The horrifying events at Virginia Tech this week will undoubtedly lead to many efforts to comprehend what seems incomprehensible at first glance. We've been down this road before, of course---trying to understand what caused the events and what it tells us about our society. After the Columbine massacre Goth music and costume seemed to be the answer to some---the culture of nihilism. If one examines many cases of mass murder by individuals, however, no common ideological commitments predominate. Fortunately, almost all adherents to any ideology don't end up shooting perfect strangers. Mass killing is an extremely rare phenomenon after all.
The fact is the ideology that animates mass killers can vary or, in the Virginia Tech case and many others, there need not be one at all. But that isn't to say that these events are not motivated by morality, albeit a twisted manifestation of one or another. Indeed what seems to be common in these cases is seething resentments against a group of individuals or an entire class of people who have violated, in the minds of the killers, deeply held values---or alternately, must be slain to uphold these values.
It is perhaps no accident that mass killing terrain appear almost always to be reatively small seemingly idyllic communities or enclaves---precisely the settings where people can have illusions about the validity of absolute values or seethe at those who transgress against them. People who live in big cities, by contrast, rarely have romantic fantasies about human pefection or a loving community. They tend to be cynical and while cynicism isn't an appealing characteristic in humans it just might innoculate against a propensity towards mass murder.
If this thesis is true we should consider ourselves lucky that there aren't more Virginia Techs and Columbines because there are probably many millions of marginalized true-believers out there. To turn righteousness into massacre there are probably many precipitating factors that come in to play. Very few of them are of a nature that intervention can reasonably occur. People have a right to be weird, loners, have odd beliefs. We can't confine all the millions that do in order to protect the society from the one every few years who will kill indiscriminately. That is why zero-tolerance programs in schools are apt to damage far more lives than can be saved by preventing ---if they even can be prevented---Virginia Techs. They are, at the extreme, the domestic variant of our ill-managed War on Terror. Labeling , punishing or "treating" large numbers who will never cause harm to others---or themselves---to prevent a mass murder.
The only social policy that actually might make a difference, at least in regard to body counts, is the one we have shown as a society least commitment to: preventing easy access to weapons that can kill large numbers of people in a short time.The current mass killing poster boy, without the capability of firing many rounds in a matter of seconds would have simply been unable, with firearms at least, to be as lethal as he was. Perhaps he could have shot one or two people in a classroom before being taken down, but not dozens.
So apart from eliminating assault weapons I'm afraid our society just has to expect that what sociologist Jack Katz calls "righteous slaughter", is the price we must pay every once in a long while for our proclivity to embrace absolute values and disdain ethical relativism, situation ethics and other more nuanced ways of judging others.
It is also worth putting the events in Virginia in a larger perspective.The kind of mass killing perpetrated by lone individuals (or the occasional duo) naturally gets intense media coverage but the far more costly state sponsored-mass killing, which has some of the same dynamics ---the demonization of the "enemy" and the perceived righteousness of the cause ---often gets short shrift, especially when, it goes on day in and day out.
Had Mr. Cho Seung-Hui, not been preoccupied with "rich kids" and "promiscuous girls", put on a military uniform and gone after "terrorists" in Iraq---even if the so-called collateral damage to non-combatants predictably dwarfs that inflicted on sanctioned targets---he would be getting medals instead of becoming infamous for slaughtering innocents. This is because in "militaryspeak", if someone is killed by our soldiers that proves they were indeed the enemy.
Winter Soldier, the 1971 documentary in which former American soldiers in Vietnam candidly discuss the atrocities committed against civilians they witnessed and/or participated in, vividly presents this aspect of war. The invasion of Iraq has simply substituted "towelheads" for "gooks" in the process by which humans become things eligible for mass killing. Not a distinctly different process from that which made Cho Seung-Hui so lethal.
Social science research has also established that homicide rates in general rise in the aftermath of warfare because of a densitization towards violent death. In the U.S., for example, murder rates nationwide declined precipitously in the 1990s , but have, of late, begun to rise. The incremental increase in routine murders, like the mounting deaths in Iraq, doesn't produce 24/7 media attention given to spectacular events such as the Virginia episode, but, once again,the overall body count dwarfs what any single mass killer accomplishes.
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