by Guild President Richard Kamei
We are now at the start of a new year and we look forward to the year with optimism. Many of us in the GCC family, whether we were rooting for the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl or not, celebrated their victory because a member of our family, GCC alumnus and Head Coach of the Chiefs, Andy Reid, led his team to their third Super Bowl championship title. Tragically, three days later, on February 14, 2024, during the parade and celebration in Kansas City, a mass shooting occurred where one woman, Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed and 22 others were injured. Coincidentally, the shooting occurred on the sixth-year anniversary of the mass shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed and another 17 were injured.
As an educator and a union leader, it is my sincere hope that we learn important lessons from the past and apply them towards a better future. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. As of this writing on February 18, 2024, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), there have already been 53 mass shootings in the United States. Based on the data from GVA, there were 656 mass shootings in 2023. A mass shooting is defined by GVA as a single incident involving the shooting of four or more people. As we have witnessed numerous times in the past, after our nation is shaken by a mass shooting, our Democratic representatives call for greater gun control while our Republican representatives focus on mental illness.
Needless to say, the factors associated with mass shootings are numerous and complex. It is absolutely imperative that we as a nation provide reasonable gun control measures such as universal background checks, which is supported by a large majority of Americans based on the findings of recent surveys such as the Public Policy Polling survey and the Pew Research Center survey. We also need to have a better understanding of mental health and greater access to mental healthcare services in our nation. However, the relationship between mental illness and mass shootings is complicated. For example, the findings from research conducted by the Violence Project Research Center show that mental illness has played a role in some mass shootings but not all. In fact, the shooters in the majority of cases were not experiencing symptoms of psychosis. It is also important to note that many Americans suffer from mental health issues and do not have a history of violence.
Despite the differences in the approach taken by Democrats and Republicans, the one thing that both sides share is a lack of attention given to the societal factors that are associated with mass shootings. In this regard, the discipline of sociology can provide us with a method of analyzing mass shootings by examining the social structure within which we live.
Significant problems experienced by people, especially the working class, in our modern capitalist society are alienation, exploitation, and marginalization, which Karl Marx systematically addressed in his writings over 150 years ago. Since the mid-1970s, the income and wealth gap between the working class and the middle class in comparison to the wealthiest one percent has grown significantly. A recent study by the RAND Corporation, which analyzed American incomes between 1975 to 2018 found that approximately $47 trillion were redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. In the most recent years, approximately $2.5 trillion per year was redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Working class people of color are disproportionately affected but the white working class would be the largest category of working class Americans that are impacted.
Since we are often not taught to carefully examine the systems that we live under, simplistic notions of the problem become prevalent in our society. In this way, the system that serves the interests of the wealthy at most people’s expense is left unchallenged. John Dollard, Neal Miller, et al. provided us with the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which helps us to understand that as members of the white working class have seen their socioeconomic status decline rapidly with less hope for the future, some have directed their frustration at members of minoritized communities. Some members of minoritized communities have also directed their frustrations toward other marginalized communities. Too often, immigrants become the scapegoats. In addition to frustration-aggression hypothesis, Christopher Sebastian Parker points out in his article titled “Status Threat: Moving the Right Further to the Right” published in the journal Daedalus, that status threat hypothesis helps us to understand the rising numbers of right-wing extremist and domestic terrorist groups as some white Americans respond to a sense of losing social status and political power. Social media exacerbates this problem by creating silos for individuals which reinforces extreme views not tethered to the real conditions under which people live.
Another important area that must be carefully examined is the rapid social changes that are leading many Americans to feel a sense of what Emile Durkheim called anomie. Anomie can be thought of as a sense of normlessness or rulelessness, which is brought on by the breakdown of existing societal standards, values, and social bonds. In our society, we have a large segment of people who have been displaced and disconnected from the larger society. Many of the rules, standards, and experiences of past generations have dramatically changed in recent times. For example, it is very difficult to find a job that provides enough income to keep up with the rise in cost of living, college is now extremely expensive, many people find themselves in significant debt, the demographic composition of the United States is changing where it is expected that people of color will be the numerical majority by around 2045, climate change is creating instability and uncertainty for our planet’s future, etc. According to Durkheim, as the sense of anomie increases in society, self-destructive behavior such as suicide becomes more prevalent. In this regard, some cases of mass shootings can be understood to be the result of individuals dealing with anomie since mass shootings are self-destructive acts.
We have what appears to be insurmountable challenges. Fortunately, unions have the potential to play a vital role in mitigating some of the ill effects that members of our society face. The fundamental purpose of a union is to bring workers together to leverage their strength in numbers to protect and improve their wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. Coming together for a common goal helps to reduce some of the alienation and anomie felt by people. It also helps reduce racism as people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds come together in a common struggle, as was found in the study by Paul Frymer and Jacob Grumbach titled “Labor Unions and White Racial Politics” published in the American Journal of Political Science. Moreover, unions can provide an outlet for the anger and frustrations that people feel in regard to their life circumstances. Furthermore, through organized labor, members can begin to study and then understand the structural causes of the inequality, exploitation, and alienation that they face. Through political socialization union members are more likely to exert their power, which, ideally, will lead them to struggle together to make substantive changes to the social, economic, and political conditions that impact all our lives.
Richard T. Kamei
February 18, 2024
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