“Bang bang, he shot me down.
Bang bang, I hit the ground.
Bang, bang, that awful sound.
Bang bang, my baby shot me down.”
Cher - Bang, bang (He shot me down)
“Lockdown, lockdown
Lock the door
Shut the lights off.
Say no more
Go behind the desk and hide
Wait until it’s safe inside”
To the tune of “Twinkle twinkle” - A song for kindergartners to learn in America.
As you can see from the graph serving as the header image for today’s article, America is the only country in the world that communicates so broadly through the use of guns, communication in extremis.
There are drug murders, crimes of passion, suicides and mass shootings. But the most harrowing way in which guns communicate is through the mass shooting of children in schools.
Media networks silently preen at their virtue as they refuse to give oxygen to the killer by telling viewers about him (we know they are preening because they insist to us that this is a moral decision). Instead they will eulogize the innocent in beautiful and heart-rending tribute. Watching these carefully crafted interviews of bereaved mothers and fathers sometimes on the very day they lost a child forever forces the viewer to surrender his head to his heart. Who has heart of stone sufficiently impermeable to remain unmoved by grief unstaunched by the mercy of time? Who can turn away from a human being in the throes of a moment of pure wreckage? Who cannot weep for the hundreds of years of life lost when a school is at the mercy of a gunman?
But there are two points missed here. On a more minor note, it can sometimes feel prurient to see a microphone in somebody’s face when they are on their knees, beating their fists hopelessly against the ground in fury at the shock and sheer pointlessness of losing a child to an anonymous stranger. But Americans, after years of exposure are TV literate, well-attuned to the demands of the medium. So these wretched people in their first moments of suffering somehow rise to the moment and give millions of people what they seek - expiation of their own guilt through bearing witness to raw grief.
“Where were you when you first heard the news?”
”What did they tell you at the school? (Take your time - I know how tough this is).
And then - to somehow finish on a more upbeat note…
”What do you want the world to know about your daughter? What will you remember”?
A crushed face momentarily brightens and the mom or dad eulogizes a son or daughter, a eulogy that permits the viewer to smile inside at the beauty of childhood. But around the edges of that glow, there is the stark fact that a few hours ago, she had no idea she’d lose her child and almost simultaneously be called upon to explain this to the world. The feeling cannot co-exist with the thought.
This television ritual - so unvarying, so implacable - is changing America. We know it inside out because there have been so many school shootings. It is pornography. And even pornography is uninteresting if over-exposed. Who will we be when televised grief is pornography and we can’t turn away?
Secondly, Americans should be interested in the school shooter. It is reflexive and honest to feel an initial surge of anger at the one who planned for immortality by way of the taking of other lives. But he too (for they are always male) is another victim of America’s tragic weaponization of guns against children.
Inevitably he will be young, probably a student or former student, inarticulate to the point that a gun is the only way he can communicate his desperation with clarity. Yes, there is the occasional manifesto, but it is almost always dense, ridden with the cliches of the day, and inexplicable when set beside the deed. It is the muddled product of a brain not yet fully formed physically - and quite probably one that has for years not known curiosity, contemplation, satisfaction, love. It is a brain that has not followed the normal arc of a healthy brain developing in normal growth. It has been tampered with.
Science has discovered that about 1.2% of males are psychopaths. It is generally agreed that psychopathy is a genetic or inherited condition, although there can be developmental factors that direct it. For the record, over 25% of prisoners test out to be psychopathic. Yet there are those - obviously nobody can quote an exact percentage - who are “successful psychopaths”, in that they integrate into life, find a profession, and do not commit crimes. They are the fortunate ones, blessed with some inhibitory mechanism.
I raise this because the word evil is so often associated with school shooters. It is my assumption that people use that word to describe somebody who has no feelings about who he hurts or how many he hurts. This description aligns to that of a psychopath. It is a questionable word here. Evil has a negative, even hateful connotation. But if psychopaths are mostly born that way, can we describe them as evil? If you are born with what is slangily referred to as a "wiring problem” that makes you prone to hypochondria, are you evil? Of course not.
The school shooter may well be a psychopath. Or he may come from such a deranged and deprived background and have been figuratively kicked so many times that an overmastering anger may choke him. And at some point this anger finds its output.
It is profoundly unfair to kick the school shooter to the ashcan of history as unceremoniously and hypocritically as the networks do. His transgression is monumental, but his soul is tortured. And he is human. And, in the vast number of cases, dead as surely as anyone he shot. We need to know these people as fully as possible. And we need to reach them before they begin to use weaponry as a primary means of communication.
The header graph puts America in an unenviable position - the worst country in the world in relation to school violence. In fact, it is the only country in the world where school shooters (and mass shooters) are a pathology. No other country in the world is remotely close to the United States.
Below is a comparison between Canada, America’s closest neighbor and most similar country economically, and America.
Sidenote:
Generally speaking, whenever Canadians compare anything that can be counted to its twin in America, we use a 1:10 ratio for the simple reason that America has a population ten times greater than that of Canada.
Canadian McDonalds outlets (2016): 1450
American McDonalds outlets (2016): 14 441The ratio is roughly what one would expect: 9.96 : 1
There is no word harsh enough to characterize the fact that for every school shooting in Canada, there are 256 in America. For every child killed in a mass school shooting in Canada, there are 60 killed in America.
And the problem of school shootings is getting worse. Hardening schools, teaching nursery rhymes to prepare for an active shooter, removing bump stocks so that gunfire is less than 600 rounds per minute, arming teachers etc are, surprise, surprise, not working. Look at the graph below.
Working to reduce shootings by dozens of strategic initiatives undoubtedly has some discouraging effect on would-be shooters. But school shootings are unambiguously on the rise in the post-Columbine world. And when they occur, there is a tendency to have significantly higher casualties. Weaponry, like any tech, has only become more sophisticated and easier to use since Columbine. Determined killers can do more damage in a much shorter window of time. And the mental health of the young has become drastically worse in the 21st century, increasing the pool of potential shooters. The fight to save America’s schools without turning them into armed fortresses is being lost - and it isn’t close.
America will not cauterize this wound until it decides as a country to deal with the causes of school shootings - and mass shootings in general. Tricky little workarounds are beyond insufficient. But, at this point in its history, Americans are indulging in a luxury they cannot afford - the luxury of fighting endless, furious fights over much lesser cultural issues. The Supreme Court has dealt with such weighty topics as the right of a bakery to refuse to prepare a cake for a gay marriage. It has opined on the right of a coach to kneel in silent prayer in view of his students. The latest issue is whether drag queens can perform in public spaces. Not to put to fine a point on it, these are brain-dead hills to die on when so much of import cries for attention
All the while, America cannot find time and space to come to solutions over gun use, systemic financial inequality, and mental health problems. These are three of the root causes of the terrible gun carnage being enacted on our children.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
Americans hate actively, while innocents are slaughtered.
I see no road ahead.
Columbine
"I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me."
Susan Klebold - mother of Dylan Klebold, one of two Columbine killers