On the 27th of October an anti-semitic mass shooting took place inside a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Eleven persons were killed and six were injured making it one of the biggest hate crime commited on jews in the USA's history. The shooter, 46-year-old Robert Bowers, a white supremacist, started shouting anti-semitic slants as he was being taken to the hospital. Even though the attack was racially motivated and shows the clear rise of racism and anti-semitism in the country, the discussion seems to be drifting off into gun-control.
Racism is a really old problem in the US, which goes back to the country's history of slavery, segregation and lynching of black people and other minorities. In the last years with the rise of fascist movements like the Alt-Right and the election of Trump, this racism seems to be becoming more common again. In 2017 the US saw a rise of 60% in hate crimes towards jews, rising activities in fascist movements like the Alt-Right and gatherings like the one in Charlottesville, which ended with the death of one activist.
As it's the case with all mass shootings in this country, the discussion seems to drift off from problems such as racism, into gun-control discussions. Attacks such as these are to be condemned, but not to be blamed on liberal gun-control laws. This deflection serves only as a scapegoat and denies tackling the real problem. It deviates from solving the problem of racism, which is deeply entangled with and finds its source in the capital power. It serves effectively in its function of divide and conquer, which keeps the masses fighting each other and denying them of uniting to fight against their oppresors. It also serves an important economic function of producing cheap labor force by making illegal immigrants work for measly wages or for producing modern day slaves in the form of prisoners.
Since grabbing the problem by the root would mean destroying everything the USA stands for, the discussion is only touched superficially never letting it get any deeper than the surface. Officially there will be mourning and condemnation and some people will genuinely feel fear and sadness, but until the question at hand is not seen from a class perspective, this topic will be forgotten or instrumentalized to follow the bourgeois state's objectives. As the massive gun-control protests this year have shown, the masses are being deceived into believing their rights to bear arms works against them. While there is a powerful weapon lobby in the US and an enourmous industry in the production of weapons, the fight is not to be waged against a right, which provides the masses with the means to fight and defend themselves, but against the industry itself, which makes a big part of the capital of the USA.