As the dust settles from a horrific weekend of mass shootings, it is appropriate to recall 2 RFK speeches that are highly relevant in the current context. The first is his speech on The Mindless Menace of Violence, his sole public appearance on April 5, 1968, the day after MLK’s assassination:
Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
Killing has continued to be glorified on TV and movie screens and called entertainment in the ensuing two-score and 11 years. The contagion has spread to other forms of mass media that have been invented during those years. While violent video games admittedly contribute to the contagion, they’re a fairly small drop in a very big bucket. Those who blame them for the contagion might wonder whether swagger and wielding of force as a campaign rally staple is such a hot idea in the current context. When a president openly laughs when one of his supporters publicly advocates shooting migrants, there’s always the risk that another supporter might take the suggestion seriously.
The second RFK speech worth noting addressed GDP (which was called GNP then) at a speech he gave at the University of Kansas the day after announcing his presidential candidacy:
But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
RFK’s reference to the rifle of Charles Whitman, the 1966 Texas Tower shooter, is especially relevant now. When Whitman killed 14 people (with weaponry he purchased that morning), mass shootings of that magnitude were uncommon. The NRA’s knee-jerk opposition to any form of gun control did not exist in that era, either. When a lame duck LBJ obtained passage of The Gun Control Act of 1968 in the aftermath of the MLK and RFK assassinations, the NRA VP stated: “the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with."
Obviously, the NRA’s approach has changed over the decades, as has its dependence upon funding from gun manufacturers. A 2013 study by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) estimated that those manufacturers funneled between $19mm and $60mm to the NRA. More recently, Josh Sugarmann of the VPC said the following in an interview:
SUGARMANN: Today's National Rifle Association is essentially a de facto trade association masquerading as a shooting sports foundation. So the NRA does the bulk of lobbying for the industry. You know, you hear the NRA talking about their opposition to an assault weapons ban, their opposition to raising the age for the purchase of a long gun from 18 to 21 years of age. And they try to frame it in terms of freedom and history and, you know, sort of the sacred nature of firearms.
Well, the reality is that's bad for the industry to pass those laws. If you ban assault weapons, that wipes out what they rely on as a recent profit center. If you raise the age for purchase of a long gun, which includes assault rifles, then you add three more years to the timeframe before a young person can buy a gun. So it's very important to understand the political battle in terms of the interests of the industry and in terms of marketing.
It ain’t rocket science—the gun manufacturers fund the NRA, the NRA pulls the strings of the GOP, and massacres in El Paso, Dayton, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Columbine, and far too many other places become a part of our national landscape. To paraphrase RFK’s KU speech, the profit margins of the gun manufacturers are a higher priority than the health/safety of our children (and of their parents). Mitch McConnell will block any attempt to do anything about the mother who was killed protecting her 2 month old child because he has gotten $1.2mm in blood $ funneled from the manufacturers through the NRA.
As much as I admire RFK, I wish that his words weren’t still so resonant today.