Thursday, January 13, 2011

(updated, Jan. 14)

Most of the chatter following the shooting in Arizona last weekend has focused upon political rhetoric in this country, which I suppose is a worthwhile endeavor.

But what about the fact that a nut with an Uncle Fester fetish was able to legally purchase a Glock? Didn't this have something to do with the violence, too? Or would focusing on this part of the story steer the conversation too far away from the mean girl in Alaska that so-called progressives can't stop talking about?

In a column that appeared earlier this week, Gail Collins described an incident that occurred at a town hall meeting hosted by Gabrielle Giffords in the summer of 2009. As you may recall, this was at a time when town hall rallies across the country were being disrupted by protests against Obama's efforts to expand health care in the United States.

In 2009, Gabrielle Giffords was holding a “Congress on Your Corner” meeting at a Safeway supermarket in her district when a protester, who was waving a sign that said “Don’t Tread on Me,” waved a little too strenuously. The pistol he was carrying under his armpit fell out of his holster.

“It bounced. That concerned me,” Rudy Ruiz, the father of one of Giffords’s college interns at the time, told me then. He had been at the event and had gotten a larger vision than he had anticipated of what a career in politics entailed. “I just thought, ‘What would happen if it had gone off? Could my daughter have gotten hurt?’ ”

For the safety of her own constituents attending her town halls, Giffords had a responsibility to denounce this sort of behavior. Instead, according to Collins, Giffords didn't take the incident very seriously.

Giffords brushed off the incident. “When you represent a district — the home of the O.K. Corral and Tombstone, the town too tough to die — nothing’s a surprise,” she said.

The following year, Giffords boasted about her own prowess with guns in an interview with the New York Times. 


“I have a Glock 9 millimeter, and I’m a pretty good shot.”

Now Giffords is fighting for her life, and six people who attended her most recent town hall meeting are dead. People were carrying weapons in holsters to town hall meetings all summer in 2009, but the people who should have made a big stink about that—like Giffords—appear to have not done so.

* *
But guns aren't the only problem—there's also the violence for which the guns are an instrument. By far the most interesting piece I've read on the Arizona shootings was produced by Mark Ames, who focuses upon themes like violence and rage. Ames has written a lot on the James Huberty-style public shootings that began occurring with increasing frequency in the 1980s in (first of all) post offices, then fast-food restaurants, and which most recently have been occurring more often at universities.


Huberty's massacre at Micky D's occurred in 1984, but would hardly be out of place in today's news

Ames notes that the Giffords shooting is something that we hadn't seen before—a combination of an attempted political assassination and public mass shooting.

I studied countless rampage massacres for my book Going Postal, and this is the first instance I can think of in which the shooter—in this case, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner—carried out anything like a hybrid assassination-rampage: first, a planned, targeted assassination of a high-profile political figure, followed immediately by a seemingly indiscriminate shooting rampage. The first part of this hybrid assassination-rampage left a U.S. Congresswoman, Gabby Giffords, in critical condition with a serious head wound; the second part, the rampage, left six dead and another 13 wounded.

These two types of murders have little in common. In America, at least, the assassin is concerned about only one thing: taking out his target. While others may get shot in the confusion, political assassins never, to my knowledge, stick around after accomplishing their primary task just so they can keep murdering others indiscriminately. James Earl Ray and Lee Harvey Oswald fled the scene of the crime; John Hinckley and Sirhan Sirhan were subdued only after they’d emptied their clips in the direction of their targets. After assassinating John Lennon, Mark David Chapman dramatically dropped the murder weapon, pulled out his copy of Catcher in the Rye, and waited patiently for the police to arrest him.

In rampage shootings, on the other hand, media reports often describe the rampage murderer “shooting at random” before the bullet-in-the-head finale. But closer study of these shootings reveals that the attackers often have specific targets in mind—usually bullying supervisors or fellow workers. Sometimes, in the bloodiest cases, the shooter takes aim at the entire “company” or school, making everyone in it an intended target. In many of these cases, the shooters turn out to have been victims themselves of bullying, harassment, and social or financial ruin.

Judging from early reports, Loughner looks to be a pastiche of these two classic profiles.  

But what's most interesting about Ames' take on this violence—and on mass public shootings more generally—lies in the way he connects it to bigger changes taking place in the US.

Each rampage shooter “snapped” because “sometimes people snap”; each school shooter “snapped” because they were copycats or wannabe heroes or “sociopathic” or “paranoid-schizophrenic.” However, postal shootings appeared only in the mid-1980s, in what later Congressional investigations agreed was a culture of bullying, harassment, and intimidation by management, thanks to Nixon-era reforms that took away postal union workers’ right to strike and mandated that the service run on its own revenues by 1983—the year the first such shooting took place. The first private-workplace massacre took place in 1989, at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky—at the end of a decade of Reaganomics that radically and violently changed the workplace culture, creating yawning new inequalities. These workplace shootings have been with us ever since.

A similar dynamic of denial came into play during the assassinations epidemic. At the time, we comforted ourselves by bracketing the James Earl Rays and Sirhan Sirhans as mere “crazies”—but somehow those assassinations came to a sudden halt in the early Reagan years. In retrospect, we understand them as the product of a chaotic, violent period of political upheaval.

Now, it seems, we have the worst of both worlds: the chaos that Reagan snuffed out, and the socioeconomic violence his policies produced. And that might explain why we just experienced the worst of all murder crimes: a political assassination-rampage massacre.

The events of this weekend seem incomprehensible to us now; someday, with the benefit of hindsight, they may strike us as all too inevitable. For now, however, there is only one question to ask: Was Saturday’s hybrid assassination-rampage a one-off, or is this new species of American murder going to become a defining symbol of our sorry era?

When I was visiting Georgia in early 2009 I gave a talk to a group of university students at an "American Corner" in Batumi. One of the first questions I was asked was whether or not I was frightened by the prospect of teaching at an American university, given the high-profile mass shootings that had occurred in recent years. Two other students asked follow-up questions to this.

For these students, America was the country of no safety in the classroom. 

I hardly begin every day in fear of getting blown away by an unstable student, but I do think that mass public shootings make up a much more tangible and realistic form of threat to someone such as myself than do terrorist acts carried out by nihilists speaking in the name of Islam. 

Nevertheless, once the current hubbub dies down, my sense is that people will stop worrying about the sudden bursts of violence visited upon them by boy-next-door white Christians like James Huberty and Jared Loughner, and will instead go back to being frightened by Scary Muslims.