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“Enough Slaughter”: When Carnage Becomes Routine, We Lose More Than Lives

I am running out of words.

Some crackpot who couldn’t get a date stabs and shoots his way across the Southern California college town of Isla Vista, killing six people and wounding 13 before apparently turning his gun on himself. This happened Friday night. And what shall I say about that?

I mean, I know how this goes. We all do. Weren’t you sort of expecting it when the father of one of the Isla Vista victims blamed his son’s death on the NRA? Would you really be stunned if the NRA countered that none of this would have happened had there been more guns in Isla Vista? And now, this is the part where I am supposed to offer context, to mourn these losses and use them in an argument for sensible gun laws.

We’ve seen it all before, in Newtown, in Tucson, at Virginia Tech, at the Navy Yard in Washington, at that movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. We’ve seen it so much that there is by now a rote sense to it, a sense of going through motions and checking off boxes, of flinging words against indifferent walls with no real expectation the words will change anything — or even be heard.

So I am running out of words. Or maybe just faith in words.

Which ones shall I use? “Sickening?” “Obscene?” “Grotesque?” “Tragic?” You’ve read them all a hundred times. Do they still have power to punch your gut? And what argument shall I use those words to make? Shall I observe that a gun is a weapon of mass destruction and that mentally impaired people should not have access to them? Shall I point out that as a statistical matter, a gun in the home is far more likely to hurt someone you love than to scare off a burglar? Shall I demand we hold our leaders accountable for failing to pass some kind of sensible laws to rein this madness in?

And if I do, do you suppose it will make any difference?

It is a measure of a uniquely American insanity that truths so obvious and inarguable are regarded as controversial and seditious by many people in this country. Indeed, Georgia recently enacted a law allowing guns in churches, school zones, bars, government buildings, even parts of airports. You think those words and that argument will find any purchase there? Don’t hold your breath.

This is why I am running out of words, or faith in words. Too much blood, pain and death. And the dictionary is finite.

I’ll tell you something, though. I grew up in South Los Angeles and lived there at the height of the drug wars of the 1980s. Seemed there was a mass shooting every weekend. They became so routine it seemed like the local paper pretty much stopped paying attention. You’d see a write-up on the back page of the metro section — six dead, three wounded — and that would be it. They reported it like the stats of some out-of-town ball team. Our deaths were routine.

But when carnage becomes routine, we lose more than lives. We lose some essential element of our very humanity. Seven people died in Isla Vista. Then, on Sunday night, a 14-year-old Miami boy argued with his 16-year-old brother over clothing, shot him to death, then killed himself. That same weekend in Detroit, a mentally ill teenager was arrested in the shooting death of his mother’s fiancé. And in Chicago, eight people were shot, one killed, in less than eight hours beginning Monday afternoon.

So I guess I cannot afford to run out of words — or faith. None of us can. Running out of words is an act of surrender, an obeisance to the obscene. Running out of words is running out of outrage. Both those who died and those of us left behind deserve better than that. Our humanity deserves better than that. Here, then, is one final word flung against that high and indifferent wall:

Enough, you hear me?

Enough.

Enough.

 

By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National memo, May 28, 2014

May 29, 2014 Posted by | Gun Deaths, Mass Shootings, National Rifle Association | , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“No One Cares About Crazy People”: Documents Reveal Scott Walker’s Racist, Offensive Staff

A day before Republican Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin, law enforcement authorities served search warrants at his office in Milwaukee (where he served as county executive), his campaign office and the houses of his top aides.

After assuming office in 2011, Walker pushed through his conservative platform, which included limiting public sector unions and implementing broad tax cuts. As Walker’s policies gained him national attention from the Republican Party, questions about his campaign were pushed to the back burner.

Until now.

On Wednesday, the first documents giving context to the investigation into Governor Walker were made public. They haven’t explicitly linked Walker to illegal activities, but they have provided a behind-the-scenes look at the offensive conduct of the governor’s staff.

Perhaps most shockingly, the documents show that Walker staffers traded emails making fun of horrific conditions at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Facility. News reports at the time showed workers there filed false claims to hide mistakes, and let a patient with a history of violence and sexual assault move around the facility unsupervised. Staffers weren’t worried this would hurt Walker in the polls, however. “[N]o one cares about crazy people,” one staffer wrote to another.

The mentally ill weren’t the only minority group used as a punchline by Walker’s aides.

Kelly Rindfleisch, Walker’s former deputy chief of staff, received an email that compared welfare recipients to dogs. The paradoxically ungrammatical email explained that dogs should be allowed to receive welfare because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who the r [sic] Daddys [sic] are.” Rindfleisch responded: “That’s so hilarious and so true.”

Other top aides to Walker also shared their offensive sentiments.

Thomas Nardelli, Walker’s former chief of staff, forwarded a chain email that makes light of a “nightmare.” In the nightmare, someone wakes up to discover he is “black, Jewish, disabled, HIV positive, and gay.” The joke ends when the person in the nightmare realizes he is a Democrat — the worst affliction of those described in the email.

Ironically, Scott Walker was concerned about county employees with a “varied lifestyle.”  A doctor who was previously an underwear model received scrutiny from Walker’s administration, for example.

The doctor, who worked at the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division, had her past career as a thong model discovered after Nardelli “MySpaced” her. Nardelli wrote to Walker that it was recently discovered the doctor “has a checkered past and has done some modeling work.” Nardelli continued: “It isn’t pornographic, but it is quite suggestive (I’m told — I don’t know her name). He [sic] apparently models thongs and wasn’t forthright in sharing that with staff prior to her hire as an hourly paid MD.”

“Get rid of the MD asap,” Walker wrote back.

And finally, the emails suggest that Walker knew his staff was breaking the law during his gubernatorial campaign. An investigator for the Milwaukee County district attorney testified before a secret hearing that email evidence proves Walker knew staff members were using personal computers and a secret WiFi network, while being paid by the county.

They set up the secret network so they could work on their personal laptops to plan his campaign for governor — all while being paid by taxpayers as staffers to the county executive.

Cynthia Archer, Walker’s administration director, said in an email that she uses her “private account quite a bit to communicate with SKW [Scott Walker] and Nardelli.”

 

By: Ben Feuerherd, The National Memo, February 21, 2014

February 25, 2014 Posted by | Mental Health, Racism, Scott Walker | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“A Crafted Public Spectacle”: There Is No Such Thing As A Motive For Mass Killings

Why did the Newtown shooter do it? This is the question to which the media and the public anxiously awaited an answer before yesterday’s release of a report by Connecticut investigators. The report itself even notes this interest, saying, “The obvious question that remains is: ‘Why did the shooter murder twenty-seven people, including twenty children?’”

If we are looking for a reason to make sense of it all, the report leaves us disappointed—and the lack of motive figures in just about every headline covering yesterday’s report. But even looking for one is a futile act.

Here is what the report does find: The shooter had mental health problems, including social dysfunction, anxiety, lack of empathy, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. But the shooter’s actions cannot be explained away merely by mental illness: although he was troubled, he was not psychotic or insane. Rather, he “had the ability to control his behavior to obtain the results he wanted, including his own death.” There is overwhelming evidence that he acted intentionally and planned his actions carefully. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Despite early speculation, there is little evidence that bullying or other personal grievances provided a motive. While a few teachers, friends, and relatives indicated that the shooter had been bullied as a child, none said that it had been severe, and a larger number said they had never seen him bullied or heard him complain of it.

But this line of questioning is peculiar to begin with. Even if evidence of bullying had been found, it could not possibly amount to a motive in any ordinary sense for a young man to murder people who had never victimized him—particularly not twenty children who had yet to be born when he himself was a child.

When we search for a “motive,” we’re looking for things like self-defense, revenge, jealousy, or personal dispute. There are also motives in which the victim may be somewhat more arbitrary, such as robbery, sexual assault, or sadistic pleasure. But there is no evidence that any of these motives apply to the Newtown shooting, as there almost never is for mass shootings—which is why we speak of them as “senseless.”

The reason that we never find these motives is that the slaughter of random victims is what mass shootings are ultimately about. Indiscriminate targeting is the main criterion that criminologists use to distinguish rampage shootings from other forms of mass murder, like gang violence.

The best framework for understanding rampage shootings at Newtown, Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and many others is not bullying, mental illness, or gun violence, but terrorism, only without (usually) a political agenda. In terrorism, the true target is society itself; the people who are killed are, grotesquely, a means to this end. Likewise for mass shootings, as forensic psychiatrist Paul E. Mullen wrote in a 2004 article, “Vengeance usually directed against society at large is part of the motivation.”

The particular reasons that drive each shooter are idiosyncratic. The common element is that mass shooters suffer from some toxic, paradoxical mix of narcissism and weak ego that brings them to make a deliberate choice to blame their frustrations on the world as a whole rather than on themselves.

The mass shooting provides a means for the perpetrator to fulfill his unrequited grandiosity and hatred. The motive is not fame but infamy. Mullen writes, “they are eased towards their self-destruction by fantasies of how others will react and by the effects they believe their deaths will produce.”

Like political terrorism, the mass shooting is a crafted public spectacle, a theater of violence in which we are the unwitting yet compliant audience. The report describes the shooter’s obsessive interest in prior massacres. But among its many inconclusions is that it finds “no clear indication why Sandy Hook Elementary School was selected.” Perhaps the answer is too sickening to be sayable: the shooter deliberately chose a target that would maximize the horror and ensure his place in the pantheon of anti-heroes.

Trying to make ordinary sense out of these extraordinary crimes is fruitless. It leads reporters to broadcast the shooters’ manifestos and scribblings, to search for any scraps of frustration or injustice they suffered that might somehow explain their actions.

But this devoted attention is just what allows the shooters to control not only their actions but the meaning of them. Putting a stop to mass shootings begins by agreeing that, once a person has resorted to the mass slaughter of indiscriminate victims, speculating on his motives means spreading half-truths that might encourage others to follow in his footsteps.

 

By: Ari Schulman, Time Magazine, November 26, 2013

November 29, 2013 Posted by | Gun Violence, Mass Shootings | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Very Troubling”: Gun Violence Is The Tragic New Normal

The horrific tragedy at the Navy Yard Monday ought to reignite a national discussion over gun violence in the country, with tragedies now known simply and universally by their venues: Virginia Tech. Tucson. Colorado. Sandy Hook. And now Navy Yard.

But in all likelihood, the rampage will have the same public policy result as earlier mass murders did: a lot of people will get on TV and offer their thoughts and prayers to the victims’ families. Some lawmakers and activists will call, yet again, for tighter restrictions on guns. And the effort toward any kind of gun control – even background checks for gun buyers – will be shunted aside or defeated on the floors of the House and Senate, where gun lobbyists have strong allies.

If the most recent shootings show anything, it’s how accustomed we have become to guns and the death and damage they cause. The suspect, now dead, had been arrested in two prior shootings, one in Seattle and one in Fort Worth, Texas. In Washington state, the accused killer, Aaron Alexis, had apparently shot out the tires of a construction worker Alexis believed had mocked him the previous day. No charges were filed against him. And in firearms-loving Texas, Alexis was arrested when he fired his gun in his apartment (he said he had been cleaning the gun at the time). The bullet went through his ceiling and the floor of the upstairs apartment, missing his neighbor by a few feet. Alexis was not punished for that act, which, at the very least, was one of gross recklessness.

Washington, D.C. used to be a place where you didn’t have to worry so much about security. You could go into almost any public building without even so much as a metal detector screening you first. The district also banned handguns, which, it’s true, did not stop gun violence. Since D.C. is bordered by two states, including one (Virginia) where gun laws are quite lax, it wasn’t too difficult to acquire a firearm and bring it over the city line. But since the Supreme Court decided the sweeping gun ban was unconstitutional, there’s more of a free-for-all attitude with guns. What galls Washingtonians more is that it wasn’t locals who wanted the gun ban lifted. It was people who don’t even live here.

The acceptance of guns – or the presumption of the presence of guns – leads to other unintended consequences, as well. In New York City this week, a deranged man in Times Square pretended to point a gun (using only his hand) at police. They shot, wounding two bystanders. It’s a terrible mistake, and one wonders whether it would have occurred if we were not all so ready to assume everyone has a gun.

Pro-gun activists say the answer is to arm more people – the teachers in schools, regular citizens on the street, security people in commercial places. Does adding more guns work? Not really. A Mother Jones investigation last year showed that in the 62 mass shootings of the previous 30 years, not one had been stopped by an armed civilian. More guns just means more opportunity for another tragedy, even another accident. And what’s more troubling still is that we have come to accept it as normal.

 

By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 17, 2013

September 18, 2013 Posted by | Gun Control, Gun Violence | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Story Bigots Hate”: A Clinic In Empathy, A Good Woman Without A Gun Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun

We rarely hear the tales of school-shooting heroism directly from the heroes, tragically, because the heroes rarely live to tell them. Dave Cullen’s haunting “Columbine” tells the poignant story of computer teacher Dave Saunders, who was shot while shepherding his students to safety and died after the students worked hard to save him. After the Sandy Hook shootings, the courage of principal Dawn Hochsprung and teachers like Victoria Soto broke our hearts – but we heard them from survivors and friends and family, because the women were among Adam Lanza’s victims.

That’s part of what makes the story of Antoinette Tuff so compelling – but only part of it. Tuff is, of course, the bookkeeper at Ronald McNair Discovery Learning Center in Decatur, Ga., whose work talking shooter Michael Brandon Hill into surrendering to police Tuesday was captured live on a stunning 911 tape that’s gone viral. The fascination at the heart of Tuff’s tale, the reason it’s riveting, is the way she used compassion and empathy to disarm a mentally ill man intent on killing. “Was the potential there to have another Sandy Hook? Absolutely,” the local police chief told reporters as he praised Tuff.

In this story, the only thing that stopped a bad guy with a gun was a good woman with a heart. Or to entirely rewrite Wayne LaPierre’s dumb Manichaean NRA propaganda: The only thing that stopped an emotionally damaged, despairing and unloved young man with 500 rounds of ammunition was a compassionate woman sharing her own story of damage and despair, and telling him she loved him.

Oh, and then there’s this: As we try to recover from the unnecessarily polarized aftermath of the Trayvon Martin killing and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, it’s worth noting that Tuff is a black woman who helped save a young white man from harm at the hands of police. Of course the race-baiters at Fox News, who were so agitated about the crimes of young black men a few weeks ago, have hardly rushed to emphasize that a young white man opened fire at a predominantly black school – let alone that he was helped to save his own life by an African-American woman (for example, check out how they approach these facts here).

Hill, a mentally ill 20-year-old, seemed convinced the police would kill him because he shot at them, and he might have been right. But Tuff tells him she’ll protect him by telling them he hasn’t hurt her, and he didn’t actually hit anyone he shot at.

“He thought it was over for him because he’d already been shooting at police officers,” she told a local Atlanta television reporter. “I told him, no, that I would allow them to know that he hadn’t hurt anyone.”

As the 911 tape begins, we hear Hill shooting outside, as the dispatcher tells a terrified Tuff to try to get somewhere safe. But when Hill comes back into the school, Tuff begins telling police outside, and the 911 dispatcher, that the cops should “back off” and not enter the building. At first she calls Hill “sir,” until she switches to calling him “baby,” which is when the momentum shifts and she seems to have a chance to save him from himself. Tuff tells the dispatcher that Hill told her “he should have just gone to the hospital instead of doing this, because he’s not on his medication.”

Gradually we hear her convince Hill to let her help him surrender safely to police.

“I can help you, you want me to talk to them? Let me talk to them and let’s see if we can work it out so you don’t have to go away with them for a long time … I can let them know you have not tried to harm me or do anything with me.” When he interrupts her to say he’s already shot at police, she reassures him, “That doesn’t make any difference, you didn’t hit anybody.”

Then she turns to the dispatcher and begins to negotiate with police. “He didn’t hit anybody, he just shot outside the door,” Tuff tells the woman. “If I walk outside with him, they won’t shoot him? … He just wants to go to the hospital … Can you talk to the police and let them know he wants to go outside with me?”

In the midst of all this she soothes Hill by telling him parts of her own story. “Don’t feel bad, baby, my husband just left me after 33 years … I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband left me. But look at me now, I’m still working and everything is OK.”

On the 911 tape we listen as Tuff calmly negotiates taking away Hill’s guns – “Put it all up there,” she tells him — and supervises him lying on the floor to surrender. “Tell me when you’re ready, then I’ll tell them to come on in,” she says. She directs the dispatcher, “Let him drink his bottle of water. Don’t come in shooting at anything, they can come on in, and I’ma buzz them in.” Then she’s back to soothing Hill.

“I’m gonna sit right here so they’ll see that you didn’t try to harm me … It’s gonna be alright sweetie, I want you to know that I love you, it’s a good thing that you did giving up. Don’t worry about it, we all go through something in life. You’re gonna be OK.”

Only after the police come in and arrest Hill without incident does she tell the dispatcher, “Let me tell you something, baby. I’ve never been so scared in all the days of my life. Oh, Jesus.”

“But you did great,” the dispatcher tells Tuff, speaking for all of us. “You did great.”

She did more than great. There won’t be an Antoinette Tuff to save us from every school shooting – we need tougher gun laws and better mental health care too, and even then, people will find guns and do bad things. But Tuff gave a clinic in empathy, and the way that trying to connect with the pain of another person, even someone scary and dangerous, can save lives. (She credits her pastor with teaching her to “pray on the inside” when she’s anxious.) Tuff protected her students, but she also protected Hill from himself, and from the police – and she did it with love.

I can only pray that a white woman faced with a heavily armed, mentally ill young black man would have done the same thing. There’s a reason it’s Antoinette Tuff Day all over social media. We need her right now.

By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 22, 2013

August 23, 2013 Posted by | Gun Control, Gun Violence | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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