Americans need a nonviolent “civil” war against conglomerate “speech” and guns, as well as against Trump.
How many times can a republic’s citizens fire guns at their fellow-citizens at random, and sometimes en masse, before that republic itself dies, along with its dreams? How much longer can Americans escape the truth that attempted mass shootings like last week’s—in a Mormon church at prayer in Grand Blanc, Michigan, where at least four people are dead and many others injured, and at a waterfront bar in Southport, North Carolina, where three were killed by shots targeted from a passing boat, and at the surreally named Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass, Texas, killing two and injuring more—are only the most recent eruptions of a larger “manifest destiny” of the polity’s political and social doom?
Our media-maddened, heavily marketed obsession with chasing, identifying, and even executing individual perpetrators of “mass shootings”—324 of which have killed four or more people in this year alone, according to the nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive—hasn’t made us safer or freer, especially when we’re compared to other democratic republics that, unlike ours, tightly restrict and even prohibit most citizens’ ownership of guns.
I believe that a major root of this crisis is not only the eternally divided human heart, which leaves many of us capable of doing terrible things, but, even more decisively now, conglomerate and private-equity investment strategies that we foolishly call “healthy” or “wealth-making” or that we accept as anodyne but that bring us no civic wisdom or social wellbeing and that actually undermine the “commonwealth.” Our casino-like capitalism, no longer constrained by cultural norms of decency and mutual respect, degrades those norms, often brazenly, in exchange for quick “market” returns. Trump is the very incarnation of the problem.
Unless we can reinterpret the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment to regulate ownership and operation of guns as carefully as we regulate the ownership and operation of automobiles, our moralism and prayers for individual shooters and their victims amount to nothing better than amoral dodging of reality.
It took me awhile—almost 30 years after a gun massacre of high school students by several of their fellow-students in Denver, Colorado in 1998—to realize that it wasn’t only or mainly the shooters’ personal backgrounds and beliefs that drove them in Colorado, or Adam Lanza in 2012 to massacre the children at a school that he had attended in Connecticut, or Dylann Roof to murder nine members of a church Bible class in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, or Seung-Hui Cho to kill 33 people at Virginia Polytech Tech in 2007.
I wonder instead when Americans will end their obsessive, even prurient, probing of every new killer’s derangement, bloodlust, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, or “radical” rage at America. When will we confront what’s really driving this mayhem? We do sometimes mention America’s historically violent “frontier” culture, its absolutism in interpreting its Constitution’s Second Amendment protecting gun abuse, and its “original sin” of racism and its analogues. We also lament the inadequacy of treatment for mental illness. But we seldom confront what’s accelerating the whirlwind, because we’re complicit in it: We even vote for it—even for Democrats who advocate better gun-control laws but stop short of controlling what’s really driving gun abuse.
The decisions whose dangers we keep on denying are the ones that empower anonymous shareholders whose profit-chasing and entertainments derange deliberative inclinations, bypassing our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and our wallets. Manic marketing—unleashed even into electoral politics by rulings such as Citizens United—is undoing the civic-republican beliefs and virtues that sustained the American experiment more often than not.
We should chase, catch, probe, and change the domestic arms race among criminals, citizens, and police departments that’s driven by gun manufacturers peddling ever-more lethal weapons to local police because they already peddle them so massively to everyone else, even to criminals.
We’ve forgotten how unarmed peoples elsewhere have brought down militarized regimes—in British colonial India, in apartheid South Africa, in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe—as the late writer and civic tribune Jonathan Schell described in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, which recounts in graphic detail and with rigorous analysis how authoritarian elites keep trying to impose their will via militarization, acting with “refreshed ignorance” of what really sustains legitimate authority.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson knew that he was risking political failure in 1964 when he adopted the civil-rights movement’s pledge, “We shall overcome,” as he proposed a strong Voting Right Act to a joint session of Congress and a national television audience. But uprooting many Americans’ racial assumptions will require more than new laws and federal marshals. Legal “remedies” alone might be counterproductive unless they’re accompanied by wrenching reconfigurations of long-entrenched American misunderstandings of liberty and justice for all—including our delusions that arming ourselves lethally against one another somehow makes us safer or freer and that our “freedom of speech” is enhanced by manic consumerism and profiteering, or by prurient or bloody “news” stories and entertainment driven by the producers’ algorithmically scripted desperation to bypass our brains and hearts by ratcheting up our stresses, fears, and lusts on its way to groping our lower viscera and wallets.
When water is polluted, fish can’t assess or alter it; they can only swim to cleaner waters or, if they’re overtaken and trapped, they sicken and die. But humans generate the pollution that they ingest. They do it when quasi-libertarian, conspiratorial, or well-funded misunderstandings of freedom and power have short-circuited our recognition that hollow commercial speech is deranging us.
Some judges and civil-liberties advocates assume that such pollution should be constitutionally protected because impositions of “purity” would be worse. It’s a legitimate worry, justified by regulatory abuses such as Inquisitions, witch trials, and leftist show trials. But it doesn’t overcome perverse jurisprudence such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling, in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976), that corporate advertising deserves protection because, the court said, “the free flow of commercial information” enhances transparency in public deliberations by conveying information that consumers have a “right” to receive.
That ruling was wrong because, as Yale Law professor Robert Post argues, the Constitution’s First Amendment that protects freedom of speech “cannot be understood as […] the champion of a particular (and contested) view of proper market functioning. To the contrary, [it] creates the very space in which all potential theories of marketplace functioning can be debated and evaluated.”
It’s too late to chase and blame deranged loners who live with only their demons. What endangers Americans now is the sickening economic and political sea that we’re swimming in and the poisoned air that we’re breathing.
Stopping the engines of our self-destruction will require not a bloody civil war but cannily organized civil disobedience and boycotting of the gun lobby and of recent judicial protections of conglomerate advertising that teaches Americans to mistrust, fear, and resent one another and even themselves.
Are Americans too “far gone” to cure this sickness? Answering will require untangling our distorted linking of libertarianism with corporate and casino-like private-equity investing, along with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that extends First Amendment protection to the supposed “speech” of massive financial donations to candidates in elections by incorporeal entities that are profit-driven but inexcusably destructive of essential civic-republican values. Americans rightly condemn the 19th-century Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott decisions that upheld racial slavery. So too, now, should we end poor jurisprudence that enables and incentivizes gun slavery.
Cover photo: A sign reading “Warning, does not play well with liberals” is seen above semi-automatic rifles displayed for sale in a gun store in Arizona on September 17, 2025. Arizona allows individuals legally eligible to own guns to carry them without a permit, background checks apply to dealer sales but not most private transactions. (Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP)
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