We often think of cause in view of immediacy — "He hit me first." "You started it." And events as brutally inhumane as our recent glut of mass shootings sting us into cleaning the wound by addressing the usual suspects in the causal chain.
They are the perpetrator, whom we dismiss as sociopathic and unstable; the targeted setting — an unprotected school, theater, mall, workplace, temple, etc.; weapons and their accessibility.
Regarding weapons, the question of whether gun ownership more likely leads to gun violence is perfectly reasonable. Yet, establishing cause via statistical relation is tricky. The 2007 Geneva-based Small Arms Survey reports 88 civilian guns per 100 people in the U.S., where 3.2 per 100,000 of us are victims of gun homicide.
Compare this with Honduras. The Washington Post charts Honduras' gun ownership last year as far lower than ours, at 6.2 per 100 people. Hondurans, however, endure a painfully higher gun homicide rate of 68.4 per 100,000.
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The underbelly of gun violence percolates in its complexity. It hides a vast social, political and economic fabric that spawns and perpetuates social inequities, disenfranchisement and gendered power relations.
Anthropologists call this veiled layer of assault "structural violence," the cruel political economy of power, privilege and their abuse that remains hidden the more it is normalized, swept under the rug. This hidden violence brews social instability, particularly within a cultural climate such as ours glorifying violence, romancing the gun, militarizing masculinity and hindering support for mental health services.
It shows itself in inequitable access to economic, health and educational resources. In August 2010, after murdering eight beer warehouse co-workers at the Hartford Distributors in Manchester, Conn., Omar Thornton told police, "They treat me bad over here, and they treat all the other black employees bad over here too."
He then shot himself. Never discount last words.
Hidden violence shows itself in income disparity — that is, gaps between the rich and everyone else. Among wealthy countries, the U.S. murder rate far exceeds all other industrialized nations and has the highest level of income inequality. As Max Fisher wrote in The Atlantic on Sept. 19, 2011, our income disparity rate resembles that of Cameroon, Uganda, and Rwanda.
Hidden violence shows itself in class division and discord, usually from obdurate historical, political, and socioeconomic entanglements.
On a more massive scale, remember those gruesome 100 days nearly 20 years ago when close to one million Rwandans were slaughtered?
In Global Health in Times of Violence, director of Partners in Health physician Paul Farmer describes the causal link of Belgian and French colonialism imprinting an "official" ethnic identity (read "division") based on social status, not ethnicity.
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Back to weapons, hidden violence lies in the insidiously profitable global arms trade. Youth militia-gangs performed much of the butchery in Rwanda.
Their weapons of choice? Not just machetes, but a large arsenal of arms manufactured in Russia, Italy and the U.S., and distributed through Egyptian, apartheid South African and French suppliers.
The deadly path from weapons manufacturers through brokers to suppliers, purchasers and helpless victims reveals an intricate causal chain, a cast of thousands — and colossal profits.
Without a doubt, stricter gun laws are a vital first step in addressing gun violence. But unless we expose and cut out its underbelly, as Notre Dame anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom warns us, violence will always have its tomorrow.
On Nov. 16, 1989, Salvadoran soldiers brutally murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at El Salvador's Universidad Centroamericana. In honoring them, Spanish Catholic theologian Jon Sobrino writes: "The suffering of victims has deep roots, and it is these roots that must be pulled out (no small thing), and replaced by others that produce life and fraternity."
Their never-ending "struggle to reverse a history of inhumanity" must be ours as well.
Michael Brannigan is the Pfaff Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Values at The College of Saint Rose. His email address is michael.brannigan@strose.edu.