The suspect is believed to be Robert Card, a 20-year US Army veteran from Bowdoin Center, Maine.
(according to Telegrams so take with grain of salt)
EDIT: Name confirmed by news.
According to law enforcement, CARD recently reported mental health issues to include hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard Base in Saco, ME.
Something that might cut down on it tho would be a robust social safety net. It’s pretty easy to get a gun if you really want one in Denmark, yet we don’t really have mass shootings - you can get pistols legally here, though its a difficult process. You can get arms illegally relatively easily, if you’ve got the money. Same goes for other countries.
Though no other country is so weirdly obsessed about guns as the us is, both in terms of “gotta have em” and also using them? At least it seems like that to me. It’s like a totem or a cultural signifier or something. People need to carry them everywhere, and everyone needs to be able to have it. It’s fucked up.
But still, other countries do make weapons available to the public at large (though far from the ease which it is in the us), but mass shootings aren’t a thing. Possibly because people aren’t as stretched out physically and mentally. That combined with not having gun stores on every street makes a big difference.
The American obsession with guns goes deep, all the way to the very conception of being American. The country was founded on a settler colonial fantasy of exploring a new (to Europe) frontier, and the actual settlers had to be quite self-reliant, often living in very remote areas in challenging climes. On top of the settler-colonialism, there grew a strong identity of self reliance and rejection/independence of society. I think some early American settlers were really self-reliant, having acquired their own means of production and in fact not needing to interact much with society. Of course, the majority of Americans were urbanites from the beginning. Yet, the idea of the frontier was always prominently in mind and cited proudly by all Americans regardless of their actual lifestyle.
I will gloss over a lot of American history and simply state that augmenting the national military with state militias made sense both before and after the American Revolution, so it is not surprising that a limit was put in place (the 2nd amendment) to prevent the federal government from monopolizing access to guns. But this was in large part a consideration of the rights of state governments vis-a-vis the federal government, in terms of their own established militias which already existed, not necessarily for random joes to open-carry in their local Walmart.
That is some historical context for the early link between gun ownership and American patriotism … the question remains, why has it stuck around even to the modern day, when the vast majority of Americans were born here and live in urban cities far away from any “frontier”?
I think that question is the one most people, especially non-Americans focus on. Clearly it is the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the US military/Hollywood, and in recent decades, the Republican Party and NRA. They have morphed the existing frontier mindset into something somewhat new and more abstract, a generic anti-authoritarianism in which the gun owner no longer defends against a specific foe like nature or “savages” or the British, but organized society in general, which they blame for eliminating the Wild West which they so desperately wish still existed in order to live out their settler-colonial fantasy. (See also: Westworld)
Didn’t expect to write this much, but my point is basically that it will take a lot more than solving material conditions of poverty to eliminate the backward gun culture in America. Like @[email protected] said, it’ll take a concerted re-education effort to undo decades or centuries of propaganda about American culture itself and what it is to be American.
Thanks for the writeup! Very interesting