How Colonization Fostered Public Mass Gun Violence in the US (and what Education and Society can do about it)

This paper positions public mass gun violence (PMGV) asan intergenerational consequence of the violence of colonization,coloniality, and slavery in the United States. I map how the shooter’swhite privilege, alongside his white/male fragility, combined with anational consciousness built on an ethos of colonization and coloniality,leads him to believe he has unearned “rights” to the social riches ofthe center. I proffer that most of us who benefit from capitalist, neo-liberal,patriarchal state and social institutions are complicit in co-creating theconditions that produce PMGV’s gunboys and gunmen because in order to benefit from these institutions, we perpetuate a system of insiders andoutsiders. As illustrated, some possibilities for allaying violence aregrounded in practicing critical self-reflection and pedagogies ofdiscomfort