Police are saying now they have found "compelling evidence" on the gunman that "may" explain motive. They don't say what it is.
Yeah, I get it that it won't be a video game box. So what? The nexus of violent video games and movies, and the Internet's amplification and acceleration powers, will undoubtedly have played a role. My son is one of those people who both argues against gun control and against my theory of violent video games, not surprising, given his demographics. But he does point out an interesting idea -- that it's Internet-enabled and cell phone-enabled chat that can give a loner like this without friends or community ties those malicious connections that can help spur him to deadly action. Chatting about angry ideas of killing people and finding nasty receptive audiences who egg you on, online, can be the tipping point.
But we don't know that this killer was in any chat rooms or IRC channels or anything of the sort. When the police say they have evidence, I imagine it's going to be either:
o a vial of powerful psychotropic drugs that can induce violence in people, like Risperdal, commonly given to troublesome youths
o or some other illegal drugs like meth or crack cocaine or roxies that make for violent, crazy behaviour
o money or banking statements or something that shows he had a financial dispute with his mother who perhaps wouldn't allow him access to funds that he wanted or believed were his
o a break-up message from a girlfriend or boyfriend on his cell phone or social media
And so on.
The other factors for this youth -- that he was bright -- maybe a genius -- that he graduated from high school even three years early but was socially awkward -- that he was on the autism spectrum -- that he was goth -- none of these will be examined with any dispassion so that people can ask whether people who exhibit a lot of these signs and have become unmanageable by parents shouldn't be in the general population but should be in restricted settings.
It's extremely hard to get people locked up for cause in America. Supposedly, when someone is sufficiently a danger to themselves or others, they can be put in psychiatric detention against their will. In practice, it is unbelievably difficult, and even when achieved with court orders, can be for only very short time periods of 2-4 days, which don't do anything to solve the problem and sometimes don't even yield a coherent diagnosis. We wouldn't have so many public shootings -- and subway pushings and other exhibitions of mania in America -- if it were easier for the parents and teachers and employers who along the way, watch the troublesome behaviour of alienated young males -- to lock them up. Why, the very posing of the notion in this fashion yields a firestorm of ACLU-type civil rights criticism. The rights of the victims seldom count in these discussions.
I'm the first to say that we have criminalized boyhood and even manhood. Fifty years ago or even twenty-five years ago, two boys who scrapped with each other over "respect" or "turf" or a "girl" or some other issue of male machismo would blacken each others' eyes and bloody each others' noses behind the barn, and then get back together and play baseball with each other the next day or leave a wary line in the sand that they didn't cross again. No adult authority figure -- much less the police -- would ever get involved in their scraps.
Today, such fist-fights in a schoolyard or a sand lot can lead to a police call and incarceration, or a trip to the emergency room and forcible administration of powerful psychotropic drugs. This has become a particular problem in the New York City schools, where authorities have trouble admitting the politically-incorrect truths of violent repeat-offenders in minority populations, and have no other facilities but jails or mental hospitals to put these violent youths, so they use drugs or "bar therapy" as some lawyers call prison. This works just grand to spawn another generation of the same kind of thugs.
I read an interesting post by Chemi Shalev in Haaretz called The American Malignancy and the Slaughter of Innocents.
I don't agree with everything she says, but she makes her points forcefully and eloquently. School shootings have taken place also in Finland, where suicides are very high, in Norway of course, where Breivik attacked the social democrats' youth camp, and in Germany. In Russia, mass shootings occur also -- but are usually terrorist attacks. Obviously school shootings in America, where there isn't a political manifesto or participation in some extremist group in most of the cases, don't fit into the "terrorist" category, although the Fort Hood Muslim shooter should fit in that category, and in my view, so should the killer of the Sikhs in their temple. Hate crimes directed at a group due to their affiliation in a symbolic organization, whether a religion or a government or military, strike me as fitting the "terrorism" definition; school shootings aren't terrorists of that nature, unless we concoct a theory of "the propaganda of the deed" related to the alienation of youth raised on the Internet.
In any event, I certainly accept her diagnosis that this is an American malignancy, and an American malignancy directly related to the American innovation -- TV, violent cinema, then violent video games and the Internet and MMORPGs. All of these forms of media ranging from passive to participatory to simulative are all Made in America and I think it behooves Americans to think more about what their relationship is to mass public murders.
Perhaps, when President Barack Obama was shedding a tear, he grieved not only as a parent who thinks of his own children but also as a president who cries for his beloved country. These unthinkable but nonetheless recurring bloodbaths by shooting are peculiarly, if not exclusively, American, a stain on its image that gets brutally bigger as time goes by.
It is this combustible mix of angry American young men, often disturbed and usually white, spurred on by the pervasive and always growing presence of limitless violence in popular American culture, together with the easy-access, open market of guns and ammo, which together produce these shooting slaughters with such sickening regularity.
She talks about the high number of guns and gun deaths in America and the gun lobby, and then concludes:
Nonetheless, the presence of 350 million guns and the relative ease in acquiring them are not enough to explain the growing incidence of mass shootings – 16 in the past year alone – or their increasing lethality. One can make at least a circumstantial connection between the fact that 6 of the 12 deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past five years and the concurrent explosive growth of the Internet and social media. These have provided fertile fields for growing the most horrid of hatreds and for spreading them far and wide.
Yet none of the public figures posturing around this tragedy really want to take on violent media -- it's harder to take on even than the gun lobby. Instead, this is what we've seen:
o Michael Moore saying we need more free health care. Except insane people are notoriously difficult to get to accept treatment. What we need is for the pendulum to swing back to more normal preventive incarceration measures when there are reasonable grounds to assume a person is a danger to himself and others -- and the advances of medicine and governance must be used to make more humane institutions for the addicted and insane, who are generally filling up prisons now only after they harm people. Moore can't accept that consequence of this public health problem, and thinks more free people's clinics will prevent a school shooter or a subway pusher.
o Frank Bruni is raging that Mike Huckabee is calling for more prayer, and even more prayer in school, and that God has been left out of society and this is what we get. Whatever Huckabee's pious posturings, Bruni's rage on this is merely another form of call for public coercive prayer -- only in the form of cloying op-ed pieces and collective Facebook likes where critics are deleted.
o Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, is telling us to shut up and not debate gun control. "Today is not the day for that," he scolds, using even this national tragedy to harangue the right wing. Fortunately, at least the left wouldn't shut up, and made a Twitter hashtag #Todayistheday and began calling for gun control anyway.
o Nate Silver did one of his classic manipulations. He took arbitrary terms that he himself thought were the ones to pick to exhibit the trends on this topic, including "gun rights," a phrase that most people actually don't use; he used sources that he himself acknowledged are different as to their volumes, and then arbitrarily decided that the rate per thousand was the way to characterize their usage (except...if they aren't large or weren't always available, that's not fair), and then he yielded "irrefutable numbers" telling us that demands for Second Amendment rights are going up, and gun control is going down. This is silly, as it may only mean that more TCOT types are on Twitter now than his precious progs. He also fails to give us any analysis as to why the public spiked HUGELY in their concern about gun control around the time of the Reagan/Brady shooting and other shootings of the 1990s, but in our decade, have fallen into oblivion and have evidently become inured -- despite the high presence of gun control advocates on Twitter and Facebook since this latest tragedy.
o Libertarians are out in full force, letting us know with brisk knowier-than-thou efficiency that car accidents kill more people in America than guns; that, oh, I dunno, cancer kills more people. So what? Car accidents and cancer aren't deliberate; few cases of car deaths are intentional, except for some tiny percentage of suicides. Meanwhile, shooting as gun does take deliberation -- it takes methodical planning to purchase or steal in many of the cases; it takes days of preparation and rehearsal and planning (see the Colorado shooter for that incredible amount of deadly work, from procuring the $10,000 or $20,000 worth of equipment as a poor, unemployed med student, to boobytrapping his apartment and dressing himself up as the Joker in Batman). He got his ammunition over the Internet. Can't we at least plug that loophole? The Connecticut shooter got his ammunition in the mail, too. Is it really legal to ship ammunition, and can't the post office spot it?
With these kinds of braying public figures all over telling us variously that everyone should be armed to prevent school shootings (although the kindergarten teacher whose son did the shooting was armed, and he took her guns); or that we need more free health care (although arrest and forcible treatment is really the issue for the insane); or that more security is needed (the Oregon mall shooting analysts are insisting that police training and store security reduced the number of casualties) -- or of course the need, conversely, to tighten up gun laws, we aren't getting at the substrate. What does Breivik, the Norwegian shooter of 70 people in methodical cold blood in a country with very tight laws, have in common with Adam Lanza, the American shooter of 27 people who took his weapons from his mother, who had registered them legally?
The Internet.
Perish the thought that the mirror of society might be responsible for refracting the rays back in a deadly manner, but it's worth contemplating.
I was once debating some geeks in San Diego at a conference -- among them was the supporter of the reverse engineers of copybot and other SL scripters. A large young man sat on the edges of our conversation, not talking. There was a kind of wistful look on his face that shone through in spite of himself that seemed to me to speak one message: "I want to belong." He didn't join in, but you felt that he wish that he could.
I finally struck up a one-on-one conversation with this youth, who at first readily talked to me, but then became reticent when I asked what his avatar's name was in SL. Finally he confessed it -- and he was one of the most notorious nihilists with a cynical blog who had griefed me and once casually demonstrated copybot on me. Eventually he told me that he literally lived in his mom's basement -- although he paid her rent, he hastened to tell me.
Dad wasn't in the picture and I think he didn't know where he was. I asked him what had poisoned his soul.
"The Internet," he said with a mischievious smile. Indeed.
Underlying all the American malignancy is this: the violent movies and video games and other media, increasingly interactive and accelerating and amplifying with the Internet and smart phones, that do create the scenario of the mass shooting in the blaze of glory as an anti-hero's dream.
The mass murderers of the 1930s -- Hitler and Stalin -- and their imitators later in Africa and Asia -- employed Goebels' and Lenin's propaganda tactics first to sway the masses. They uses the Big Lie or telling partial truths and other known and documented methods of mass propaganda. Vance Packard later studied some of these same kind of tactics now switched to ostensibly benign tactics in marketing.
But we lack a modern-day analyst of the same kind of mass propaganda of our age which takes both more interactive and more subtle and ubiquitous forms. AJ Keen -- who, by the way, talks about the German and Finnish school shooters in his Cult of the Amateur -- is probably the best we have, but he is very much rooted in Silicon Valley's tech marketing world and earns his bread as "the anti-Christ of Silicon Valley" in fact in the belly of the beast. I don't think that undermines his important work, but I just think we need more figures of the stature of Hannah Arendt who wrote on the totalitarians of her age.
Everyone who has taken on the Internet critically tends to describe the problem as "making us dumber" or "making us more dependent" or "losing our privacy". Authors of massive works like Parmy Olsen, who wrote on Anonymous , become too sympathetic to their subjects; supposed scholars like Gabriella Coleman not only embeds with Anonymous but becomes their most avid whitewasher and cheerleader. Hanneh Arendt never struck thoughtful poses while she described Eichmann's "transgressive" behaviour and mined the literature on carnival and ritual. There's Evgeny Morozov, the advocate of a global Glavit, but for him, the potential school shooter might merely be an insufficiently engaged flaneur.
I really wish our age would produce the philosophers worthy of it. It hasn't yet.
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