S.T. VanAirsdale reports from Stockton, California, where the first mass school shooting of the cable-news era took place a quarter century ago:
Much else has faded about the Cleveland [Elementary School] shooting since it seized the American imagination – since Time grimly proclaimed “ARMED AMERICA” in a cover story three weeks after the massacre and, later in 1989, Esquire painstakingly deconstructed the last days of Patrick Purdy. No less a pop cultural eminence than Michael Jackson invited himself to Stockton on Feb. 7 of that year, where his attempts to cheer up the Cleveland community only meant more emergency vehicles, more police, more helicopters and more campus bedlam that just recalled the panic that Jackson had sought to assuage in the first place.
A reader reflects on last year’s massacre in Connecticut:
Saturday marks one year since 20 first-graders – 20 six- and seven-year-old kids – were slaughtered in their school with six of their teachers and protectors, as well as the mass-murderer’s own mother. Since then, the United States has responded decisively and deafeningly: we’ve done approximately nothing. We’ve heard a stupid comment or two from Congress suggesting we arm our teachers. And The New York Times just published a startling infographic documenting the 109 pieces of state-level gun legislation passed in 2013 -two thirds of it loosening restrictions, not tightening them, and a few in outright defiance of federal law. It seems no serious gun-safety legislation is weak or toothless enough to survive our more extremist impulses.
I’m not sure what we should do about guns. But I’m pretty sure we need serious therapy.
If we as a nation could spend a session on the couch, our analyst might conclude that on some level, we must enjoy this repeated horror. We’re a society that tolerates and even kind of expects the occasional massacre – even when it means the slaughter of six-year-old children. Because we keep letting it happen, and we refuse to make any changes to prevent it from happening again.
A few weeks ago, a friend down the street took me trap shooting – a little like skeet for beginners, maybe: you say “pull” and, if you do it right, you blast the shit out of a soaring clay disk with a shotgun that, because I was holding it wrong, turned my bicep all kinds of bizarre colors for the following two weeks. It was a hell of a lot of fun, even a little zen, in a funny way. It’s not hard for me to see the appeal. But it’s very hard for me to see how better licensing could threaten our Constitution. The only friend I’ve ever talked about guns with in a more personal sense keeps his father’s firearms locked in a cabinet, with the bullets in another locked cabinet on another floor of his house. “But what if you really did need it?” I wondered, and he admitted to me: “Trying to square that circle is something I’m still trying to figure out.”
I have to wonder what our reaction over the past year might have been if the murderer could have been tarnished by a more convenient ethnicity or faith, by something “other.” Just imagine the government and talking-head response if he’d been Muslim. Or suppose the Boston Marathon bombers in April, with their difficult Chechen names, had used firearms on Boylston Street instead of pressure cookers. I don’t think there’s much serious doubt that our representatives and talk-show hosts would have gone completely apeshit. (Actually, I know exactly what the reaction would have been: “Get the Muslims.”) But this was one white kid – one creepy, psychotic white kid – and so this mass-murder of teachers and tiny children was just a terrible aberration, a “tragedy,” and a mental-health issue, not a gun-safety issue. (And when I say “gun safety,” obviously I’m talking mostly about guns that can only be used to kill people.) And we’ve permitted ourselves, again, to put this “tragedy” behind us.
And who decided on that passive word, anyway? Calling this a “tragedy” is an insane perversion of language. English has any number of honest, accurate words to describe what actually happened. “Massacre.” “Slaughter.” “Mass murder of children.” But “tragedy” suggests that what happened was unavoidable. It lets us off the hook. It sets the stage for the next “tragedy.”
Grief and mourning and rage all feel right. So do nausea and sickening familiarity. I also feel chest-tightening parallels to September 11, 2001. Witnessing that massacre from uncomfortably close range has made it impossible for me ever to refer to that day as “9/11”: a term far too neat, too abstract and political, too simplistic and reductive to encapsulate its colossal horror. “9/11” is a term that has allowed our collective memory of that mass-murder to be symbolically debased and abused, easily and endlessly. Same with “Katrina.” When we talk about the many degrees of social, environmental and political failure we witnessed in response to the flooding of New Orleans, we don’t always seem to remember that we’re not talking about a symbol but about an actual cataclysm that erased the most marginalized neighborhoods of an already neglected metropolis—and one that real people actually experienced and lived through, or didn’t. “Katrina” lets us shrug and forget that we’re supposed to have a heart. We’re supposed to be better than this.
So as I’m trying to keep its victims and its survivors in my thoughts, I’m also trying to keep in mind that “Newtown” can never encapsulate an absolutely unthinkable massacre of very young children and teachers that happened to real people in a real place. For the families, the neighbors, the first responders, “Newtown” is not that day in hell, and “Newtown” is not the anniversary. “Newtown” is not gun debate. “Newtown” is not future mass murder. “Newtown” is not the heartless cowardice of our elected officials. Newtown is a real place in terrible anguish. I’m still not sure what we should do about guns, but I’m still angry, and today I’m trying to keep my mind on the pain of real people who might never escape it.
(Hat tip: Slate)
The Dish 