Sunday, April 22, 2007

Mass Killing

This past week, Americans were witness to yet another incident of mass killing. An incident where one lone individual decides to make a statement, to act out his/her angers, and uses multiple indiscriminate killings as a tool of self-expression.

This time it was 33 persons dead at Virginia Tech University. With the exception of the University of Texas-Austin 40 years ago, most of our mass killings have spared our colleges and universities. They have been more at high schools (Columbine and the young girls at the Amish school), or in the workplace where an angry employee returns to take vengeance on a boss and innocent coworkers. In its aftermath, there will be the usual national discussion that, in the end, seems to result in little change.

There will be a new call for gun control to prevent such unstable people from obtaining guns; but politically there is not the strength of will to fight the minority NRA and enact meaningful legislation or control processes. Our Bill of Rights guaranteed the right to bear arms. It was written for a time when many people hunted to feed their families with a single-shot rifle, there was no standing law enforcement in the unsettled frontier wilderness, and it followed a citizen’s war of independence against England. (In that same antiquated spirit, the Bill of Rights also guarantees that we cannot be forced to house British troops in our houses, but I believe that has not been an issue for any of us since it was enacted over 200 years ago.) In short, it was a defensive legal protection. I do not know that the constitutional framers envisioned the level of personal armament and firearms usage that we experience today as necessary to protect our homestead.

There will be calls for an investigation into the actions of the campus police and the need for increased security; yet in reality there is little increased security possible at most of our open-access universities. Irresponsible outlets of our national news media roll out the historical comparisons of similar death counts (killing as a competitive Guinness record?) and intrude on the privacy of people’s grief. They broadcast photos and video clips and unending details about the shooter all in the name of “news,” thereby giving that individual all of the inappropriate attention he craved but never had in life, and laying the foundation for the next person to believe that mass sensational killing is the way to make a personal attention-getting statement.

As all of this was happening in America, over 200 citizens of Iraq died this same week. Over 150 people died in one Baghdad marketplace incident alone. By the most conservative of estimates, that war has consumed well over 50,000 innocent citizens on a cumulative daily basis. We rightfully grieve for the 33 lost in Virginia. How can we even imagine what it must be like to experience a Virginia Tech on a daily basis. How can we even imagine the numbing impact on one’s emotions from such a continual exposure to unexpected and horrific death, especially for a whole generation of young people. Why is it that we react more strongly to the death of an individual that we can to 200 hundred people, or to the millions killed in World War II? Our emotional and rational capacity to understand and assimilate death is truly very limited.

Whether it is the suicide shooter or the suicide bomber, whether a Christian shooter or an Islamic car bomber, it is still r4eally about people who have lost their sense of self-worth, of hope, of personal power, and for whom such a “glorious ending” is seen as the only recourse left. It is to this greater issue that our thoughts, energy and prayers must attend. (See future posting on this website regarding “Powerlessness.”)

A member of my spiritual group shared the following at our gathering this week from a prayer made available by the United Methodist Church:

“Whether in Darfur or Baghdad, London or Madrid, Kabul or Atlanta, Paducah or Blacksburg … The bullets ripped their flesh, and tear our souls, Lord God. Flashing from nowhere, unseen, unforeseen, perhaps unforeseeable, lives of promise ended, others mangled by hot steel and the shrapnel lodged in hearts too stunned to cry ... What break in heart, or mind, or flesh moved, possessed, demanded him to stalk these down like prey? We cringe, paralyzed before the mystery of evil even as we remember that he was your son who also needs your peace. We open our mouths, and join the silence of the disbelieving. Hear us, Lord. Heal us, Lord. Grant them, and us, your peace.”

We grieve for them all, and earnestly seek the capacity of forgiveness.

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