When trying to crack an unsolved case, a useful question to pose is: Cui Bono? I learned this in Criminal Law classes many moons ago. The lesson has been reinforced through years of reading detective fiction and watching TV cop dramas, in which the question is asked in less academically Latinate terms. To Whose Benefit? Or more colloquially and less grammatically translated: Who Benefits?
This motive-locating question kept popping into my mind the last few days, as the recent Oregon school shootings were rehearsed and analyzed . . . and the ‘gun control discussion’ once again washed up on the shores of national consciousness, accompanied by the expected flotsam of enforce-existing-statutes, it’s-a-mental-health-problem-not-a-gun-problem, criminals-don’t-follow-laws-anyway-so-what’s-the-point, and (thank you Jeb!) stuff-happens on one side, and the predictable jetsam of plug-gunshow-loopholes, expand-background-checks, restrict-ammunition-clips, and forbid-military-style-automatic-weapons on the other. (I'm not even counting the Obama-Is-Coming-To-Take-My-Guns or the More-Guns-Equal-Less-Gun-Violence idiots.)
As anyone who knows me or has read my previous blogs and op-eds on guns realizes, I agree with the jetsam. But I think that ‘my side’ is missing an important point, if it really wants to change this country’s gun culture. Cui Bono? Who benefits from resisting gun control measures? We have to know the profiteers in order to combat their influence. Simply making outraged moral arguments or trying to shame cowardly politicians just doesn’t cut it, as we certainly should have figured out by now.
The easy answer to 'who benefits,' of course, is the National Rifle Association (and the politicians pandering for its approval). And if one digs a little deeper, armament and ammunition manufacturers who fund and control the NRA. All of this is pretty obvious.
What’s not so obvious is the network of corporate and ideological interests uniting many enterprises and initiatives that benefit financially from 2nd Amendment absolutism. These would include the for-profit private prison industry and the for-profit bail bond industry, both integral corporate components of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), an umbrella organization responsible for drafting ‘model bills’ that benefit its members and that Republican-controlled state legislators have enacted into law. Many of these laws have to do with guns: stand-your-ground laws and open-carry laws to name a few . . . not to mention ALEC-backed opposition to any and all gun control efforts. Although it might seem paradoxical, ALEC’s advocacy of privatizing key components of the U.S. justice system fits neatly with its advocacy of unfettered access to guns.
How? The more our society becomes criminalized, and the more criminalization is handled by private corporations, everyone (if everyone means ALEC members) benefits. On both ends! More fear of crime: more weapons. More weapons, more profit and more crime. More crime, more high bails and incarceration. More high bails and incarceration, more profit.
This circle jerk encompasses anti-immigration efforts as well, as ALEC supports anti-immigrant mandatory incarceration measures. And the ‘war on drugs’ with its attendant, disastrous, mandatory sentencing. And the push to try juvenile offenders as adults (more moolah for private prisons). Even, tangentially, the media’s fixation on florid mass shootings (easily ‘analyzed’ as occurrences that tighter gun laws would not prevent) rather than on the appalling number of ‘routine’ firearm murders and accidental killings and suicides that take the lives of approximately 30,000 citizens a year (a grim statistic that actually could be positively impacted by tighter gun laws).
In all these instances, the potent profit-producer of enhanced public paranoia drives up gun sales and stokes the cultural anxieties that keep fearful citizens electing ALEC-backed politicians to state and national office.
Cui Bono? Not the interests of the vast majority of U.S. citizens who support reasonable gun control measures. Maybe if we look seriously at who does, we might be able to effect meaningful change.
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