TEHRAN †Noting that American cinema is certainly entangled with gun violence, a cinema expert believes America itself is suffering from violence too.
“American cinema is violent, sure, but America itself, it seems to me, is violence,” Anthony Ballas, an American cinema expert, tells Tehran Times.
Over the weekend, two people were killed and four others injured in a shooting at Chickasaw Park in Louisville, Kentucky. This came less than a week after a mass shooting at a bank in the same city left five people dead.
While there are a lot of factors that contribute to the issue of mass shootings and spread of extremism in the United States, some experts argue that the country itself is violent.
Anthony Ballas, an adjunct instructor who currently teaches composition and rhetoric at the University of Colorado at Denver, highlights the need for increased scrutiny of social media with regards to the threat of right wing extremism.
Far right extremism has found a stable foothold in the legal system, making it difficult to prevent individual acts of gun violence, Ballas notes.
The interview with Ballas, who also teaches philosophy and social sciences at Northern New Mexico College, explores how politicians and lawmakers have responded to mass shootings and what measures can be taken to prevent individuals who hold far right extremist beliefs from committing acts of mass shootings.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: How do you view the role of media and cinema in contributing to the issue of mass shootings and the spread of extremism in the United States? What actions do you believe should be taken to address this issue, if any?
A: Well, in terms of cinema, I have actually been interviewed on this subject before, so I would recommend readers take a look at some of my earlier interviews for the Tehran Times and elsewhere. But let me say briefly that cinema and media in general †including social media †ought to be directly implicated in this problem, though perhaps not in the way some might readily assume. It is not insignificant that so many of these mass shootings have been live streamed on Facebook or “Meta,” Instagram, Twitch and other social media platforms. We saw this, for instance, with the recent mass shooting at the bank in Louisville, Kentucky, or the white supremacist terror attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York just under one year ago. And the list goes on from there.
Although I think many assume that violent cinema simply influences a violent culture, I don’t tend to think it’s that simple necessarily. In fact, I think it’s quite clearly the other way around. Many point their fingers at video games, television and cinema while they should probably pay more attention to what’s flashing before their eyes in the news media, and the fact that the United States has been continually at war for decades †for the entirety of my lifetime at least, though certainly longer. Imagine one giant, continuous, cinematic tracking shot †like the famous 15 minute one from Children of Men, or the movie 1917 †chronicling the unbroken history of American imperialism playing out on screen media. Well, this really isn’t that abstract of a thought.
Cinema is certainly entangled with gun violence, as both share roots in the racist history of the United States. It is probably cliché at this point to even mention Western films, John Wayne and so on, the well known genre depicting quite unapologetically and unabashedly the horrors of settler colonialism and white supremacy. American cinema is violent, sure, but America itself, it seems to me, is violence.
In terms of the actions we might take to address this issue, well, I don’t think we should simply be blaming screen media for the problems we face. This seems reactionary. I think we need to address the issue of gun violence and mass shootings from the ideological and political roots of these problems, so perhaps starting with an analysis of white supremacist terror, the ethos and logic of settler colonialism, and the war machine †including the weapons lobby and the fact that there are more guns in the United States than there are people †is a good place to begin.
Lastly, let me just say that social media deserves increased scrutiny with regard to the threat of right wing extremism. The MAGA movement, Trump and his white supremacist, libertarian band of followers certainly have a presence on the internet, and many social media sites have functioned like digital recruitment centers for the far right. We should pay attention to the fact as well that with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter we can probably expect it to become a recruitment site as well as a platform for right wing propaganda, as we saw with his recent re platforming of fascist figures like Kanye West, Nick Fuentes and others.
Q: Some mass shooters have been found to hold far right or white supremacist beliefs. How does this ideology contribute to the problem of mass shootings in the United States? How have politicians and lawmakers responded to mass shootings carried out by individuals with far right beliefs? What measures can be taken to prevent individuals who hold these beliefs from committing acts of mass violence?
A: In most cases, lawmakers and politicians have been ineffectual when it comes to mass shootings. There has been some legislation passed enhancing background checks for the purchase of weapons, increased mental health resources for communities impacted by gun violence and so on. Biden of course signed an executive order for reducing gun violence. But of course none of this really speaks to the ideological issue of right wing and white supremacist terrorism that you bring up here, which I think can’t simply be prevented by way of executive order or legal reform.
It’s been a little over two years since Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021, in which we saw his far right foot soldiers storm the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. I don’t want to overstate it, but I think it’s important that we’ve seen some of these far right militias prosecuted and convicted for their role in January 6, such as certain members of the so called Proud Boys, Stewart Rhodes of the Oathkeepers and others. At the very least this may dissuade far right extremists from committing political violence †though I have to admit I am not fully convinced of or committed to this position.
One major problem is that far right extremism does not only manifest in the form of lone gunmen committing acts of terrorism but has found a stable foothold in the legal system: in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, for instance, or the overwhelmingly conservative Supreme Court and elsewhere. (And with the recent revelations about Clarence Thomas’s financial ties to the Hitler enthusiast Harlan Crow, can we really be that surprised? Not to mention his spouse Ginni’s role in plotting the coup of January 6). Preventing individual acts of gun violence seems, at this point, to be nearly impossible. Every now and then you’ll hear of a state or city security apparatus intervening and potentially stopping a mass shooting from taking place, such was the case of William Whitworth recently in Colorado Springs for instance. But recall too that the Colorado Springs nightclub mass shooting in 2022 was motivated by Anti LGBTQ+, Transphobic, and Christian nationalist, fascist ideology.
We are seeing right wing ideology motivating mass shootings or attempted mass shootings for a variety of reasons; election denial, QAnon, support for Trump, anti Black Lives Matter, COVID denial, antisemitism, anti immigration, Accelerationism, and on and on. But right wing extremism is a political and ideological front in the United States (and abroad I should add), and thus tackling the issue as being rooted in individual acts of terrorism is myopic. To combat this front realistically, we need to tackle right wing extremism in all of its guises through electoral politics, activism, and through local, national and even international coalitions. We need to understand it as a broad based ideological system that has snaked around the globe, from Washington to Brazil, to Hungary and so on. We really can’t take the problem of neo fascism in a piecemeal manner, nor can we solely rely on the glacial pace of the reform model. We need to build a strong, capable center left, anti fascist, anti white supremacist coalition.
Q: There have been debates on the role of gun control to prevent mass shootings. In your opinion, what policies or measures could be implemented to better regulate firearms and prevent mass shootings? What are the primary obstacles in gun control policies?
A: One primary obstacle is surely the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which enables the libertarian, right wing gun culture that I mentioned previously. The history of the second amendment makes this clear. Who was granted the right to bear arms? Well, it certainly wasn’t the dispossessed Indigenous populations, or the enslaved Africans. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory, published a book entitled The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America detailing this history.
Certainly, regulating and making it more difficult to access firearms, including enhanced background and mental health checks and so on, are needed. Intervention through red flag laws, too, though I am always skeptical of measures that put more power in the hands of law enforcement.
As I already mentioned, there are more firearms in the United States of America than there are people †and the COVID pandemic that introduced a million preventable deaths only further augmented this sobering statistic. At this point we have to be in favor of even the most modest gun control reform efforts it seems, while simultaneously pressing lawmakers for more robust legislat
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