I was listening to Beau from the Fifth Column's arguments, as a person of the left and stalwart supporter of the 2nd amendment, and while he points out there are toxic cultural elements about the gun culture, he seems to not recognise that the 2nd amendment's lore is highly poisoned out of context. In that, I think there is a much bigger issue than gun violence that is resulting in this gun violence but the economic dependency on this gun violence to justify further economic dependence. That is, we need the gun manufacturers because they create jobs and demand for steel and other parts of the industrial goods.
The 2nd amendment as the story is told nowadays is a fiction used to justify the continuation of using the arms industry as a means of propping up the economy. And the same logic is used as America and the Soviet Union used in their mass accumulation of nuclear arms. Sure they want to keep building arms because it keeps the industrial capacity to keep producing lanthanides, actinides and other rare earth metals. And so while the capability to produce these elements and the ability to do tests on these metals were interesting, the question of what all these nuclear weapons were going to do remained. Were we going to use them in a war? Hence we get the mental gymnastics the US produced. The "rational man" was concocted as a way of effusing praise onto the inquiring minds in hopes that if the inquiring minds saw themselves as rational, they could assume that the men building these weapons were "rational". And if they were rational, they could create the just-so stories that would convince us "mutually assured destruction" was a sensible policy and that we could continue to build nuclear weapons.
This is of course an older problem. The Arms Races between Germany and Britain, and Italy and Austria-Hungary were economic policies concocted to deal with the pains of the Long Depression. The realpolitik employed by the likes of Bismarck, Disraeli and Gladstone which ultimately led to the Great War was simply a decision to get the factories working again after noblemen lost their most value in their most critical assets, their livestock. That is, escalation was preferable over organic growth when it came to economic policy.
Because the economic policy of escalation has been around for so long, it seems inconceivable to many folks that de-escalation can exist as a policy. Not as a means of brokering peace, because that is too far-fetched, but as a policy that we can have economies sustain themselves without having to escalate. Individuals in the United States who are wrapped up in escalation policy end up not being able to see that de-escalation is important.
And as a result, we are a-massing arms to water the tree of liberty because. . . we can't find reverse? We can't find another gear? And so this video reminds us, that on the local issue of massacres in our schools that de-escalation needs to be thought possible. On the larger scale, de-escalation needs to be sold at this scale so that we can get it on this smaller scale.