Culture Must Change to Support Policy Initiatives to Reduce Mass Shootings

      Some years ago I was at an U12 soccer tournament in an upscale Southern New England town. One squad worked through pregame warmups in tony outfits with a warning for opponents printed on their backs: “We work our butts off so we can kick yours.” A TV sitcom aired an episode with two young women sharing a lunch break. One abruptly announced she had to go because someone in her office is getting fired. Her friend asked, “Why do you have to go?” “Because I’m the one doing the firing!” she answered, all smiles and giggles. In a TV news feature, a group of new principals was interviewed. One was asked how it felt to be appointed: “powerful!” she said, as if she just ingested a large can of educational spinach a la Popeye. Before interstate banking was normalized, a New York City based financial institution told a corporate division it was moving big time into smaller western states despite local resistance. The speaker challenged the states and local banks to sue them bec “we’d bankrupt them if they tried,” sounding more like Dillinger than Rockefeller.

Now-candidate Donald Trump told his followers earlier this month:

In 2016 I declared I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed—I am your retribution.” I am your retribution.” Godhood personified.

What common thread connects these disparate tableaus of Americana? The power imperative. In American secular society, power sits upon its podium, worshipped, desired, coveted. It’s what we mean when asked, “What you do for a living?” The inquirer isn’t being sociable or showing interest, the question is a probe to discern the pecking order. The euphemistic question really asks how much wealth you have compared to me. Only the ones with money and the aura of power it emits ask the question. Cab drivers and waiters and data processors don’t ask because they lack the economic power and its social prestige to win. Know your enemy.        

In feminist language, words have changed to neutralize what they view as male dominance. History becomes herstory (even though the word has no gender relevance). “Women” becomes the emasculated ‘womyn”. However, the word “manager” has never been amended for gender language because it connotes a woman executive having power over individuals—especially men. E Pluribus Unum may be our nation’s motto, but it lives by Leo Durocher’s “Nice guys finish last.” 

The power imperative describes the realms we want to rule: socio-economic, personal relationships, work and career, the internal power of self-actualization. None of these are necessarily evil or wrong. However, the moral compass breaks as we aspire to dominate, to be a winner at all costs. It’s not how you play the game, it’s that you win. It’s about the cruelty. Trumpworld rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear   (Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, Oct 3, 2018).   

We worship the material success, the money makers, the fabulously popular, the celebrity. Reality television means anyone can be a star, and we live vicariously through the neighbor next door surviving the jungle, the singer from Noplace bowing to a standing ovation when last month she was a waitress on Main street, now sipping cocktails at a penthouse party, all shining brightly on tv as we whisper to ourselves ”I could be that person”.

No place has ever personified Nietzsche’s will to power as the American way of life. “Only Americans can make birding a competition”, said a British birder watching the frenetic intensity to be number 1 in the film The Big Year. Donald Trump’s The Apprentice made the words “You’re fired!” part of our cultural argot, as we all shouted collectively at the victim. In 2006 Time magazine put a mirror on its cover and proclaimed “You” its recipient for “Person of the Year” Award. Now anyone can look into the Time’s mirror and see in his/her reflection a rarified individual of historic proportions. It feeds the ego with empty accomplishment and faux superiority, just like the Disneyworld magazine covers you buy with your face pictured under Best___________ of the Year (choose your sport or alter ego).

Own the libs. So we can kick your butt. Cancel culture. You’re fired!        Master–slave. The Powerful—the powerless. 

If you  have no girlfriend, no money, students shun you in class, bullies seem to be everywhere against you. In the adult world you’ve lost things dear to you, or you obsess over a world not spinning to your Weltanschauung; everyday nothing changes except your deepening desperation. What do you do in a society so permeated by the climb to to the top when you’re the bottom rung of anonymity and rejection.

You buy the great equalizer. Several of them. Pistols and assault rifles, flack jackets and SWAT gear. The great American Ninja  Warrior dressed to kill, and ready to die in a blaze of divine fire and hellish glory. You’ve transcended the quiet life of desperation, of faceless living staring at the smirks and picking up the barely audible whispers loud enough for you to hear, turning into giggles behind your back. Persecution at every turn. But your  AR-15,or AK-47, plus a sidearm or two—Congratulations! You’ve made it. You are now God, the ultimate authority of Life and Death. You have attained the American dream.

The divine impulse, the imperative to power, permeates the mind of the mass shooters consistently. Columbine shooter Eric Harris in is writings “I am the law; if you don’t like it you die” His partner Dylan Klebold wrote that he found true love and made him “infinite times greater than the wealthy and powerful…I want to die sooo bad…such a sad, desolate, lonely, unsalvageable life, The god of sadness.”

“I understand everything. I am the god of everything.” declared Sandy Hook mass killer, Adam Lanza. He had a history of mental and emotional problems documented from early on. Socially dysfunctional, developmental problems, the killer of 26 in an elementary school warned us. We just didn’t pay attention. Anxiety. Asperger’s. OCD. A walking Pearl Harbor the radar spotted but excused. Seung Hui Cho, who killed over 30 people on the campus of Virginia Tech, wrote: You had a 100 billion chances to avoid this day. But you forced me into a corner.” He said to MSNBC (from CNN) “You had everything. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats, Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs.” His mental illness was known; students feared him. A judge declared him mentally ill and an imminent danger--two years before the shooting. Nicholas Cruz, the infamous gunman responsible for the Marjorie Douglas Stoneham High School massacre, known as Parkland, chose St Valentine’s Day to kill 17 people because no one loved him and wanted to ruin the holiday for the entire school (AP).  Even adults like 64 year-old Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas sniper who killed almost 60 concert goers at Mandalay Bay, felt alone, that God didn’t love him. His brother said he was bored with life and capable of an act to commit mass murder for the price of fame and glory; he took control of a life spinning out of it. (CBS News)

Power to the Powerless. I am God.

Or, as someone else said 25 years later, “I am your retribution.”. I am God.

Serbia recently suffered two major gun attacks within two days. One in a school by a 13 year-old student, and another by a young man aged 20 who shot up two villages. Both incidents accounted for nearly 20 people killed and others wounded.

Despite having a high rate of gun ownership, apparently the weapons were leftover from the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Apparently the peace left  people awash with firearms. Yet,  these were the first mass shootings since 2013—10 years ago. The Balkan war was long over.

What makes America different than Serbia, than the rest of the world when it comes to guns? The answer lies in the culture, in our values, how we live and work and play. Our super aggressive culture, our extreme tough-guy, ego driven socio-economic values obsession with celebrity and wealth and popularity, with winners and losers and fend-for-yourself attitude could only lead inevitably to the forsaken collateral damage seeking not merely parity but victory and subjugation of the tormentors. No one wants to lose.

Thor had his hammer, Poseidon his trident, Zeus his thunder, God his omnipotence, Americans their guns. The ultimate judgment of a god—who shall live and who shall die. Nothing speaks to power more than deciding life or death. To steal Valentine’s day from the innocent. I am my retribution.

We do not have to take away all guns, there is a legitimate argument for recreation, such as skeet shooting and hunting,  but we must knock it from the pedestal. Let it fall like a defeated deity’s oversized statue. In the latest shooting, in Allen, Texas, a six-year old is orphaned, a family wiped out; two young siblings obliterated by an AR-15’s massive damage. Gun violence is now the number one killer of children. Grotesquely, we have Congressmen wearing lapel pins to make it the national gun. I am your god.

 On a pragmatic level, we must commit to the reparations of heart and soul, mind and health, from the time we identify at-risk individuals at any age and follow up with a multi-agency response across appropriate government and private services. Vigilance, purpose and dedication armed with continual monitoring, meaningful action, customized treatment focusing on bringing the individual back to the fold of humanity before pulling a trigger. The price is high, the cost of not doing is dead kids, murdered teachers, innocents from every age and category of life, in schools, malls, concerts—no place is safe. I am my retribution.

 Nothing will be enough until a collective America finds the fault in itself. We have a gun problem driven by our values problem. Pope John II, looking to America, said capitalism needs a human face. President George H. Bush asked for a kinder, gentler nation. If our contagious mass murders are rooted in emotional and mental health, Uncle Sam needs to look in the mirror and ask himself how much carnage results from his own out-of-control concepts of wealth, greed, power, callousness, politics, fanaticism, ego.

When guns no longer represent the killer’s self-anointed, god-like supremacy on a sacred mission to vanquish his demons, be it a personal grievance or a political belief, America will finally have the gunslayers’ scourge of  mass murder at school, at work, at play in its cross hairs.