Another horrible shooting took place last weekend in Allen, Texas. Another deranged individual decided, for God knows only what reason, to show up somewhere in public armed to the teeth and start shooting strangers. They would commit random murder against as many as they can, before the police or anyone else nearby, puts them down.
My first response was to wonder what freak of nature was behind this. A disaffected loner? Another person with no friends, no hope, and no end of rage? Almost seven weeks ago a trans person in Nashville, Tennessee attacked a private Christian school. This time in Allen, Texas it appears to be a Latino guy with links to far right extremists attacked a mall. Both are total losers.
Some people direct all their ire towards the gun used in cases like this. Not me. A gun is just an inanimate hunk of steel. By itself it does not interest me. But a psychopath with a gun in hand, that is different. I focus in on the individual who chose to murder as many strangers as they could, following the Internet meme started by the Columbine High School killers almost two and half decades ago. It is the contradictory matrix that makes up our psyche which intrigues me. The hot passion of the human heart, more than the cold steel of the gun, draws my attention.
What is going on? The United States has always had a high profusion of guns in circulation in its past, but there were none of these senseless mass shootings. What changed in our society? How is it different now? Countries like Switzerland or Israel have more military grade weapons in their homes than we do. But they don’t have as many of these school and other shooters (although these stupid memetic copycat mass shootings seem to be spreading overseas, too).
Why is this happening?
I suspect there are about seven or eight contributing factors. It is complicated. That also means no way are you going to “fix” all the variables that feed the problem, and so this phenomenon is here to stay, alas.
When I heard about the shooting in Texas last weekend, I just wanted to know the name and face so I could contemn the shooter forever. “Another loser mass murderer – let me know the name and face.” You regard these shootings and the persons responsible for them the same way you look at a horrific car accident on the side of the road, or the bearded woman at the circus, or some cat that gave birth to a three-headed kitten. “Let’s take a good look at this total freak,” I thought to myself. “You know the person responsible for this will be a piece of work.” I was not mistaken.
But that guy in Texas last weekend, and the others like him before, care not a whit what I or you think of them. They will have the last laugh. I can almost hear the voice in the interior monologue:
“I might be a freak with no friends and little reason to live, as you say. But I am more famous than you ever will be, after having murdered as many strangers as I could in some public place! I walked into a crowded mall and started shooting. I went to an elementary school and shot at anything which moved. By the end of the day, I might be dead. No, I will be dead almost for sure. But people will know my name. They won’t know your name. In America the worst possible thing to be is unknown and to get no attention. So if you can’t be a hero, you settle for being an anti-hero.“
Surely, the psychiatrists will come up with DSM-5 diagnoses for these mass shooters under the aegis of “mental illness.” Narcissism and neuroticism. Anxious and depressed. Suicidal and homicidal. Disassociation and body dysmorphia. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) combined with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Anti-social disorder and psychopathy. These are all “scientific” diagnoses of modern science. Therefore, they can be used in a court of law.
And they will all have some truth to them.
But they don’t go far enough, in my opinion. They don’t get to the heart of the real problem.
And that is the problem of evil. The dark seductive influence of pure evil is at play here, ladies and gentlemen.
“I’m going to save up for and buy guns and ammunition. I’m going to research earlier mass shootings on the Internet, and try to outdo them in scope and grandeur. I will plan everything meticulously. For months I will lay in my stores and prepare for the day. Then I will enact my plan, gun-smoke will fill the air, the noise will be deafening, people will scream in terror, blood will flow in rivers, the mass media will arrive en masse, they will spread the news like greased lightning online, and everyone and his mother will know my name. Just the thought of it – the pulling out my gun, the minutes of hot killing, the culmination of so much planning and effort – will be wonderful. The adrenaline will flow, History will be made, and I will become (in)famous. The power surge will be incredible! And then I will be done with this miserable world.
“And people will remember my name after I’m gone. In the future others of my tribe will research my handiwork, respect my ingenuity, appreciate my audacity, admire my example, and seek to surpass it, mirabile dictu.”
This is evil. The urge to have such power over others – the power of life and death – this ability to take all a person has or ever will have, and to take it randomly and without discernible rhyme or reason, this is evil. It is to seek to play God, and for a few minutes at least, to be like a god. These shooters in regular life might be losers with no friends and few prospects, but during their killing sprees they are the opposite when seen through the eyes of their victims. Start with strong elements of nihilism, emptiness, and anger, and mix them into a morass of darkness and evil deep down inside, and you will have a mass shooter:
There have been many copy-cats, but nobody has equaled Columbine. That horrible massacre, over twenty-four years ago, was the seminal act of evil, which has inspired so many others. There appears to be no end in sight to this madness, either.
The terrifying thing is that only an incredibly small percentage of the population heeds the siren song of the Columbine murderers. But even a handful of people can create enormous damage. That a mere .005 percent of the country is possibly predisposed to engage in this dynamic is dangerous. Not only in terms of the dead or wounded in their acts of evil, which total no more than a few hundreds over decades, but in the hundreds of millions of those enraged and terrified by the senseless slaughter of random innocents. And there is almost nothing anyone can do to stop them.
If this is not terrorism, I don’t know what is.
If this is not evil, then evil does not exist.
Doctors and lawyers will argue over the definitions.
But we know it when we see it.
Buffalo, NY shooter arrested on May 14, 2022.
