The recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton shocked America and unleashed the Eumenides of the Mass Media to hound and punish the wicked who are responsible.
Mass shootings of innocent bystanders are inexcusable acts of savage barbarism. The same is true for acts of terrorism, such as the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka that claimed more than 300 lives and the Kabul bombing of a wedding feast that killed 63.
Yet such outrages take place almost daily in our violent world.
Every time a mass shooting takes place, the gun debate heats up.
Gun owners logically point out that guns don’t kill people, people do. Their opponents counter that if guns weren’t so readily available, mass shootings wouldn’t happen. Maybe.
What is the truth?
In Switzerland, gun ownership and training are common. Yet the Swiss murder rate is 0.5, which is 10-times lower than the US rate of 5.2. The Swiss have universal military service for males aged 18 to 34; after discharge, the soldier can purchase his rifle and keep it at home.
What is the explanation for the vast difference in the Swiss and US homicide rates?
The Swiss are civilized, cultured, disciplined, and responsible, and Americans, apparently, are not.
Is the United States a culture of violence? How do we compare with others? Below the Baltimore police enforce a curfew..
Of the 50 most violent cities in the Mexico Citizens’ Council for Public Security annual ranking, 41 are in Latin America, 4 in the US, 3 in South Africa, and 1 in Jamaica and 1 in Puerto Ruco.
Specifically, they comprise 15 in Mexico, 14 in Brazil, 6 in Venezuela, 3 in South Africa, 2 in Colombia, 2 in Honduras, 1 each in El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, and 4 in the US..
The 4 US cities are St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans.
Analysts attribute the violence in Latin America to drug trafficking and organized crime.
Violence is also exacerbated, they say, by political instability, poverty, corruption, and impunity
Does poverty cause violence?
Did the Blitzkrieg cause a lot of casualties?
The answer to both of these questions is No.
Behind the Blitzkrieg were German soldiers, who were the causal agents. Behind poverty are poor people, who are the causal agents.
The GDP of Mexico is about $10,000, India’s is about $2000.
On that basis one would expect five times more violent crime in India than in Mexico or, at least, considerably more.
Yet the truth is just the opposite of what one might expect.
The homicide rate in India is 3.2 versus 24.8 in Mexico.
Though India is five times pooer than Mexico, its homicide rate is 8 times lower.
The situation is even worse with assaults . A person has a 10-times greater chance of being mugged in Mexico than in India (which isn’t the safest country in the world).
If violence is not attributible to external factors like poverty, what is its cause?
There is no simple answer to this question. If there were, there wouldn’t be any mass shootings.
To find out why the Blitzkrieg caused so many deaths, we would have to examine the nature of the Germans, who were the causal agents.
The homicide rate in LatinAmerica as a whole is 4 times the world average.
Do the people of Latin America have anything in common that makes them prone to violence?
It can’t be the Spanish language, culture, or Catholic religion because Spaniards are not any more violent than other Europeans. Neither can it be attributed to the Portugese heritage.
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.
The philosopher’s stone of the wealth of nations is internal discipline. That is what enabled 60,000 Englishmen in the 19th century to govern 300 million Hindus, many of whom were intellectually superior to them. That internal discipline is sometimes called character. Some nations have developed it, others haven’t and never will. It is a quality that takes many generations to forge.
God always strives together those who strive (Aeschylus).
The man who can control his present desires for the sake of a future goal will gain success and wealth. Self-control is something that the Latin peoples apparently do not possess. Benjamin Franklin expressed this in the dictum, A penny saved, is a penny earned. His life is an example of the exercise of self-control. As a young apprentice in the printing trade, he saved half of his meager food allowance to buy books. He never attended college, but he mastered English, became an inventor, and one of the authors of the American Constitution.
A thorough study of the psychology of the Latin peoples would have to be made to deterime why they are so prone to violence.
A gulf wider than that of Mexico separates the mind of the white man from the mind of the red man in the things that are ingrained in the soul and worth dying for.
To understand Latin America and the culture of violence one has to study of the mind of the Indian.
Only then will we make a start towards mutual understanding.