An utterly horrifying tragedy unfolded this week in Uvalde, Texas as yet another deranged psychopath entered a school full of children and began indiscriminately killing. This 18-year-old monster barricaded himself in a single classroom where he had his way with two teachers and 19 students, executing all of them in cold blood. The security force paid for by taxpayer dollars did nothing to stop him and only after he murdered the entire classroom was a SWAT team sent in to take him out.

The Texas elementary school gunman shot his grandmother, entered the school, then barricaded himself into the classroom where virtually all the killing happened. Then, a special operations unit breached the classroom and killed him, the Texas Department of Public Safety said. pic.twitter.com/lb32dJOTGv

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 25, 2022

Predictably, political blowhards didn’t even wait for the bodies to cool before they began exploiting the deaths of innocent children to score political points. Rabid partisan hacks have been frothing at the mouths for 48 hours now as they put forth their “solutions” to the problem of mass shootings that involve about as much depth and nuance as a kiddie pool full of piss.

“Guns are the problem!” screams the rabid anti-gun left. “We need more teachers with guns!” screams the pro-gun right. Yet neither of the two sides have been able to do a damn thing to stop or prevent these horrific events.

If it is a gun problem, why is it that other countries with well armed citizens don’t see the same frequency of mass shootings? If it’s solely a mental health issue, why don’t other countries with higher rates of mental disorders see the same mass murders?

The United States spends roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars every year on mental health care but none of that money goes to psychological research. Instead, psychological research is funded by the nation’s $66 billion annual research fund and and a portion, 1.5 percent, goes to actual psychological research.

Nevertheless, billions of taxpayer dollars flow into the mental health industry’s coffers and most mental health issues go untreated as the country’s mental health problem gets worse. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars are making lots of industry insiders and big pharma players rich yet we’re nowhere close to figuring out what triggers these lunatics to carry out such horrors.

Perhaps we need to look deeper than the two talking points offered up by politicians every time this happens. Perhaps we need to look at the ones offering up the solutions in the first place.

After years of perpetual war and state-sponsored mass murder overseas this country has become largely desensitized to violence. When we aren’t exporting mass murder, the government is carrying it out here at home as police kill an American citizen every 8 hours — many of whom are in dire need of mental health help. In fact, American cops have killed magnitudes more people in just the last few years, than all mass shooters ever — combined.

This point seems to be missed entirely by the anti-gun left. The gun-hating liberals have no problem calling out the government’s history of racism and oppression while asserting that guns are “instruments of mass death,” yet they advocate for government — with a history of racism and oppression — to be the only ones holding the guns.

The right, while correctly stating that people need guns to protect themselves, misses the point entirely as they look the other way at the thousands of citizens killed by police over the years.

Governments kill a lot of people, plain and simple. And throughout history, the most of worst atrocities were carried out by the state against unarmed populations.

As a point of reference, in the 20th Century alone, governments were responsible for 260,000,000 deaths worldwide. That number is greater than all deaths from illicit drug use, STD’s, Homicides, and Traffic Accidents — combined.

Yet still, Americans cannot see the elephant in the room.

This desensitization to violence has fostered a mindset in the average American to view life as disposable. Through massive propaganda campaigns, the state and their corporate masters have waged a war of dehumanization, bolstering an unhealthy environment in which people see their political opponents as subhuman.

If you disagree with someone over any one of the day’s superficial talking points handed down from the arbiters of truth in the corporate press, you’re a “white supremacist animal who needs to die” or a “Marxist libtard who needs to jump off a cliff.”

The middle ground is compromised in such a way that all nuance and critical thought is looked down upon like a modern leper. As a result, the citizens largely condone violence on a mass scale, so long as it is carried out, sanctioned by the state, and hurts “the other guy.”

Then, when someone whose been desensitized to violence and taught to dehumanize their perceived enemy their entire life suddenly acts out, everyone acts surprised. They send their thoughts and prayers, call for banning guns for a few days and then go right back to sleep, condoning state violence and and wishing for the deaths of their political rivals.

The entire time, both sides blame the other for the violence while ignoring the fact that their own government is the largest purveyor of mass violence throughout all of American history.

We need only look at government sponsored mass murder and the lack of accountability faced by the perpetrators to see the writing on the wall that causes this mass desensitization to violence.

One of the more recent examples of this mass violence was the siege in Waco, TX. The US government carried out the deadliest church massacre in history and it led to the deaths of dozens of men, women, and children. Agents with the FBI and ATF set fire to a compound occupied by the Branch Davidians, burning the men, women, and children alive.

The all-consuming inferno killed 76 people who were huddled inside. Later, it was determined many of those who’d perished were also shot by firearms. Researchers, who later investigated the incident, concluded federal agents were observed shooting from the compound’s grounds into the building already set ablaze by fire. While the official government narrative is those individuals committed suicide, the researchers were able to demonstrate they were likely killed by automatic weapons fired by federal agents, possibly killed as they were attempting to flee their burning compound.

Other incidents of state sponsored mass murder were the Sand Creek Massacre in which 500 peaceful native men, women, and children were slaughtered by US troops. Or how about the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, during which 150 Black men, women, and children were murdered by US troops? Or Wounded Knee, in which 300 more Americans were gunned down by the 7th Calvary? The blood soaked list goes on and on and on.

These incidents only account for the people slaughtered inside the borders too. If we look at countries in which the US has waged wars of aggression, the death toll skyrockets. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people have been exterminated in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. Instead of holding the people who started these wars accountable — we name libraries and roads after them, build them statues in town squares, and celebrate their birthdays.

So yeah, we certainly have a mental health problem in this country and it needs to be addressed, but until we stop condoning and celebrating state-sponsored mass murder and treating all life as sacred — no matter your political predispositions — we will continue to see the symptoms of this inherently sick society manifest over and over again like it did on Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas.

Article posted with permission from Matt Agorist