Earlier in this thread I was resonding to other posts while I formulated my thoughts. Well, you beat me to the punch. I agree largely with your post, but I do want to add a couple of points. You correctly call out the socio-political changes in the US. It has been decades in the making and I would add very intentional. The radical socialist left has been working to undermine the free market and overthrow the US Constitution for over 100 years. It goes back to the original progressive movement in the early 20th Century. It has ebbed and flowed over time, but there has been a continual socialist movement every since. It started even before with the Fabian socialists in the UK, but the movement was already well developed in the US by the time Dutschke coined the phrase the, “Long march through the institutions,” which was similar to Gramsci’s concept of the “war of position”. The idea was to infiltrate the institutions of education, government, media, entertainment, etc. and undermine the US and “capitalism” from within. See Zohran Mamdami. There were other manifestations of this as well, such as Paulo Freire’s “Critical Pedagogy”. This movement was accelerated by the ascendance of postmodernism, which is antithetical to the philosophical underpinnings of the US Constitution and whose proponents were Marxist. Post modernism is now the dominant system of philosophy in the American academy.
That is how we have gotten to the place where you rightly describe the millions of Americans who have adopted the “oppresor-oppressed” culture, which is a Marxist construct. With regard to the issue of shootings, this is the part of our modern culture that contributes to political violence. The majority of leftist political violence has not been called out. Just see the riots and near daily assaults on federal buildings and ICE facilities. It is still the minority of shootings in total each year, but on the rise. The majority of violence in the US is realted to gangs, drugs, and other criminal activity, but that is a separate, yet related topic.
I think those of us who are American patriots and believe in the Constitution must recognize we are in conflict with forces that have long been at work to undermine the country with the goal of replacing our federal republic with their Marxist “utopia”. So yes, politics and political violence are downstream of culture and we must work to change the culture. There are those who do it very publically, like Charlie Kirk and are effectively building cultural movements. That is why he was assassinated. We must support those who are doing the work publically and organizing while we each play our part, talking to our children, our children’s friends, our neighbors, our fellow congregants at church (yes, it’s in the church too), etc. The vanguard, to borrow Lenin’s term, of our radical left is relatively small, but they have an outsized voice, in part amplified by certain politicians, but also because patriotic Americans have busied ourselves quietly going about our lives. I think for the moment, we still have the greater numbers, but we do need to start using our voice in honest, respectful, but direct conversations to help turn the culture back. In the mean time, yes, deter by advocating for and utilizing our 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms.