Of all the reprehensible shootings we’ve had in the country in recent weeks and the 180+ mass shootings in the first 121 days of the year, the one in Cleveland, Texas seems the worst, and not just because Gov. Greg “Hold My Beer, Ron” Abbott described the dead as “illegal” immigrants with an alleged smirk.
You’ll remember that that is the one — like mass shootings are a freaking Friends episode, now — in which a friendly Texas neighbor was shooting his AR-15 at 11:00 PM at night in his front yard, as one does, and took exception to the now dead family’s dad asking him to stop or move further away because it was keeping their baby awake. Would that that baby had stayed in the womb, so Greg Abbott could care about its life! He responded by shooting dead five of the people in the house including a nine year old… as one does, apparently, in the United Fucking States of Fucking Stupid.
Yeah, that one seems worse to me than all the other heinous shootings we’ve been traumatized by this year alone, but go ahead, debate the point in the comments, please.
Culture and Gun Violence
The huge number of gun-related deaths in the US buggers the question of why we have a culture that will tolerate this level of slaughter and trauma? Don’t give me nothing ’bout no poll numbers. The only poll that counts is at the ballot box. And, that actually tells us something. Gun violence is not evenly distributed across this blood-red land of ours. Some of us are flooding our hip waders in blood and some of us are just sloshing around in blood up to our ankles. Why is there such a huge disparity? Can psychology explain it?
It seems to me counter-intuitive to say that culture is tied to geography. Culture is a human construct that we use to explain differences in behavior, language, beliefs, dress, and all sorts of things between people that are otherwise pretty much the same. Yet, there is ample evidence that geography influences culture.
Specifically, geography has been found to correlate closely with the number of gun related deaths in an area and the amount of racism, as reported in Racism in America: Same Bat Time, Same Bat Place — Location Influences Bias. Let’s take a deeper dive into culture, then explore the data linking gun deaths to geography, and if there are words left in the self-imposed limits, we’ll revisit some of the racism and culture stuff, too.
Deep Culture
As explained in the post, The Civil War Never Ended: The Racist Deep Culture of Trumpism (part 1), Deep culture is “the unconscious frameworks of meaning, values, norms and hidden assumptions that we use to interpret our experience.”
As such, deep culture is what governs how similarly two or more people view a scene. You know like if you see a Black teenager in a hoodie walking away from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and a drink, do you see a kid walking with a drink and candy or are you mortified to your core fearing for your life? You know like if you see someone pull into your driveway and then start to pull out again, are you so afeared for your life that you start shooting into the car as they flee or do you think someone is lost or unsure of where they are and are just turning around? Deep culture governs how you view those two situations.
Culture is passed from person to person like syphilis or pregnancy. Consequently, we’ve always thought that deep culture changed slowly, generation to generation. However, what happens when immigrants or migrants move to an area with their culture? The culture of the migrant is a minority culture. The individual must somehow integrate the majority culture of their new area into themselves and into their already existing deep culture. The newcomer’s culture changes.
Theoretically, it is possible that the newcomers will change the local culture, but given the evidence from the Harvard Implicit Bias study and a study by the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Colin Woodard, it doesn’t seem like it is an even exchange or maybe it’s no exchange at all.
Geography, Culture, and Gun Violence
In the US, where are you more likely to die a violent gun death by your own hand (suicide), a stranger (murder), or someone known to you (murder)? New York City? Atlanta? Chicago? New Orleans? the West Virginia coal country? Nebraska corn fields? Texas? Florida? California?
According Woodard’s research, the places with the most gun deaths is the Deep South, especially in the greater New Orleans area. Is that what you thought? Look at the area labeled New Netherlands (New York City), it is among the safest. Florida, the Deep South, the rest of the old Confederacy, border states, much of Texas, and Oklahoma, are far and away the most dangerous places in the country. And, what do the politicians from those states tell you: it’s New York City and Chicago that are dangerous, that you’ve got to be armed to defend yourself from the deep state and all the criminals.
Join me in a chorus of That’s FUCKING insane!
Now just wait, a minute my favorite drunk uncle slurs spewing his gin and whiskey steeped breath and spittle across us says. Jus’ what the heck kinda proof of anything is a map that labels New York City as the New Netherlands, New Orleans as the New South, Hawaii as Greater Polynesia? What the fuck is up with that shit right there?
Cultural Roots of the US
Glad you asked. Woodard has studied the sources of colonists and settlers for the US, especially in the east and south east of the country (these folks migrated west as the country expanded). He has found distinct cultural boundaries in the country and has labelled with names indicating their affiliation with either the origins of the predominate culture of the settlers there or of where they are in the US, so New Netherlands for New York City because it was originally a Dutch colony, New France for New Orleans because it was originally a French colony.
He gives us some key differences for the cultures of each area:
YANKEEDOM: This was Puritan country where if you didn’t love Jesus right, you could be banished to the wilderness to establish Rhodes Island, but they also wanted to build heaven on Earth because God’s chosen. On the plus side, they favored the common good over individualism (thus all the banishing) and accepted foreigners as long as they loved Jesus right.
Because small individual farms were the predominate economic organizing principle, these folks were interdependent. They needed to help each other do the more difficult and labor intensive farming and community activities. Think barn raising and that kind of stuff. This is traditional Americana of neighbor helping neighbor.
NEW NETHERLAND (sic): This is the former Dutch colony; surprisingly, it still exhibits many of the ideals of 17th-century Dutch culture: global trade, materialism, and a real tolerance for differences.
You don’t run a city without having food and natural resources for it. Those came from the surrounding countryside,, which New York has long since consumed, but its culture remains. That culture is very similar to that of Yankeedom.
GREATER APPALACHIA: Most people don’t know the history of Appalachia, but it was populated by folks from the English rejects from its own isles: Northern Ireland, Northern England, and Scottish lowlands. All of these folks valued individualism and were anti-authority, especially British monarchy authority (the original deep state).
The British castoffs were herding folk. The herding economy differs from farming because livestock is so much more vulnerable and easy to steal. Herdsman have to be vigilant and distrustful. Given the fluidity of the basis of wealth where possession really is nine-tenths of the law, these folks weren’t always the most obedient and submissive to authority and the law.
DEEP SOUTH: I didn’t know this, but apparently when the British Caribbean colonies needed some place to send its burgeoning slave owning population, it sent them to the Deep South. They brought their view of democracy as being for the people-owning class and the idea that their was a natural hierarchy with Black folks at the bottom and them at the top. Convenient, right?
A lot of the settlers here were the second sons who had little to bring with them from the family estate other than their culture. They were the landed gentry, which means that they brought with them a sense of chivalry straight from Medieval knights in shining armor and feudal ideas of social organization and hierarchy and their rights of ownership, entitlement, and honor.
Cultural Legacy
These are the people who populated the earliest forms of government, businesses, and institutions of the country. As such they made the “rules” by which the day-to-day operation of these organizations ran. They wrote the newspapers and became the clergy. They disseminated information to the population. They trained their successors and the people who joined, like employees, students, and members.
As interregional migration occurred, the institutional culture endured. It was the way that things were done there. Newcomers were assimilated into it, changing the newcomers much more than the newcomers changed it.
Now, jus’ wait a ding-dang-dumb minute! my favorite drunk uncle pipes up. Culture cannot be tied to geography cuz we’d all be living like Native Americans!
Good point, but culture is passed person-to-person. Remove the people who have the culture, they cannot pass it on to anther. We did not assimilate the Native Americans, we genocided them and those who didn’t do the right thing and die, we moved on to reservations hoping they’d die there. That’s not what happened throughout much of American history to the white people who settled the country and those of us who continue to migrate around it.
Now we have the Second Amendment gun culture being disseminate whole sale around the country. It is being passed form person to person. It is wildly supported and used by those living in the honor cultures of the American South, but it is breaking out and being passed on to others around the country.
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Image Attribution
Image generated by WordPress’ AI image maker using the phrase, cartoon map of the US with each state drawn as a caricature of a gun. It is licensed however WordPress licensing these things, so use it at your own risk. I just trust that it is okay for me to use it.
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Categories: Social Psychology
The Psy of Life 
I will comment on the following from your article about gun violence — “DEEP SOUTH: I didn’t know this, but apparently when the British Caribbean colonies needed some place to send its burgeoning slave owning population, it sent them to the Deep South. They brought their view of democracy as being for the people-owning class and the idea that their was a natural hierarchy with Black folks at the bottom and them at the top. Convenient, right? —- and my comment follows:
When you speak of the “people-Owning” class, you are definitely talking (Basically) about those who adhere to the fanaticism of right wing ideology in the United States. They are the ones who think they are the “Only Americans” or “The ‘Real’ Americans … their arrogance knows no bounds. That is why they are the party of “My Way or The Highway.” Superiority and a sense of entitlement is in their dna. Their ideological ideal makes no room for any view on any subject that is not entirely in line with their own. For that reason, authoritarianism appeals to them as being as American as Apple pie. That is one reason there is a severe rightward shift in their little isolationist alternate-reality, alternate facts-filled fantasies. They operate from a sense of ingrained paranoia and fear — “The government is coming after me and my penile extensions (guns). All these characteristics suggest to me that most of those kinds of folks suffer from some kind of psychological or mental dysfunction … They definitely appear to me to operate on a lower perceptual scale than most other folks …maybe even a lower intellectual capacity … I cannot say for sure but the signs found in their attitudes and actions suggest that kind of anomaly to my way of thinking.
In all this, I should think that a predisposition to enforcing their superiority would resolve itself in gun worship and so they would be more amenable to an “Old Wild West” social structure than not … thus the preponderance of gun violence originating with them.
I am John Liming and that is my opinion. Thanks for the invitation to express it.
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Howdy John!
Delighted to hear from you, and couldn’t agree more. I’ve written about most of the ways you’ve described the party of white supremacy in posts past. Conservatives do indeed tend to see the world as a hierarchy; they tend to simpler solutions to complex problems and actually do have difficulty with emotional intelligence and problem solving; They are far more prone to misinterpret ambiguous social cues as aggressive, feel aggrieved, and and have a much higher sense of entitlement. Worse than any of that, though, is mass psychosis. After having been steeping in anger, stress, threat, and outrage since Reagan, they have lost their ability to think straight and are willing to believe any lie no matter how ludicrous.
We are seeing the right’s plan of flooding the country with guns, fear mongering and scapegoating CoC, marginalized groups, and immigrants, and normalizing violence come to fruition. The more chaotic, dangerous, violent, and deadly our streets become, the better for the “I alone can fix it” party.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The Nine Nations of North America (OK, eleven). Bit dated now, and based on a lifetime Way Out West along the Left Coast didn’t necessarily agree* with some of it, but it suits. The maps lay across each other quite nicely.
My differences were geological in nature, the work a social study …
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Howdy Ten Bears!
I would guess that in the same way racist culture is imbedded in the institutions of the Confederate South, the culture of anti-Native Americanism is embedded in the institutions of many Western states. It explains a great deal of why such attitudes are so difficult to rid ourselves of and supports the notion of institutional racism.
Huzzah!
Jack
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My sincere and grateful appreciation for your nice comment. I have added your blog to my “Favorite Blogs” list on the front page of “Liming’s Lynkz” and I know that I will be receiving from your writings which I see as timely and super-relevant. Feel free to visit and comment whenever you desire, whether you agree with me or not. I am kind of mercurial as I see circumstances change, but my obvious eccentricities should be evident to any observer. Nonetheless, like I said, “I am thrilled to hear from you and to have discovered your wonderful blog.”
Best Always,
John
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Howdy John!
Thanks for letting me know where you’re blogging at. Your linesbyliming link didn’t work, but google led right to Liming’s Lynkz.
As someone once told me, “We’re all eccentric in our own ways.” As a kettle, I cannot be calling no pots black, if you take my meaning.
Blogging is the best form of social media. It allows for interaction with a large number of people, an exchange of information, and a deeper level of thought. In all of the how to be a blogger books and posts that I’ve read, no one has mentioned that as being one of the benefits.
If you’re not careful, you could get added to the dreaded Festivus card list.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I am not so certain that the Festivus card list would be any different that some of the defecate lists that I must surely already be featured on. My “Shock Jock” style does offend … but it is intended to focus people who might otherwise be distracted when I am trying to tell them something I believe they need to hear.
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Wow! Talk about the Airing of Grievances! Festivus cards being equated with defecation! Frank Constanza just smiled and probably shed a tear.
I took my blogging inspiration from Hunter S. Thompson and his gonzo style of writing.If it ain’t over the top, it ain’t shit.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I swear before all that is Holy — you are a refreshing source of encouraging and healing waters. Thank you for your encouraging words. I am so glad I found you. My blogging experience is being very much the more enjoyable because of you.
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Thank you for your kind words. We of like minds have to band together to help us resist this fascism.
Jack
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack – Geography, settlement, and guns
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This is such a fascinating study, both in results and method. It gets me thinking about how the cultures, especially the political cultures of former colonies reflect the cultures of their former colonial masters. The language differences have a lot to do with that, and laws and legal systems inherited at independence, but so does the question of how an indigenous person has to present in order to succeed in the colonial situation.
AS for our predicament, it comes again to the one the Yankees have been asking since before independence, “What do we do about the South?”
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Howdy Bob!
Assimilation seems to play a big part in the continuance of culture through geography, but it seems to me that some cultures may be more amenable to assimilation than others. I think the honor cultures probably are less willing to adapt to their circumstances, so those people are less changed when they move away from their cultural areas. But, those same honor cultures are not able to tolerate people not assimilating to their culture. I wonder if there is work investigating that level of change in migration in the US.
What do we do with the South? How do we make nice with people who refuse to abide by the principles we aspire to? How do we live with people who undermine our democracy and citizens at every opportunity? The answer, maybe, is that we don’t. The persistence of their culture in their geography may speak to the necessity of separation.
Huzzah!
Jack
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We talk these days a lot about the “Culture War”, and this linkage of culture and geography got me thinking about the Civil War as a culture war, with slavery as the practical and emotional issue symbolic of the deep cultural differences. The Union won on the battlefield, but did not win the culture war. Reconstruction was to be a process of culture change and regime change. Had “40 acres and a mule” actually happened without the planter class (landed gentry) being compensated for the loss of their land and human capital, it might have worked. It didn’t happen. The plantation socio-economic system adapted by turning the freed slaves into debt-trapped and disenfranchised share croppers not much better off than they had been. The plantation took another form, especially in the Appalachian coal fields with company towns, the workers renting company houses and shopping at company stores (on credit), also debt trapped. The wars between the UMWofA and the bosses (with actual shooting) can be seen as part of that same culture war. Now, we have the predicament of “gig workers”, and baristas who organize finding their stores closed, and those seeking to better their situations through higher educations having to take on debt. Billie Holiday was right when she said; “
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”
The long culture war goes on, and The South, via the GOP and the “Southern Strategy” is exporting their system to the rest of the country.
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Howdy Bob!
That’s a GREAT point, the Civil War was part of a larger culture war between the north and the south that continues to this day. While they are trying to fan the flames of racial and cultural conflict throughout the country, it doesn’t seem to be paying off. Most people are against explicit racism and sexism. When they go to far, which they are right now in a classic case of overreach, there is a backlash. The biggest problems are political gerrymandering, the stocking of the court with MAGA judges, the continuing vulnerability of the white voters to racist dogwhistles, and the need of a for-profit press for clickbait.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I was thinking of the cultural meme of the “Kentucky Colonel” which we take now as a empty, and often comical, honorific. On the Old South it was real. Those landed gentry were colonels, majors, captains, and generals of their state (and earlier, colonial) militias. And those militias, facing the threats of Indian attacks and slave rebellions, included all able bodied, free, white men of fighting age. Those younger sons of British (and other) nobility brought with them the feudal system, a military hierarchy funded by grants of land. It was different in the North. The settler base there was former tenant farmers and peasantry seeking family farm scale land ownership and the entrepreneurial commercial and industrial class. The North saw itself as a meritocracy, as valuing social mobility, and attaching its ideas of honor, not to family name and status, but to being “upstanding and God fearing”, fair dealing, and honest. And, who worked for whom was an employer-employee relationship, not owner-slave or based on geography.
But in one way, they were alike. Both were capitalist systems seeking to get the most work for the least wages.
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Howdy Bob!
Economically, slavery was a questionable endeavor. When you took in the reproductive rate of human beings and the length of time from birth to being old enough to do hard labor, the amount it cost to feed, house, and cloth your slaves, and overseers, and police the grounds for runaways and rebellions, the profit margin was slim at best. In some ways the sharecropper and company town was a far better arrangement for the owner since you recouped wages through sales and didn’t have to be responsible for everyone’s housing and clothing and such.
When we say that the original sin of the US was slavery, it really encompasses this cultural divide and conflict between the more meritorious and greater equity culture of the North with the hierarchical and hereditary culture of the South. Even without slavery and racism, there would be conflict there. Now with the free-flow of guns, we’ve got deadly conflict.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I think it would be fair to say that although the North won on the battlefield, it lost or failed to follow through in the conquest. And, it wasn’t only Southern resistance that won that part. It was common practice among the large slave owners, if they needed capital, to mortgage not their land, but their slaves. When they lost the slaves, they still owed on those loans. I don’t know if the accounting of what happened next has ever been done, but it is a good bet that when the former owners were compensated for the loss of their human capital, much of that money went to pay off those loans. Who, besides those debtors would have been lobbying in Washington for that compensation? Of course, since 40 acres and mule didn’t happen, some of those loans could be renegotiated to use land as collateral. Who really pulled the plug on Reconstruction? A true conquest of the the South would have required that the slave owners loose both their slaves and their land, and the economic management of the region being taken over by investors and managers from the Northern culture. The closest analog in English history would be the Norman displacement of the Saxon nobility, although both were feudal cultures.
In some sense, the introduction of slavery was kind of an accident. The early landed gentry settlers were coming from a system of manorial landlords and tenant farmers in villages that were in effect company towns. Had the opportunity of obtaining slaves not showed up, they likely would have copied the system back home, bringing in those same tenant farmers who were being displaced by the Inclosure system.
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Howdy Bob!
Had we let the South go to continue slavery, it would have been worse than the Jim Crow laws and Sundown Towns. In some ways, the compromises we’ve made with slavers has been for the greater good; although, I doubt many would agree. I guess it is a thought experiment… a rabbit hole to run down and check out. The North could temper the Southern racists to some degree… or, at least, that is what we tell ourselves.
Would the alternative had been wholesale genocide of the landed gentry? Displacing them from positions of entitlement, authority, and ownership may have been possible, but they would’ve carried on some place else as some did in South America for a bit.
Is part of the fear of so many white people that Black people will want a violent revenge on them part of the historical fear of slave revolts and guilt for the pain and suffering inflicted passed down through institutional culture like racism is? Carried with the survivors buried deep in their psyche passed form generation to generation?
The costs of slavery in the American South have been far greater than the rewards. The longer we shy away from these questions and issues the higher the cost gets.
Do you know if the history of the United Kingdom after having done away with slavery has any clue for how to mollify the inner racist of the slavers?
Huzzah!
Jack
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I think that to totally displace and dispossess the salve owners would have looked much like the French Revolution, but with guns and nooses instead of the guillotine, and, short of a long term military occupation, similar chaos. Agricultural production of the major cash crops would have been devastated with severe economic consequences in the northern industries dependent on those raw materials.
Letting the South separate, or the South winning the war, creating a new nation would have had long term consequences that historians and speculative fiction authors have explored with a variety of results. But, it is a good bet that the contest between those promoting joining one side or the other would have continued in the new states and territories to the west, probably in the style of Bleeding Kansas. With a different nation facing the Gulf of Mexico, the Union would likely not have been so involved in the Caribbean, repeatedly intervening in Haiti, and no Spanish American War and possession of Puerto Rico and involvement in Cuba. The Confederacy would have been not involved in WWI, and likely to have sided with the Axis in WWII.
Yes, I have long been convinced that the terror of slave rebellions is epigenetically encoded. Deep down, white folks know that if somebody had done to them or their ancestors what was done to black people, they would want revenge, and they can’t believe that black people don’t. I’ve heal that behind every unarmed black man summarily executed by police, there stands the larger than life ghost of Nat Turner. Wasn’t the first thing they believed President Obama would do was to take away their guns? It is the same reason the Replacement Theory is so believable. We know we stole this land from somebody else. Those who claim Anglo-Saxon heritage know in their bones that they did it to the Celts of Britain. [The Norman conquest was a replacement of the nobility, not settler conquest.] So, in an Eye-for-an-eye universe, somebody want to do it to them.
The post-slavery situation in the UK was different. Their slavery was almost all in the colonies, not the homeland, and the plantation system in the colonies adapted and survived.
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Howdy Bob!
I’ve read a few of those the South won the Civil War alternative history novels. They are entertaining. My favorite alternative history to contemplate is the French winning the French Indian War and tossing the British out of North America. If that had happened, the Eastern seaboard might be like Quebec is now in Canada, a linguistic minority struggling to maintain itself. Ah, one can dream, can’t we?
While the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution was chaotic and horrific in the short term… okay, fifty years or so, in the long term, it worked out. There isn’t a strong monarchal political party in France like there is in the UK and Spain. There is a strong commitment to secularism, equality, and lifting up the average citizen. While modern France has its problems, it is doing quite well. Would that we could make such claims.
The idea of institutions harboring culture like bone marrow hiding HIV (too specific of a comparison?) is an intriguing one. The only way to actually change it, as Camden did its police department, is to get rid of the institutions and the people running them and start over. That’s a scorched earth policy that few of us could stomach.
While racism is alive and well in the UK, it is nothing like in its former Caribbean colonies. The Bahamas and Bermuda (not in the Caribbean) are cesspools of imbedded racism. It worked the same way there as it does here.
An interesting line of thought. One that I’ll spend some more time with and hope to turn into a blog post.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The availability of legal firearms, and no gun control laws, and how the Congress is funded by the, NRA, only makes it, more dangerous to, live in the U.S., especially if you are, a person of the, “wrong color” (non-whites)…
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Howdy Taurus!
The confounding thing about US gun politics is that everyone tells polsters that they want gun reform, yet two things happen on the way to vote. First, white voters fall for racist dog whistles and vote in Republican gun supporters and abortion opposers. And second, the Republicans have gerrymandered every district that they can to ensure majorities and super majorities in state legislatures and Congressional delegations.
We are up against it until voters start voting guns-abortion as a single issue litmus test. We seem to be creeping closer to that.
Huzzah!
Jack
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And that, is how, politics, still, get in the way, of, getting the right kinds of laws, set, and, there’s, nothing, the “minority” voters can, do, after all, in a democracy, it’s, the, majority that, ruled…
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Howdy Taurus!
Well, politics is all about getting the laws and policies you want enacted. Democracy is about the majority being willing to compromise with the minority giving everyone a say in the laws and policies. When a minority is repeated denied any influence in how the government is run, it often leads to frustration and ultimately revolution.
The only conclusion that we can make is that the Republicans (a) no longer care for democracy, and they only care about the policies they want to enact; and (b) are not concerned with the inevitable consequences of their actions (the revolution) and only for short-term gains.
It’s madness.
Huzzah!
Jack
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