Making a killing

(With update below)

The killers are among us. In exurban Washington state, a man with a stormy marriage reacts to his wife leaving him by killing his five children -- with multiple gunshots -- and then killing himself. This came the same day as a nutjob in Pittsburgh escalated a fight with his mother over a dog peeing in the house into the murder of three police officers. Days before, a man burst into a center that helps immigrants in Binghampton, N.Y. and shot 13 to death before committing suicide. Last month it was eight shot to death in North Carolina, another 10 shot to death in Alabama, and four Oakland officers murdered after a routine traffic stop.

In many cases, the gunmen had recently lost jobs. There were histories of instability and alienation among the suspects (the Oakland case was simply a murderous ex-con). And what our age now calls "anger management problems." All this happened during the Great Depression, too. America had plenty of guns then, and not a few demagogues whipping up the gullible. But in my relatively extensive study of the era I can't find one example of these kinds of mass shootings of innocent people. (I know my literate readers will disabuse me of my ignorance here; but the shootings certainly were not widespread). When America faced mass slaughter, it was events such as the now all-but-forgotten natural gas explosion at a rural Texas school in 1937. It killed nearly 300 students. The outpouring of support and volunteers was immense. (Even Adolf Hitler is said to have sent a telegram of condolence).

But we were a different nation then.

Ironically, these deadly events seem to grow alongside two other phenomena: what my old-school cop friends call the "militarization of law enforcement," and the proliferation of "get tough" laws that send non-violent drug users to prison and criminalize what would have been high-school pranks when I was a teenager. None of this seems to deter these killers (and it's impossible to prove a negative).

I don't know how much they listen to Rep. Michelle Bachmann's calls to get "armed and dangerous" and Glenn Beck's rantings about Obama. I doubt they go to gun shows, worry about the Second Amendment, or are NRA members -- although a few were very well armed and at least one had taken shooting practice. (I own guns, shoot well and was an NRA member before the organization went totally whacko). But they do exist in a culture of two distinguishing features: constant, electronic overstimulation, much of it violent, whether television or video games, and deep disconnection -- from family ties, civic involvement, even spatially. All this is "genie out of the bottle" stuff. I don't know what one can do. Militarized police and the world's largest prison population haven't helped. Maybe pray. (How many of our loud, right-wing Torquemadas have prayed for the forgiveness of the shooters today?)

I suspect this is another sign of decline and discontinuity. Both could be addressed. But it's difficult to make a stand when the nation's elites continue to show, at the least, a complete ignorance of the challenges facing us. Witness Obama economic adviser Larry Summers making millions as a speaker for the financial industry and working as a...what would one call it?...for a hedge fund. Summers moves easily in the oligarchy that runs the country and flaunts their wealth and disregard for fair play even as most Americans have gotten screwed the past several years. And they haven't even begun to realize how much poorer they are now, thanks to the bad bets placed by Summers' crowd.

The Bachmans should be careful advocating revolution. They might get it. But it wouldn't be to install "conservatism." It would be the pitchforks against the bankers, whom Obama reminded he was the only thing standing between them. But that was probably another America, too. An America before the elites became so corrupt, before average folks just wanted to shut the garage door and dream of house flipping again.

So we will have these senseless outbursts of violence. The killers aren't about fighting SOCIALISM!! or protecting their gun rights. They just want to kill. The people they love. Anybody. Themselves. They will kill in the Bible Belt, the Rust Belt, in "gated communities." Our recession is about more than lost money.

Update: The man accused in the Pittsburgh shooting had posted on white supremicist Web sites, including his distress over President Obama's election and fear that his guns might be taken. Right-wing hate speech scores one.

Comments

[soleri]

Most of the random mass murder sprees come, as you describe, from the rage of the alienated and lost. But there's been an uptick in the kind that are stoked by the right-wing scream machine. Certainly, the Poplawski affair shows that even if he was still just a disturbed individual. And we shouldn't forget the single most deadly act of terrorism prior to 9/11 came from an NRA member and registered Republican, Timothy McVeigh. He served honorably in the US Army, got along with others, but was obsessed by the liberal demons, Janet Reno and Bill Clinton.

I can't imagine a scenario in which angry burghers assault white bankers. The rage that's out there is almost exclusively about Obama, his "socialism", and the implicit idea that he's not an American. This is what Michelle Bachman is getting at. There's a world of white grievance about a country that's changed dramatically in their lifetime. It simply doesn't fit the script to get angry at rich white people unless they're also Jewish, gay, and liberal. As it is, Obama brilliantly personifies the cosmopolitanism that instinctive fascists loathe so fiercely.

Right-wing demagogues are playing with fire and they know it. They know what their audience craves: certitude in their prejudices and suspicions. It's why the post-factual news shows like Glenn Beck's traffic in heavy breathing and dark innuendos. The deep well of racial resentment doesn't require a logical justification, just an emotionally satisfying one.

I'd like to believe there's an angry mob of left-wing populists ready to cast Obama aside to lynch some Wall Street high hats. There may be a few in the Pacific Northwest, to be sure. In the country as a whole, not so much.

[Emil Pulsifer]

USA Today had a great editorial cartoon today that showed an American couple watching the nightly news on television, with scenes of beret wearing protesters holding signs saying things like "Jobs now!" and "No war", with flames and smoke vaguely depicted in the background. The American husband is saying, contemptuously, "The Europeans get SO angry!" while the wife reads the "U.S. Nooz" paper with headlines like "Mass Shooting", "Killing Rampage" "Spree Fever" and one with a chart of "Gun Sales" accompanied by an upward pointing arrow. I found it quite amusing.

Still, even in places where guns laws are strict, it's by no means impossible to get a shotgun and saw the barrels off, and load up on shells.

I've known several gun-nuts, mostly of a libertarian bent, and (reactionary politics aside) they aren't necessarily bad neighbors. In fact, they tend to be "law and order" types (except with respect to the particular laws they choose to flout, but those generally deal with such things as the income tax). Guns, for many of them, represent a defense against their personal and political bugbears more than a method of intimidating or attacking society.

Of course, it can hardly be argued that crimes involving firearms are much rarer in Europe and most of developed Asia, where legal access to guns involves tortuous bureaucratic processes, strict screening, and oversight.

Looking further afield, I do wonder about a country like America, where films showing consenting adults sexually pleasuring one another are given the cinematic kiss of death, an "X" rating, whereas films showing the most gruesome and graphic acts of sadism, featuring the very worst kinds of moral and spiritual perversion (e.g., "Hostel" and many, many other such films) are given a commercial rating that, while technically requiring adult supervision, is seldom enforced in practice.

The question is, how does one get from here to there, causally speaking. Unless there is far more to circumstances than meets the eye in news reports, crimes of mass murder in which the killer makes no attempt to conceal his involvement from the authorities, must be regarded as inherently irrational. Someone spends a few minutes, or a few hours, shooting strangers, and then in most cases kills themselves or is killed by the police. Where's the percentage? What is the rationale?

[bearsense]

"As through this world I've rambled,
I've met lots of funny men.
Some rob you with a six-gun,
some with a fountain pen.
...
As through this world I've wandered,
as through this land I've roamed,
I've never seen an outlaw
Turn a family from its home"
Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd"