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Departments National Issues Degrees of Separation: Mass Murder Style It’s a weird thing about American public mass murder by gunfire. It is sometimes difficult to get details about the murder weapon in the first wave of general news stories. Many times "weapon" or "gun" is not mentioned in a news piece, in favor of a lonely verb phrase media pimps prefer: “opened fire,” which carries a creepy underlying assumption that people with guns in public places is pretty normal, and sometimes they’ll just decide to “open fire”. A shorthand reporting style has developed for the representation of mass shootings, well-honed through countless witness descriptions and cursory wire reports of suburban carnage from the San Ysidro McDonald’s kill spree (21 dead), Littleton, Colorado (13 dead), the Killeen, Texas Luby’s bloodbath (23 dead), the Long Island Rail Road commuter train massacre (6 dead), the Stockbridge, Georgia day-trading killings (9 dead), or the Beltway sniper killings (10 killed). The Columbus, Ohio rock club shooting (5 dead) is a case in point. In a search of articles about the shooting in the Toledo Blade, local news affiliates’ websites, and the Columbus Dispatch, the most specific weapon description occurs in one article describing the police hero’s weapon (the killer was brought down by one shot from a police who crept in the side door) as a rifle. A convincing picture of the super-fan on stage killing people is never fleshed out with a description of his weapon, despite hundreds of witnesses and the weapon lying right there. We read the horrific articles with fascination, and wonder, because there are usually no explicit answers, “What was his beef? Where’d the gun come from? Was he insane or premeditated?” In a paper by the Violence Policy Center analyzing firearms use in high-profile killings from 1963 to 2001 (65 in all, the majority coming after 1980) the findings were that handguns were used in 71% of the killings as the only or primary weapon, while in the remaining 29% shotguns or rifles were used as the only or primary weapon. Of the handgun shootings, 62% were acquired legally, while 71% of the long guns were acquired legally. The damning and inevitable media phrase always comes, especially in the case of kids shooting kids, when it is revealed that the underage killer got the gun from home. It was just a matter of opening a cabinet or drawer. Countless media commentaries exist excoriating American’s fascination with serial killing and spree murder details, and the true crime industry thrives. But for all the violence touching our lives, we still need to think and talk about blood and guts more, with an eye toward solutions. Embarrassingly for sane gun advocates, there are some high profile pro-gun zealots who shift into paranoid ravings after a mass shooting media spectacle. Remember the N.R.A.’s vice president Wayne LaPierre saying of Bill Clinton shortly after the Columbine shootings that the president is “willing to accept a certain level of killing to further his political agenda"? And then there's the conspiracy among delusional (as opposed to rational) gun rights advocates that goes something like this: public mass murder by gunfire is a plan by Second Amendment foes, and when they execute enough of them to foment public revolt against gun-ownership, the amendment will be repealed. The theory fascinates because it is perfect Freudian wish fulfillment fantasy, the idea that religion springs from deeply felt desires, that an idea is “motivationally attractive”. This conspiracy theory represents the sincere wish and desire for the anti-gun lobby to shoot and kill hundreds of people in order to convince America that gun ownership is unacceptable. The theory fascinates because it resonates a timbre so very close to what gun control advocates really hope happens after each mass shooting: that the public comes to the conclusion on its own that the gamble of guns for everyone is not worth the risk of homicidal mania by a few. And that the jig will then be up. Gun advocates rightly worry that for every bloody public gun death, there is born at least one anti-gun activist. Heading off a potential public outcry against guns at the pass is commonly seen as motivation for things like professional neo-conservative contrarian John R. Lott Jr’s well-publicized study and book entitled More Guns, Less Crime (1996) (arguably another example of wish fulfillment), in which he states that when states pass concealed weapons laws, crime goes down. Specifically, Lott writes: “Examining all the multiple-victim public shootings from 1977 to 1999 shows that, on average, states that adopt right-to-carry laws experience a 60 percent drop in the rate at which the attacks occur, and a 78 percent drop in the rate at which people are killed or injured from such attacks.” Tim Lambert, computer scientist and anti-gun blogger at the University of New South Wales who makes it his personal mission to bring down what he calls Lott’s “cherry picking” of facts and numbers with painstakingly detailed corrections to Lott’s statistical mischief, has pointed out on his site the tendency for mainstream media to support the pro-gun think tank (John Lott is from the American Enterprise Institute) barrage in the aftermath of mass killings. John Lott is frequently that man trotted out to reassure folks that it is still not guns that shoot people. People shoot people. Just because guns can kill doesn’t mean guns are not value-neutral, so relax. These things happen. One can imagine the relaxation of a Columbine mother or a relative of the 35 people killed by surfer dude, semi-automatic wielding Martin Bryant at Port Arthur in 1996, or the father of a Dunblane, Scotland 6-year old torn to bits by rifle fire as they read an op-ed warning how we mustn’t overreact to these freak incidents. After all, studies have shown that the more guns there are in society, the fewer violent crimes occur. One difference between the Columbine mother and the Port Arthur or Dublane parents: Australia and Scotland responded to their respective massacres by enacting very strict new gun bans, an example of one horrific incident leading to sweeping legal intervention in the firearms control debate. In contrast, Columbine parents were left to carry their dead children’s shoes around on pro-gun control public speaking tours, vying for media time against Charlton Heston himself. On the one-year anniversary of the Columbine shootings, Colorado’s Republican governor Bill Owens gave a Heritage Foundation lecture shaming any who would dare to blame guns in any way for the violence, and went on to talk about that old neo-conservative chestnut of culture: character, and the fact that Americans lack it. The fact is mass murder aftermath spin exists big time. Conservatives play mass violence as the inevitable result of a loss of family values and encroaching secularism. Liberals can be heard to cry lax gun control. But we all know Christians are capable of murder and gun laws won’t stop all violent shootings. You would think that with a steady volley of public mass murders by gunfire (like plane crashes, we know them to be inevitable and semi-regular events), that every American would have a close-call story or a friend of a friend’s close call story. Maybe you, the reader, have one. Maybe you have told your gun violence story to your children or friends to help them understand the reality of torn bodies or to make a point about the prevalence of gun violence in America. Maybe you didn’t have a story until last Wednesday night when Damageplan toured through the Columbus, Ohio suburbs. Perhaps not all of us are so closely touched. At any rate, just for kicks, here is my story. One bright, warm winter day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1995 I was in my apartment listening to my new Urge Overkill cd. I was going to be late for class if I didn’t get on my bike soon and start heading up the hill to the Hanes Art Center. In fact, by the time I made it out the door I was already 10 minutes later than usual leaving for class. Shortly after I left, my father called to tell us the breaking news he’d just heard on Ohio radio, that there was a maniac with a gun in downtown Chapel Hill, shooting at random. My sister was there to get the call, but I was already on my way downtown via bicycle. When I reached the top of the hill a half-mile away and tried to take my usual route I was blocked by police cars and yellow tape. Hmmm, I thought, well I’ll just go the slower way. When I reached class all conversation was on the killer in the street who was shooting people. No one knew the details, but by the end of class it was known at least one person was dead and the shooter was in custody. In the end, two passersby died and the killer, who was a UNC law student, was diagnosed schizophrenic, sent to a nuthouse, wrote a successful book called Nightmare: A Schizophrenia Narrative, sued his psychiatrist for half a million, won the money, and sparked a national debate on psychiatric care and the legal rights of murderers. Ah, memories. The point is that I was within a half hour of riding my bike through a mass-killing firing zone, and this fact shapes my thoughts about gun control. Other things do, as well. I lived in Columbus, Ohio through the Interstate 270 sniper scare and worked with a woman whose friend happened to be the one body fatally penetrated by the sniper’s bullets as she unluckily drove under the killer’s overpass stakeout. While I was living in Columbus I rocked out to the Supersuckers at a skanky freestanding heavy metal cum thrash cum grunge joint called the Alrosa Villa. I eventually moved to Arlington, Texas and a few months later an Arlington guitar whiz and, it seems from all accounts, all around great guy was killed in the Alrosa Villa. Those who do not have their own once or twice-removed relationship to mass murder are arguably still touched by the reality of such tragedies. Community proximity taints the psyche of Austin residents, many of whom weren’t even born when Charles Whitman turned on his transistor radio, crouched in a well-trained sniper position, took aim at people 28 floors below, and waited to hear the breaking news of his own making. The tale bespeaks such lasting terror, once new generations learn of it, casual glances tower-ward continually transformed into silent remembrances. The modern day students walking the Kent State University quads probably feel the same way. Communities sometimes try to bury the incidents for good, often with fire. The ancient west coast Pomo cultural tradition for child deaths was to burn the kid’s cradle. The Branch Davidian compound inWaco went down in a huge state-sponsored burning, the second floor library was sealed at Columbine High. Thankfully, however, we can’t engage in ritualistic erasings of kill sites for all gun violence tragedies. For instance, try to imagine all the WalMarts that have served as locations for murder being burned down (I have trouble believing corporate headquarters would take that lying down, at least not when the store in question is still turning profit. Well, perhaps they’d let the Cooper Street location go.). We can burn the houses of the cannibals and the criminally insane, but it will be more difficult to get rid of New York’s city hall, D.C.’s suburban spaces, or any other sprawlscape that increasingly serves as backdrop for (dominantly white) gun violence. We need to remember the bleating panicky terror of mass gun violence for what it is: silent threat, chaos waiting to happen, a sometimes predictable carnage, cultural signifier, media event, spectacle, exceptions to society rather than comments on it and unfathomable otherness. Mass gun violence is a particularly bad dream for gun advocates and those intellectually and patriotically invested in defending gun ownership rights at all costs, and this fuels the post mass-murder pro-gun lobby PR machine. Mass murders are also nightmares for those gun control advocates whose despair is palpable in their conviction that better laws and enforcement would have prevented the tragedy. Then there is the generalized lamentation over the violent impulse itself after the details of a mass shooting become known. But certainly the worst nightmares suffered are by the witnesses and victims of such bloody spectacles. Let us try to keep the reality of their suffering in mind as we recount our own relationships to mass murder and contemplate another local connection to gun violence. |
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