’s first result was the conversion of U.S. airports into high security quarters, with surveillance and rigid controls, along with degrading treatment toward travelers, particularly foreigners. Yesterday, however, such measures could not impede the [individual] aggressor from entering one of the LA airport’s terminals with an assault rifle, opening fire in front of a security control area and continuously shooting until he reached the boarding zone.

In contrast with that pointless paranoia, the U.S. government has been particularly ineffective and remiss in preventing the expressions of individual violence that recur in the country and claim innocent victims: Yesterday’s event is the latest in a long chain of similar episodes that include the massacre at Columbine High School in April 1999 with 15 students dead, the assassination of 33 Virginia Tech youths at the hands of one of their fellow students in April 2007 and the attack last December in a elementary school in Newtown, Conn. that claimed the lives of 30 people, among them 20 children.

These phenomena have as an indisputable condition of their existence the excessive proliferation of firearms in the hands of the neighboring country’s population, enshrined in the anachronistic Second Amendment of the Constitution. Added to this is a fluke that afflicts U.S. society: a structural propensity to repeat violence that sees itself reflected in individual disruptions like the one manifesting itself yesterday in the LA airport, yet that has not been addressed from the public policy perspective by that country’s government.

In sum, the results are devastating to a society that enjoys high levels of development in abundance in wide spectra and that insists on boasting of itself as a model of civility before the rest of the world: to so frequently experience alarming episodes such as the ones referred to here, which justly denote a regression from civilization and a propensity to violence and barbarism.