Melt The Guns
Melt The Guns
A weekly column by Inside Songwriting contributor, Michael J Roberts.
Columbine, Colorado, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Chattanooga, Washington Navy, Charleston, Roanoke…. ??
Art and music helps us make sense of a complex and difficult world and the paradoxes of modern life. Songwriters have helped voice the concerns of generations from Pete Seeger and We Shall Overcome and Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind during the civil rights era to Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance during the Vietnam War. Neil Young wrote CSNY’s Ohio after Kent State atrocities when American authorities turned the guns on their own students, giving a platform for David Crosby’s impassioned “Why”? during the coda. Many great songs have been written with an anti-gun bias, none more that XTC’s Melt the Guns, by Andy Partridge. In the wake of the latest American tragedy in Roanoke I urge any like-minded musician or writer to share #melttheguns on social media to get traction for the idea that gun control laws are a valid response to these continuing acts of slaughter.
“I blame Hollywood” – Andy Partridge
In a brief Twitter exchange, where I complimented Ricky Gervais on his anti-gun stand, Andy Partridge replied pithily, “I blame Hollywood”. Maybe they need to take some of the blame, but Hollywood is good at reflecting culture, not leading it. I suspect the truth is that Americans view guns very differently to Brits or Aussies, in fact differently to most comparable western countries. I think the reason for this is mostly at the heart of what Hollywood and all American industry is interested in – money, which contributes to an issue that is a many headed Hydra mixed up in a quagmire of politics and capitalism. The gun lobby is the face of a billion dollar industry out to make a buck at all costs, and if they have to propagate lies to increase profits they will do so in a heartbeat.
There are plenty of guns in the UK, in Canada and in Australia, and yet we have nowhere near the level of gun related killing per capita. While all these countries are culturally similar, we seem to view guns differently. It would be unusual to visit a friend in Australia, where we heavily regulate gun ownership, and find he had a gun safe. I think we view Hollywood fantasies like the Liam Neeson cycle of Dad revenge tosh as just that, escapist garbage that can be consumed like fast food and soon forgotten, but in America it seems to underpin the notion that you need guns to solve problems. In Australia we had one of the biggest gun massacres in history at Port Arthur, in my home state of Tasmania, and afterwards a conservative Prime Minister led the way in increasing regulations on guns and we all agreed. It can be done.
Americans are continually fed the lie that gun ownership is part of their constitutional rights, yet the nonsense trotted out by the NRA i.e. that somehow any restriction of gun ownership is an affront to ‘freedom’ and against their constitution is clearly specious and self-serving. Somehow this threadbare argument flies in the heartland. The dirty truth about the NRA is that it used the Civil Rights struggle to scare white America into arming itself against the rising black movement, effectively using the tactics of militant organisations like the Black Panthers against them. The real winners are the gun manufacturers who continue to make a killing, in every sense of the word, aided and abetted by the egregious NRA and their blatant and cynical twisting of the constitution for their own ends.
Americans are told, post 9/11, that they are in danger from Islamic terrorism, and yet the facts don’t support that proposition in the way that it is being sold. Home-grown gun deaths, in the 14 years since, dwarf the Twin Towers tragedy by tens of thousands, with some 300,000 plus deaths and three times that maimed and injured by Americans shooting Americans. You are still infinitely more likely to die by a lightning strike that by the hands of a fundamental terrorist, and yet trillions are spent on fighting a so-called war on terror. They’re fighting the wrong war.
America, being America has a couple of other troubling complicating elements, race and religion. Charleston was a manifestation of the sad intersection of racist lies and ridiculously easy access to killing weaponry that does not happen in comparable societies and the rest of the world needs to support the large parts of American society that does see the sense in stepping back from the brink. After the seminal struggle for Civil Rights through the ’50s and ’60s, white liberal America, as represented by mainstream media, seemed to have taken the line that, especially after electing a black man to the White House, America was somehow living in a post racism world, think again. A potent mixture of latent bigotry, poor gun control, entrenched poverty and the divisive and disingenuous agenda of the right have led to the country repeatedly confronting the stark reality of racial tension still beating in the dark shadowland of festering resentments and putrid ideologies.
Racism is ‘normalised’ by subtle signals still present in general American life, just as guns are ‘normalised’ in their ubiquity by the passive acceptance of them as a constitutional right, these new normals need to be recognised and rejected so that the tide begins to turn. How can it be normal for a black pastor to propose the bizarre and disgusting idea that all Pastors should be armed, which is what happened on Fox News in the aftermath? He’d just been saying how hard it was to be a Christian, being that you had to love your enemies, turn the other cheek, et al, and then casually said he’d carry a gun so that he could shoot back! The question now seems to be “What would Jesus shoot”?
Dylann Roof spouted racist nonsense straight out of Birth of a Nation before allegedly shooting dead 9 people because of the colour of their skin. At this early stage it seems clear we are dealing with a disaffected white boy who has embraced the poisonous ideology of his Confederate forebears and, echoing Charles Manson, has attempted to ignite a race war. Of course if he’d been radicalised by foreign ISIS propaganda and killed the victims in the name of Allah, there would be a different spin by he proprietors of the right wing media, who have been at pains to deny the central race component at every turn. Fox News tried to spin it as part of a so called War on Christianity and others deflected race and invoked it as being part of a drug problem. Rick Perry carved a singularly idiotic position by calling it an “accident”.
America needs to confront several issues in regard to this and other events. It needs to examine the underlying alienation in a society that enabled a nondescript and unremarkable young man to act out his murderous fantasies.
The casual and ‘normalising’ effect of having symbols of a racist past paraded and revered needs to be debated – can you imagine Germany flying flags of the Third Reich as a nod to their glorious past? Also it needs to address the complicity of the right in urging men like Roof to “take our country back”, as if these vapid and poisonous pronouncements from behind the fortress of golden microphones would have no consequences. This is a situation that has reached a particularly shrill level since Obama’s election, and the tone and nature of much of the criticism of the President has been nothing short of racist hate speech.
If America remembers the lesson of Watergate, and follows the money, it will quickly work out who benefits from the current situation. The gun lobby is well funded and well organised, and Obama is right to shine a light on their nefarious agenda when every other comparable country has nothing like the level of gun violence that America suffers under. If 30,000 Americans every year were killed by Islamic terrorists umpteen billions would be spent to find and fix the problem, but the fact that Americans kill Americans to that extent seems to pass invisibly in the political debate, due to the power and influence of the gun lobby.
America also needs to sort out its health care system, which will help in preventing people who are mentally disturbed to be treated for their illness before they harm themselves and others. Americans continually poll numbers that show huge support in introducing universal background checks when guns are purchased, and yet Congress stalls at the behest of the gun lobby, who even forced them to reject legislation stopping children from ‘owning’ guns.
America, for all her doctrine of American Exceptionalism, is not so different it can’t understand reason or take criticism. America not only needs to increase the regulation it puts around guns and gun ownership, it needs to turn around the way it thinks about guns. Guns, for a peace loving society that prides itself on the rule of law, do not solve problems, they create them. Guns should be viewed as an extreme tool to be employed with great care and as a last resort, not a commodity to make fat corporations richer at the expense of the lives of the ordinary populace.
America is a country of great achievements and full of normal, decent people who wish to live free of the fear of guns and (in case they don’t know) they greatly outnumber the gun nuts. These people need to consider the gun culture they have and call out the NRA and others for what they are, profit driven organisations that do not have the best interests of the American people at heart, and then organise against them to take back the agenda. Until they do they are condemned to suffer more Columbine’s, Virginia Tech’s, Sandy Hook’s, Charleston’s and Roanoke’s as the arms dealers and their associates continue to exploit fear and ignorance as they count their profits knee deep in blood.
Songwriters, musicians and artists should lend their voice to seeing reason prevail in the land of the free.
“Melt the guns, melt the guns, nevermore to fire them”
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