Guns and the Art of Sanity Maintenance: a few tips to US of A

Americans shoot, Indians lynch

A number of factors are blamed for the mass shooting epidemic: mental illness, the cutting of public health funding for mental health, the sheer love for guns plain and simple, seeking revenge for an old grudge (being fired from a job or expelled from school) and a range of supremacist causes, which keep changing and churning.

Dylann Roof was a variety of white supremacist. When, during a video interrogation, an FBI agent asks him if he is a white nationalist, Roof explains: “I am a white supremacist. We are superior to blacks. Only East Asians are equal to white people, Chinese and Japanese.” I was upset when I read this. If you’re generous enough to include China and Japan, then why leave us Indians out? And what about the Vietnamese?

In fact, white kids from southern American small towns should be made to pay a visit to the badlands of India: U.P. Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan. In Allahabad, where I grew up, it was easier to buy a country pistol and place an order for crude bombs than it was to buy pineapple cake. The security is lax in most Indian schools; there are always ways of entering and escaping. The Doon School, for instance, is a bit of a fortress, but the municipal primary school, down the road from me in Dehradun, doesn’t even have a chowkidar guarding its entrance.

And yet, despite the easy availability of firearms and explosives, and little security, Indian youth, simmering with rage and resentment, don’t enter schools and open fire indiscriminately. We prefer rape and lynchings, when we want to make a violent statement; the chosen mode of violence can be culture specific. In India violence is often a collective act, while in America it’s about the atomised lone wolf striking out.

In his piece, Edward Ball describes billboards that go up in Charleston come December. These are gun stores advertising military weapons for the average Joe. One such billboard features an AR-15 assault rifle with a red bow tied around it: “All I want from Christmas is you.”

Ball visits the store selling the AR-15: ‘The idea that a young man shops for guns in a 40,000-square-foot store with Van Halen playing on the ceiling speakers is, in this part of the US, unremarkable.”

Here’s an idea. It cannot happen, which is why it’s an idea. When the love for guns is embedded in the culture, the economy and as a right in the constitution, it’s never really going to go away. Some American schoolboys will not grow up into the adarsh balak.

Think about what they did in Switzerland with heroin. One goes to a government-sanctioned clinic and gets one’s fix of clean heroin (along with counselling). One can’t take the drug out of the premises. This simple measure managed to bring street deaths from overdoses down to zero. Similarly, how about a large amusement hall of real guns where you can shoot down dummies of whomever you hate: Blacks, Asians, women, schoolchildren.  (The gun superstore Ball visits in his piece sells “targets in the shape of men, like a guy in a hoodie”).

After you’re done shooting, you will have to return your weapons to the store—no one is allowed to take them out. And if you’ve been shooting the dummy of a black man in a hoodie, you will undergo counselling in race sensitivity, where it will be gently explained to you that if, as a white supremacist, you put Caucasians, the Japanese and the Chinese on the same plane, then it’s rude to leave Indians and African-Americans out. (And, what about the Vietnamese?)

Incel trouble has an Indian cure

As I’d mentioned earlier, the multifarious supremacist causes are in a constant state of churn. Incels are the latest to have joined in the festivities. Incel is short for Involuntary Celibate.

In April this year, a Canadian Incel, pledging allegiance to the ‘Incel Rebellion’, killed ten people by driving his van (not firing a gun) down a crowded Toronto street. Most of the victims were women. In Incel argot good-looking men are called Chads, while good-looking women are Stacys, and the two conspire to keep the Incel celibate for life for no fault of his.

The hero of the Incel movement is one Elliot Rodger who killed six in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara, California. Of course, being an American, he used a gun rather than a van. Rodger has been hailed as the ‘Supreme Gentleman’ of the Incel ecosystem.

This problem has an easier solution than gun-control. All Incels should come to India. In India, there are no involuntary celibates. On the contrary, we have a surplus of the involuntarily wedded. Everyone is married off in India, even if you’re homosexual. Your class and looks—it really doesn’t matter. Every Indian gets married as a matter of right. The ugliness of the Indian male has been the subject of much discussion but it hasn’t prevented him from marrying, as a matter of course, generation after generation.

And dear milk Incel, here’s another point to note: Indians worship white skin. You will find yourself changing from lonely white banana to prized catch in a matter of hours. Do check out my website: Incel @India Wedding Tours.

(The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth, published by Rupa)