TEHRAN – Noting that American cinema is certainly entangled with gun violence, a cinema expert believes America itself is suffering from violence too.

“American cinema is violent, sure, but America itself, it seems to me, is violence,” Anthony Ballas, an American cinema expert, tells Tehran Times.

Over the weekend, two people were killed and four others injured in a shooting at Chickasaw Park in Louisville, Kentucky. This came less than a week after a mass shooting at a bank in the same city left five people dead. 

While there are a lot of factors that contribute to the issue of mass shootings and spread of extremism in the United States, some experts argue that the country itself is violent. 

Anthony Ballas, an adjunct instructor who currently teaches composition and rhetoric at the University of Colorado at Denver, highlights the need for increased scrutiny of social media with regards to the threat of right-wing extremism. 

Far-right extremism has found a stable foothold in the legal system, making it difficult to prevent individual acts of gun violence, Ballas notes.

The interview with Ballas, who also teaches philosophy and social sciences at Northern New Mexico College, explores how politicians and lawmakers have responded to mass shootings and what measures can be taken to prevent individuals who hold far-right extremist beliefs from committing acts of mass shootings.

Following is the text of the interview:

Q: How do you view the role of media and cinema in contributing to the issue of mass shootings and the spread of extremism in the United States? What actions do you believe should be taken to address this issue, if any?

A: Well, in terms of cinema, I have actually been interviewed on this subject before, so I would recommend readers take a look at some of my earlier interviews for the Tehran Times and elsewhere. But let me say briefly that cinema and media in general — including social media — ought to be directly implicated in this problem, though perhaps not in the way some might readily assume. It is not insignificant that so many of these mass shootings have been live streamed on Facebook or “Meta,” Instagram, Twitch and other social media platforms. We saw this, for instance, with the recent mass shooting at the bank in Louisville, Kentucky, or the white supremacist terror attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York just under one year ago. And the list goes on from there. 

Although I think many assume that violent cinema simply influences a violent culture, I don’t tend to think it’s that simple necessarily. In fact, I think it’s quite clearly the other way around. Many point their fingers at video games, television and cinema while they should probably pay more attention to what’s flashing before their eyes in the news media, and the fact that the United States has been continually at war for decades — for the entirety of my lifetime at least, though certainly longer. Imagine one giant, continuous, cinematic tracking shot — like the famous 15-minute one from Children of Men, or the movie 1917 — chronicling the unbroken history of American imperialism playing out on screen media. Well, this really isn’t that abstract of a thought.

Cinema is certainly entangled with gun violence, as both share roots in the racist history of the United States. It is probably cliché at this point to even mention Western films, John Wayne and so on, the well known genre depicting quite unapologetically and unabashedly the horrors of settler colonialism and white supremacy. American cinema is violent, sure, but America itself, it seems to me, is violence.

In terms of the actions we might take to address this issue, well, I don’t think we should simply be blaming screen media for the problems we face. This seems reactionary. I think we need to address the issue of gun violence and mass shootings from the ideological and political roots of these problems, so perhaps starting with an analysis of white supremacist terror, the ethos and logic of settler colonialism, and the war machine — including the weapons lobby and the fact that there are more guns in the United States than there are people — is a good place to begin.

Lastly, let me just say that social media deserves increased scrutiny with regard to the threat of right wing extremism. The MAGA movement, Trump and his white supremacist, libertarian band of followers certainly have a presence on the internet, and many social media sites have functioned like digital recruitment centers for the far right. We should pay attention to the fact as well that with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter we can probably expect it to become a recruitment site as well as a platform for right wing propaganda, as we saw with his recent re-platforming of fascist figures like Kanye West, Nick Fuentes and others. 

Q: Some mass shooters have been found to hold far-right or white supremacist beliefs. How does this ideology contribute to the problem of mass shootings in the United States? How have politicians and lawmakers responded to mass shootings carried out by individuals with far-right beliefs? What measures can be taken to prevent individuals who hold these beliefs from committing acts of mass violence?

A: In most cases, lawmakers and politicians have been ineffectual when it comes to mass shootings. There has been some legislation passed enhancing background checks for the purchase of weapons, increased mental health resources for communities impacted by gun violence and so on. Biden of course signed an executive order for reducing gun violence. But of course none of this really speaks to the ideological issue of right wing and white supremacist terrorism that you bring up here, which I think can’t simply be prevented by way of executive order or legal reform.

It’s been a little over two years since Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021, in which we saw his far-right foot soldiers storm the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. I don’t want to overstate it, but I think it’s important that we’ve seen some of these far-right militias prosecuted and convicted for their role in January 6, such as certain members of the so-called Proud Boys, Stewart Rhodes of the Oathkeepers and others. At the very least this may dissuade far right extremists from committing political violence — though I have to admit I am not fully convinced of or committed to this position. 

One major problem is that far right extremism does not only manifest in the form of lone gunmen committing acts of terrorism but has found a stable foothold in the legal system: in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, for instance, or the overwhelmingly conservative Supreme Court and elsewhere. (And with the recent revelations about Clarence Thomas’s financial ties to the Hitler enthusiast Harlan Crow, can we really be that surprised? Not to mention his spouse Ginni’s role in plotting the coup of January 6). Preventing individual acts of gun violence seems, at this point, to be nearly impossible. Every now and then you’ll hear of a state or city security apparatus intervening and potentially stopping a mass shooting from taking place, such was the case of William Whitworth recently in Colorado Springs for instance. But recall too that the Colorado Springs nightclub mass shooting in 2022 was motivated by Anti-LGBTQ+, Transphobic, and Christian nationalist, fascist ideology. 

We are seeing right wing ideology motivating mass shootings or attempted mass shootings for a variety of reasons; election denial, QAnon, support for Trump, anti-Black Lives Matter, COVID denial, antisemitism, anti-immigration, Accelerationism, and on and on. But right wing extremism is a political and ideological front in the United States (and abroad I should add), and thus tackling the issue as being rooted in individual acts of terrorism is myopic. To combat this front realistically, we need to tackle right wing extremism in all of its guises through electoral politics, activism, and through local, national and even international coalitions. We need to understand it as a broad-based ideological system that has snaked around the globe, from Washington to Brazil, to Hungary and so on. We really can’t take the problem of neo-fascism in a piecemeal manner, nor can we solely rely on the glacial pace of the reform model. We need to build a strong, capable center-left, anti-fascist, anti-white supremacist coalition.

Q: There have been debates on the role of gun control to prevent mass shootings. In your opinion, what policies or measures could be implemented to better regulate firearms and prevent mass shootings? What are the primary obstacles in gun control policies?

A: One primary obstacle is surely the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which enables the libertarian, right wing gun culture that I mentioned previously. The history of the second amendment makes this clear. Who was granted the right to bear arms? Well, it certainly wasn’t the dispossessed Indigenous populations, or the enslaved Africans. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory, published a book entitled The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America detailing this history. 

Certainly, regulating and making it more difficult to access firearms, including enhanced background and mental health checks and so on, are needed. Intervention through red flag laws, too, though I am always skeptical of measures that put more power in the hands of law enforcement. 

As I already mentioned, there are more firearms in the United States of America than there are people — and the COVID pandemic that introduced a million preventable deaths only further augmented this sobering statistic. At this point we have to be in favor of even the most modest gun control reform efforts it seems, while simultaneously pressing lawmakers for more robust legislation across the board. 

Let’s also not forget that gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and teens in this country. I am going to repeat that: death by firearms is the leading cause of death of children and teens in the United States. Children walk around with targets on their backs, as we’ve seen recently in Nashville, Tennessee and last year in Uvalde, Texas and elsewhere. And I shouldn’t omit my home state of Colorado, as recently as this past February when Luis Garcia, who was 16, was killed a block away from East High School (where I actually attended high school nearly 20 years ago). Then, within weeks of this incident, a student brought a gun to East High School and shot two administrators before fleeing and eventually taking his own life. The school system, the local, state and federal government — and the American gun culture more generally — are all culpable for this violence. They failed these students just as they’ve failed countless others. 

And all signs point to a continuation of this kind of failure. It was just reported by the Intercept a few days ago, for instance, that the intelligence agency in Colorado, The Colorado Information Analysis Center (CIAC), instead of monitoring potential terror threats was monitoring East High School students who were planning a nationwide walkout protest after the shootings I just mentioned. We’d be remiss not to consider factors like these as primary obstacles to gun control. 

Q: In addition to gun violence, Kentucky and Tennessee are confronting various other challenges such as poverty, drug addiction, climate change, education, and healthcare. How do you think these factors contribute to the issue of violence in Kentucky and Tennessee? To what extent do they reflect injustice and inequality in the country?

A: I’m glad you brought up Kentucky and Tennessee because not only are these two states the latest to have witnessed mass shootings, but they are also prime examples of what I’ve been talking about with regard to the history of white supremacy and fascism in the U.S. Let’s not forget that Tennessee was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist terrorist group started by confederate veterans of the American Civil War who were against the emancipation of Black people. This is not unconnected from what we’ve seen unfolding currently in the Tennessee legislature with the “Tennessee Three.” I am speaking of the recent expulsion (and eventual reinstatement) of two young, Black lawmakers, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, for their participation in a gun control protest following the mass shooting in a school in Nashville only weeks ago. It is not insignificant that while these two lawmakers faced expulsion, their comrade in the protest, Representative Gloria Johnson, was not expelled — and the reason why ought to be crystal clear: Johnson is a white woman, and so she avoided expulsion on these grounds quite clearly. There is a bill in committee in Tennessee to bring back the firing squad and the electric chair as legal forms of capital punishment — and recently Republican Representative Paul Sherrell even proposed adding lynching to the bill. So, to answer one of your questions, I’d say that, yes, Tennessee in particular absolutely reflects the racial injustice of the United States. 

There is absolutely an epidemic of drug related deaths in the country, particularly in the Midwest and in the south, though certainly not localized entirely to those regions. If we take into consideration the massive amount of poverty affecting these regions, homelessness, lack of adequate healthcare, etc., the compounding character of this crisis is quite revealing of the priorities in this country. Rather than tackling homelessness, for instance, we are funding a proxy war in Ukraine with Russia and China currently. 

Climate change is affecting the entire planet, and very few serious steps have been taken to mitigate or even think about this problem in the United States at all levels of government — and I’m sure this is rather acutely the case in Kentucky and Tennessee. And since you mentioned climate change — to which I will append its apocalyptic twin, nuclear war — we may not even have a future to fix lest we take all of the above seriously and immediately. 

We just saw a bill pass the Tennessee House and Senate that would effectively censor college professors from teaching “divisive concepts,” which, like most stock phrases on the right, we can think of as code for anything having to do with the teaching of the history of racism, gender inequality, and social justice issues, etc. This is straight out of the fascist playbook. 

The crisis in education is deeply rooted in the very politics that provide nourishment for the kinds of violence we’ve been talking about here. Just look at what’s going on in Florida with DeSantis and the Florida Education Board, the blocking of an AP African American Studies course, the call to ban Critical Race Theory, and the removal of influential Black scholars from the curriculum like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Robin D.G. Kelley and others. DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and the “Stop Woke” act also demonstrate this kind of politics and the legal fascism that figures like Jason Stanley has discussed. Or in Arkansas under the aegis of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the newly inaugurated Governor, who, with her hand barely even off of the Bible she was sworn in on, enacted her own executive order banning Critical Race Theory. Just more evidence of white supremacy getting folded seamlessly into the legal system in the United States. Book bans, censorship, defunding of libraries, the attack on women’s reproductive rights, banning abortion medication, a slew of anti-Trans legislation, and the list goes on. We are trending down the path of neo-fascism in this country. 

All of these issues are connected, certainly. The economic devastation wreaked by capitalism breeds this kind of reactionary violence — and in the context of the racist and settler colonial history of the United States, with candidates like Trump and DeSantis, and with a media sphere saturated by influential far right pundits like Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Jordan Peterson, and even Joe Rogan who, I’d argue, provides a platform for figures like Peterson and others, this kind of white supremacist violence will persist unless we take these threats seriously and actively fight back the rising tide of neo-fascism.