US gun violence: Capitalism is the culprit

 Al Jazeera English

On July 27, two top executives from prominent US gun companies – Marty Daniel of Daniel Defense and Christopher Killoy of Sturm, Ruger & Co – appeared before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform chaired by New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney. The hearing came on the heels of the latest succession of massacres – the Buffalo supermarket, the Uvalde elementary school, the Highland Park July 4 parade – that have come to define life in America.

As the Guardian noted, this “marked the first time in nearly two decades that the CEOs of leading gun manufacturers testified before Congress”. The CEO of Smith & Wesson Brands – which according to the committee earned at least $125m in 2021 alone from the sale of assault-style rifles, a frequent prop in mass shootings – had declined to participate in the attempt at “oversight”.

But the two willing invitees presumably spoke for the US gun industry as a whole when they shot down the notion that their products and aggressive marketing practices have anything to do with rampant killing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Beirut, fragmented

 Al Jazeera English

“How can I write about Beirut?”

So begins the Lebanese civil war memoir Beirut Fragments by Jean Said Makdisi – Jerusalem-born Palestinian scholar, longtime Beirut resident, and sister of the late Edward Said – which was published in 1990 at the end of the 15-year conflict.

Expanding on her introductory question, Said Makdisi wonders how she can “collect it all into one volume: the years of pain; of watching a world collapse” – and how to express her “strange love for this mutilated city [and] the lingering magic of the place that has kept me and so many other clinging to its wreckage”.

Some 32 years later, on May 31, 2022, I myself would arrive back in Lebanon – one of my regular pre-pandemic international destinations – following an absence of more than three years. By the end of my 10-day visit, I, too, was faced with the conundrum: “How can I write about Beirut?” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Ameri-coup: A brief history of US misdeeds

 Al Jazeera English

There is an old joke about why there are never coups d’état in the United States of America: because there is no US embassy there.

Granted, the joke’s foundations have been somewhat shaken now that former President Donald Trump stands accused of inciting an “attempted coup” in January 2021. Not everyone is on board with the “coup” designation, however – even among Trump’s critics.

In a recent interview with CNN about the congressional investigation into the matter, longtime US diplomat and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton – whose moustache “Trump never liked”, as the Associated Press reported – declared it a “mistake” to see the insurrection as a “carefully planned coup d’état”. In short, according to Bolton, Trump was simply too incompetent to pull off something of that magnitude: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état – not here, but, you know, other places – it takes a lot of work.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The ‘terror’ in Highland Park: The US is exceptional, indeed

Al Jazeera English

On the morning of Monday, July 4, as the United States was gearing up for its 246th annual celebration of independence from Britain, the National Rifle Association (NRA) – America’s ultra-powerful gun rights organisation – offered the following inspirational reminder on Twitter: “The only reason you’re celebrating Independence Day is because citizens were armed”. The tweet ended with the hashtag “#FourthofJuly”.

This was before Monday’s mass shooting in the affluent Chicago, Illinois suburb of Highland Park killed seven people and wounded dozens of others at July 4 festivities in what Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering described as an act of “terror that was brought upon us”. Parents with strollers and children on tricycles fled for their lives. And yet the horrific casualty toll was not even the tip of the iceberg in terms of things that can happen “because citizens were armed”.

As NBC Chicago reported before the clock had even struck 9am on Monday, at least 57 people had already been shot in the city of Chicago alone over the Fourth of July weekend – nine of them fatally. Nationwide as of July 4, the US had registered no fewer than 309 mass shootings in 2022, according to the Washington, DC-based Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one with “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter”.

There are more guns than people in the US, and this is certainly a large part of the problem – particularly as states like Texas, which recently hosted the Uvalde massacre of 19 elementary school students and two teachers, ensure that it is essentially as easy to acquire a firearm as it is to acquire laundry detergent. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

This Fourth of July, I am not ‘proud to be an American’

 Al Jazeera English

Every year on July 4, to much fanfare and revelry, the United States marks its 1776 independence from Britain.

The date is also an official holiday in Puerto Rico and other de facto US colonies. So much for “independence”.

I was born in the US in 1982, and, before definitively freeing myself from the “land of the free” in 2003, got to experience many a Fourth of July celebration. One year, when I was 12 or 13 and living in the Texas capital of Austin, my family and I attended a massive Independence Day gathering by the river, complete with deafening music and fireworks that permanently traumatised our dog Bounder.

Although this was more than 25 years ago, I can still recall being disproportionately moved by the Lee Greenwood song, God Bless the USA – a staple of July 4th festivities – even as Bounder convulsed beside me. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.