Alienation flows through the barrel of a gun: Despair, mass shootings, and suicide in an American settler colony

Abstract

In what is now referred to by many as the United States, gun violence rages on. When one considers the country’s sheer number of annual gun deaths, the data is as overwhelming as it is distressing. Indeed, perhaps the only thing outpacing the trauma and loss of life wrought by gun violence is the anguish and grief of those who are impacted by it. Despite the shocking statistics and fervent calls for change, few efforts have been effective at curbing the harm. Such a reality raises pressing questions about why gun violence in the U.S. is so prevalent, and what can be done to prevent it. In this Contention, I maintain that the only way out of the U.S.’s centuries-long doom spiral of gun violence will be reckoning with the nation’s historical-ongoing trajectories of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism. I further contend that any effort to eliminate gun violence in the U.S. mandates ending mass alienation and taking masculinity to task. Accordingly, I illustrate how guns are not actually the root of the problem, even though their ease of access and the culture(s) surrounding them are corollary symptoms that necessitate urgent intervention. In short, I argue that resolving gun violence in the U.S. demands a historical-structural-intersectional focus and that the source of the country’s firearm-involved deaths are alienation, despair, and oppression owed to capitalism, entrenched patriarchal social relations, and the settler colonial state­­––all of which must be abolished if we are seriously concerned with livable futures.