Ponmala

On 16 May 2022, a young American buys two AR-15 assault rifles on the day he turns 18, the eligible age in the US for buying guns. He gets out of home after shooting his grandmother in the head and drives to the elementary school where he studied and where his mother is working as a teacher. He enters the school carrying one AR-15 and seven high capacity magazines. He shoots and kills 19 children and 2 teachers. The police shoot him dead. Just one more mass murder added to what has become a distinguishing mark of American culture.
The usual prayers and expression of shock and disgust followed, only to be drowned by volley of protests fired by the gun lobby. President Biden said: “I am sick and tired. Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone?” Governor Abbot, whose state Texas made it possible for a teenager to buy semiautomatic guns even before he was eligible to buy a can of beer, bemoaned: “Anyone who shoots his grandmother in her face has to have evil in his head… far more evil for someone to gun down little kids.” But how evil it is to legally enable a teenager commit such a crime!
The motive of the teenage shooter has not been established, and it never may. Governor Abbot said that the boy had no history of mental illness. But is not killing innocent kids apparently just for the fun of it a sign of mental illness? For that teenager, killing people was like hunting game. Mental illnesses can show up at any age, but the more serious varieties show up at the turbulent teenage period. The shooter in question was a recluse who hardly spoke with others – tell-tale sign of mental illness. Loners are dormant volcanoes. You can’t say when they will erupt. Mental illness or no mental illness, gun culture is death culture.
The Republicans, who vow to uphold individual freedom, maintain that they won’t allow the dilution of the Second Amendment, which is the bedrock of American gun culture. The most advanced nation on earth is quite primitive in its idea of human life and its worth. The Democrats believe that the right to abort a six-month-old child in a womb as a matter of convenience is fundamental to individual freedom; the Republicans believe that the right to posses as many assault rifle as one wants is fundamental to the individual freedom of even mentally sick people. Staunch Christian believers that most Americans are, they don’t give a hoot to these words of Jesus: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Human life is the ultimate value for which all the rest should give way. But, thanks to the Second Amendment, death awaits every kid who walks into a school and every male or female who walks into a place of worship or a shopping mall in the most powerful nation on earth. By their own hands shall Americans die.
President Biden wondered aloud if people in other countries had no mental illnesses. That was another way of saying that mass murders would be rampant in other countries also if guns were freely available there. The fountain of mental illness is a false notion that makes an individual act crazy. That false notion can also be a fabricated one like threatened racial, cultural, religious superiority or the nostalgia for a lost empire and the desire to restore it. America’s White Supremacists feel threatened by empowered Blacks and Browns, India’s high castes feel threatened by empowered low castes and dalits, Muslim purists feel threatened by modernisation; Putins’s Russia wants to re-establish Czarist empire, Modi’s India is working hard to bring back Ramarajya and Muslim Fundamentalists are aiming at global Caliphate. An eighteen-year-old White Supremacists recently gunned down 11 Blacks in a mall in Buffalo. He was indoctrinated with the fabricated idea that Blacks and Browns are actively involved in ‘White genocide’.
One shudders to think what would have happened if India had its own version of the Second Amendment. Take Kerala as a case study for it. Muslim, Hindu and Christian fundamentalists are in their heyday now. Radicalisation is spreading its vicious tentacles in all the three major communities of the state. To counter the perceived existential threat posed by the BJP and the RSS, more and more Muslims are embracing a radical political outfit, the Popular Front, and its militant wing, the SDPI. Feeling threatened by this fundamentalist Muslim faction, fundamentalist Christians are joining hands with the RSS and the BJP. The Popular Front has reacted by publicly threatening to kill Hindus and Christians if they don’t behave.
Kerala is now a boiling cauldron of communal hatred and fear. Just imagine what would have happened if assault rifles were freely available at the counter in Kerala! Thus goes a Malayalam proverb: ‘If horses had horns!…’ Thank God, we don’t have anything like the Second Amendment. The non-availability of guns can save Kerala from mass extinction, but who is there to close the communal divide? Dropping their secular mask, the communists are rowing ahead merrily with the warring Christian fundamentalists on one end of the boat and Muslim fundamentalists on the other end. The moment one lounges at the other, the boat will sink.
Majority of Christians have shed their identity as peace makers and the communists have shed their identity as secularists who are duty bound to liberate man from the shackles of religion. As things stand, the RSS, which holds fast to its Hindutva ideology, will radicalise Christians. And when Muslims will have crossed 40% of Kerala’s population within a decade or two, the communists will suffer the fate of their counterparts in Bengal and elsewhere. In the meanwhile, political murders in Kerala will keep pace with mass shootings in America. Maybe, things can turn out differently if Christians act as catalysts for peace.