On Random Violence

There was a nurse in my clinic who used to say about certain diabetic patients who did not take their insulin or test their blood sugars: "I don't see why I should work any harder for this patient than he works for himself."

In some ways, that's the way I found myself reacting when news of the shooting at the Aurora, Colorado theater reached New Hampshire. We will continue to see bad news if we don't do some work to avoid it.

The question becomes: What can we do to protect ourselves from the occasional gun wielding maniac out there?  Even Norway had its own crazy, shooting kids at a camp.

My father in law, a lifetime member of the NRA, used to say even if we outlawed the sale of any guns from today onward, there are so many millions of guns out there, we would still have crazies shooting innocent people for the next hundred years.

And the crazies in the NRA are now saying the solution to the latest Colorado shooting is to have everyone in the audience armed, and we should arm legislators and kindergarten  kids.

I really do not have an answer.

Yesterday, I heard on NPR a young woman talking about getting out of the subway at Gallery Place and heading for her ritualistic morning coffee at the Starbucks on 7th Street and I knew exactly the spot she was describing in Washington, DC. So, I kept listening, expecting to hear a little piece about the pleasures of everyday life in the nation's Capitol, within sight of the Capitol building on The Hill. Then, she very calmly described feeling a sudden pain in her neck and then another in her back as an attacker stabbed her from behind with a knife. She fell to the sidewalk and looked up at this attacker, just some random crazy with a knife, who stood over her looking down, fury distorting her face.  

Just another day in the big American city.

Or in the quiet suburb at 1 AM at the new Batman movie.

One thing which does give me pause, and which is so politically incorrect to say, it belongs only in an anonymous blog, is the Chris Rock routine about white crimes vs black crimes. You hear about a man opening fire on a group of kids in a playground, right away, you know the shooter is a white guy.  You hear about somebody who grabs a purse off the shoulder of some little old lady and whaps her on the head with it and runs off down the street, leaving her in a heap on the sidewalk, black guy.

Somehow, according to Rock, the one on one, personal assault, motivated by money or some interpersonal spat, even if that spat is over an unfriendly look or a remark about the sneakers you are wearing, somehow you've "dissed" someone, that provokes the black man to violence. But the white guy, he just cuts down the innocent and the helpless, people who've never done him, personally, any harm.  That shooter's motivations are incomprehensible, at first blush.

Of course, the Virginia Tech shooter was Asian.

It's not about race, of course, but about psychopathology.  The sort of guy who sends bombs through the mail, shoots a Congresswoman at a shopping mall, sends Anthrax through the mail, climbs a clock tower on a campus and just shoots random people he doesn't know, the guy who loads a van with a fertilizer bomb and blows up a building with a day care center,  that guy has demons which are hard to fathom. 


Now, you will bring up the Washington, DC sniper, who was black, who shot people he didn't know, randomly--but that turned out to be related to someone he did know. He was planning to set up a fake random shooter so he could shoot the person he wanted to shoot, his ex wife, without anyone pointing to him as the one person who had the greatest motive to shoot his ex wife--she would be just another random victim of the sniper. So that was a twisted effort to settle a personal score.

There is a wonder scene in The Wire--you knew this was coming, The Wire, where Jimmy McNulty has to go down to Quantico, Virginia to the FBI academy to get a profile on a serial killer. Of course, McNulty knows there is no serial killer--he has created a fake crisis to keep the police department funded--but the FBI profiler, who has the details of the "crimes" outlines a perfect description of McNulty, which the viewer sees as a double whammy of an irony.

Fact is, we are shocked by these random explosions of pathology, but when the French collaborators of the  Gestapo or the German SS did this same sort of thing, rounding people up, brutalizing them in the streets during the 1930's and 1940's on a daily basis, it was just  an expression of hate we could "understand," and it didn't surprise anyone. It all made sense. 

Thing is, listening the the Norway shooter, what he did made perfect sense to him, and  probably the Colorado shooter thinks he did what he had to do. He probably thinks he was the victim.