Systemic failure: How Turkey’s gun violence epidemic reflects neoliberal security policies and militarised masculinity
Original framing: “Erdogan promises tighter gun controls after deadly Turkey school attacks - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The original framing omits the historical role of the Turkish state in fostering a gun culture tied to militarism and masculinity, particularly through mandatory military service and the glorification of armed conflict. Indigenous and Kurdish perspectives on state violence and disarmament are erased, as are the economic drivers—such as the privatization of security firms and NATO’s arms deals—that fuel gun proliferation. Additionally, the mental health crisis is depoliticized, ignoring how neoliberal austerity has dismantled social services while the state invests in surveillance and policing.
Medium structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by Reuters, a Western-centric news agency embedded in global financial and geopolitical power structures, framing gun control as a state-led solution while ignoring the transnational arms trade and NATO’s influence on Turkish military-industrial complexes. The framing serves Erdogan’s government by centering his authority as the sole actor capable of reform, obscuring systemic critiques of his regime’s militarization and the complicity of Western allies in sustaining Turkey’s security apparatus. It also privileges a statist perspective over grassroots movements, such as those led by women’s groups or Kurdish activists, who have long documented the links between state violence and gun proliferation.
Turkey’s gun violence crisis is rooted in the 1980 military coup, which institutionalized militarized masculinity and neoliberal economic policies that prioritized security over social welfare. The 1990s saw the rise of private security firms and the proliferation of small arms, a trend accelerated by NATO’s Cold War strategies and later by the war on terror. Parallels exist in Latin America, where US-backed military regimes in the 1970s-80s created similar cycles of state violence and civilian gun ownership, as seen in Guatemala or Colombia.
Turkey’s school shootings are not isolated incidents but the culmination of a century-long project of militarized state formation, where neoliberal economic policies, NATO’s security frameworks, and the glorification of armed masculinity have normalized violence as a tool of governance.