There Is No 'Motive' for Shooting 9-Year-Old Kids
We have entered the "police are searching for a motive" stage of the cycle. That usually arrives the morning after. There was another American mass murder on Monday, this time at an elementary school in Nashville, and because this is one of those spasms of American bloodletting that we've decided we care about, we'll spend a day or two having a pantomime debate about what to do in response while examining, with varying levels of interest, the background of the shooter. In this case, the identity of the murderer did appear to break the usual mold, and it will get plenty of attention. But there is no "motive" for killing nine-year-old children, not if "motive" means "a reason for doing something." There is no "reason," no explanation or justification grounded in any kind of logic, to shoot kids in math class with high-velocity bullets from an AR-15 that will destroy their bodies for life even if they survive. We are searching for order, for some cause-and-effect, where there is none.
I was in a philosophy class one day back in college when a fellow student flipped out on the professor for supposedly advocating an atheist (or at least anti-Christian) worldview. He screamed at him and stormed out of class. The teacher was sort of bemused afterwards, but he also did mention the kid had some previous behavioral issues at the school. It wasn't the first time he'd blown his top in a classroom setting. Some students pretty quickly sounded the alarm: what if he comes back, and what if he's carrying something with him? This was in Nashville, too, and Tennessee was a gun anarchy state even before the Supreme Court took further steps to turn the whole country into the same. The professor quickly agreed we should adjourn the class and leave the area. David Hume could wait.
Thankfully, nothing more came of it that day. But I've thought a lot about what could've happened. Run-hide-fight and all that, the joys of being an American. The same uniquely American freedom I feel when I scan for the exits in crowded public places, just in case. The same freedom I feel when I think about what it might be like to get hit by a bullet from an AR-15. But I've also thought about the aftermath. Folks on campus would probably be interviewed by local news, who'd ask about the shooter and his "motive." Was he a troubled kid? Was he a loner? Were there any signs he was on the cusp of committing mass murder?
I guess this would've been an incident where there was some identifiable cause-and-effect. The student seemed to believe the teacher was brainwashing us all with secular ideology. It could be classified as an "affront to God," and he may well have said something in that vein while berating the professor. Here, I suppose, there was a "reason": he didn't like what the professor was saying. It set him off. But would that really have been the "reason" he shot people?
Maybe it's helpful to look at other cases. There's Dylann Roof, who shot nine people during Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, a historically Black congregation. He has made no bones about the fact that he was acting on his beliefs as a white supremacist. He seemed to be a full-fledged neo-Nazi, and he's not the only mass shooter—here and abroad—motivated by racial grievance. "Somebody had to do it," Roof told police, adding that "Black people are killing white people everyday…what I did is so minuscule compared to what they do to white people every day." This is a motive, however fucked it may be, to the point that you could classify it as terrorism.
But a significant share of the mass shootings in the United States—quite a phrase to write—involve someone (almost always a man) getting fired and then shooting up their workplace. There again there seems to be a cause-and-effect. Maybe they're just mad about getting fired, maybe they always hated their coworkers. But are these the only people who've gotten fired or hate their coworkers? Is that really the reason they murdered a bunch of people? The school shooters might not like some of their classmates, and they might be loners (though the narrative on that, which began with Columbine, isn't as clear cut as you might think), but is that really why they shot up the school? And then there's the guy who walks into the mall and starts shooting complete strangers. Does he really have a "motive" for doing that? And all this is before we get into how, while some shooters display plenty of warning signs beforehand–domestic violence is a major one—others don't, and none of it seems to prevent them getting guns in America and shooting people.
Part of our quest for The Reason This Happened is to preserve some sense of control over our own fates. If we just figure out all the right red flags, or learn how to profile a future mass shooter, we can avoid becoming their victims. We can prevent the next one, or at least be somewhere else when it goes down. And then another one happens, and we're forced once again to face the fact that we're living another day because we weren't at the wrong place at the wrong time. The shooter might have had some things in common with some other shooters, but usually it's that he was a young man between the ages of 16 and 25. Doesn't exactly narrow things down. Even when it's not typical, like in Nashville, it doesn't tell us much about the next one. The chaos of it, the unreason, is too much to bear. It's far better to tell ourselves the person was an angry loner seeking revenge against people who slighted him than to grapple with the prospect that this is a kind of savage American ritual.
It would help, of course, if the many outposts of the mass media were able to come to some agreement not to offer any details about the shooter at all. At this point, we know about the domestic violence factor. If indeed it is their desperation to be seen and heard and remembered that drives them to join the ritualistic bloodletting, we should deprive them of that. Maybe the local sheriff is duty-bound to go public, but it's not incumbent on the rest of us to amplify it. There is no public interest in it anymore, not that such concerns always factor into news coverage. But this prescription probably stands about the same chance as gun control, and that's the most obvious remedy in the world. Every country has psychos, but nobody seems to do psycho gun murderers like America. Could it be all the guns we have, and that they don’t have? Hell, no! Something something, Chicago. Criminals don't follow gun laws? Well it's a lot easier for them to get a gun—for themselves, or to sell someone else on the black market—now that they can steal it out of some open-carry aficionado's car outside the Piggly Wiggly.
More guns means more criminals with guns. It means more psychos with guns. It means guns are cheap and easy to get. There are more than 400 million guns in America—more than we have citizens. While there are sound arguments that people should be permitted to have a handgun to defend their castle, or a hunting rifle for sport, or even a shotgun for either, American gun culture has spiraled out of control within a kind of parallel-dimensional logic. The operating theory of American life, as confirmed last year when the Supreme Court overturned a 110-year-old New York gun law to make the state more like Tennessee, is that you need a gun to defend yourself and your family against all the other people with guns everywhere you go. (I remember the first time I was patted down going into Rippy's on Broadway in Nashville because, while politicians in the state legislature might have thought it was a good idea to allow people to carry guns in bars, the management did not.) This might be fun for the gun manufacturers and the gun retailers, who want to sell more guns, but it's not much fun for those of us whose right to live in a civilized society has been infringed.
The simple truth is that American gun culture is not freedom, it is tyranny, and it has succeeded in dragging us all into this stupid, vicious world. The gun proliferation activists have remade America in their image: more guns, everywhere, all the time, along with ample talk that they are stockpiling guns out of some kind of proto-revolutionary fervor. They are positioning themselves to "fight a tyrannical government," which really means, to take this fantasy to its endgame, "shoot at American soldiers." And who elected these people to decide the government has crossed the line into tyranny? Certainly not the citizens who elected the government.
And this, I suspect, is at the very root of why we spend so much time on pantomime debates about whether Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wanted every American 18 and older to have easy access to a weapon that can destroy the bodies of 20 people in a minute. It's why we're always searching for The Motive. It's better than confronting the fact that a section of the American populace is heavily armed and at least talking like they want a confrontation. Every day that they are not challenged is one where the guns are serving their purpose as a tool for projecting power. The gun fanatics are using the threat of force to impose their will on other citizens, and violating their rights with impunity as they do so. You might believe the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms, which the Supreme Court decided in...2008, but once the bullets start whizzing through the town square, the rights of the rest of us start to come into play.
But these regular spasms of mass murder do not actually hurt the cause of gun proliferation activists, which is why, along with the GPAs' strange brand of militant obtuseness in any argument, these events never have much effect on our politics or policy. The killings are an ongoing, ritualized testament to the chaos of our atomized world, to the higher importance of individual self-defense in this state of nature they've dragged us all into, a place where the government and the police—the people we all agreed as a polity to grant the power to use force to keep order—can't help you. When you go to school, the mall, the office, a concert, or a little league game in America, you stand a better chance of getting shot by some random psycho with a gun than in any other rich nation, and they call this freedom. I call it tyranny, and the role of the mass murderers—witting or not—is to convince you this is a cycle you cannot escape. Maybe they're right. Maybe we should all lose ourselves in silly little John Wayne fantasies, where if we'd just been at the scene we'd have fought off the psycho with our tactical scopes. It makes about as much sense to me as assigning a "motive" to some guy who kills kids because they were sitting in the wrong classroom at the wrong time. The only answer we have is the "how."
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