Understanding gunman Aaron Alexis and other mass shooters

He’d been demoted from Lance-Corporal to private in 1963, for gambling, and the possession of a personal firearm on base, which he’d used to try an extract $15 interest on an $30 loan he’d given a fellow soldier. He’d also, though, single-handedly saved another Marine, who was pinned under a jeep which rolled over.  He won a Marine Corps good conduct medal, an expeditionary medal, and a sharpshooters’ badge.  He struck his wife thrice, recording his remorse in his journal, and resolving not to be like his own abusive, violent father. In the summer of 1966, it seemed Charles Whitman’s life was going well: he’d resolved his problems with his wife, who’d started work as a schoolteacher; he’d helped his mother escape her brutal husband; he had a job. He made good friends, and was respected in the community. Then, on the morning of August 1, he stabbed his mother to death.  “I have relieved her of her suffering here on earth”, he wrote in his suicide note. “The intense hatred I feel for my father is beyond description. He has chosen to treat her like a slut”. He stabbed his wife through the heart later in the morning. “I love her dearly”, he wrote, “and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could hope for. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing so”. “If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts”, he wrote in a hand-written postscript to his neatly-typed letter “[and] donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation”.  “Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type”. From atop the University of Texas tower in Austin, Whitman shot dead seventeen people that day, picking off passers-by with an M1 carbine, among the weapons he’d demonstrated so much skill with as a marine. Now, as the United States struggles to comprehend the Washington Naval Yard killings, Whitman’s story holds out valuable clues. His story has not a little in common with that of Aaron Alexis, the Washington killer: a troubled military past, personal crisis, flashes of uncontrollable anger, and murderous voices in his head. The eminent experts who were appointed to make sense of the 1966 mass-shooter said this: “the application of existing knowledge of organic brain function does not enable us to explain the actions of Whitman on August 1”. Five decades later, almost, experts are facing the same blank wall. [caption id=“attachment_1118157” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Aaron Alexis’ rampage in the Washington Navy Yard brings the issue to the fore again. AP[/caption] Earlier this year, the Federal Bureau of Investigations concluded a thorough study of 154 active shooter incidents between 2002 and 2012—a response to a growing wave of mass shootings that have sparked off both outrage and introspection across the United States. In 49% of those, no clear motive driving the shooters could be identified.  However, 21% had something to do with workplace issues, another 14% with their domestic lives, and yet another 7% with academic frustration.  The perpetrators are overwhelmingly men; they overwhelmingly acted alone. “Loss loss of significant relationships, changes in financial status, loss of a job, changes in living arrangements, major adverse changes to life circumstances, and/or feelings of humiliation or rejection”: all these catalysed shootings, the FBI found. These are things that afflict the entire human race—and thus don’t tell us anything about the most important question, why. How bad the problem is, we’re not sure of either. Batman killer James Holmes’ murders in Aurora, Seung-Hui Cho’s massacre at Syracuse university or the Columbine High School massacre must be read against a backdrop of regular mass-shooting incidents. There are conflicting numbers, though, because of different methods of judging what constitutes a mass shooting. The FBI, for example, counts any shooting incidents involving more than three victims as one, leaving aside the question of homicidal intent. Its latest available data shows a steady increase in incidents from 2000-2010. Grant Duwe, a criminologist who has written a history of mass murders in America, says mass shootings actually fell in 2000s, relative to the 1960s. His figures show mass killings reached their peak in 1929. The only reason mass murders are seen as a special problem, Duwe has argued in a thoughtful scholarly paper, is because they’re constructed so by the media. However, a list of mass-shooting incidents put together by Mother Jones magazine shows that while the numbers of active shooter incidents hasn’t increased all that much,  fatalities have grown substantially—giving at least some real cause for concern.  The rise in fatalities may have something to do with the growing ease of access to assault weapons, like the AR15 James Holmes used in the Batman killings—though there isn’t enough data to test this proposition.    It’s easier for us to make sense of ideologically motivated mass killers: the apparent clarity of motive gives us the illusion of a beginning, middle and end; the narrative structure human minds crave.  We get people who kill for money, or sex, or land—not people who kill us for no apparent reason at all. There’s no ultimate accounting, though, for why Michael Adebolajo’s Islamist beliefs led someone described as a polite, friendly boy to butcher a British soldier on a London street—when thousands of others of the same ideological persuasion didn’t. There’s no science that tells us precisely why Mangalal Barela slit the throats of his five infant daughters , angered their expenses stood between him and his financial hopes, when millions of equally-misogynist Indians don’t. It’s interesting to speculate, though, that there’s curiously American about the active shooter—this particular form of crime exists nowhere else. Elsewhere in the world, rage most often manifests itself against more abstract targets—the state and its apparatus, most notably, or individuals with authority. In India, the typical agent of mass killing is the communal or caste rioter—or his doppleganger, the communal terrorist. The philosophical underpinnings of American society militates against such collectivist modes of killing. “If I seek among those characteristics the principle one which includes almost all the rest”, the great commentator Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his masterwork Democracy in America, “I discover that, in most operations of the mind, each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding”. Each act killing may is underpinned by a system of belief, a philosophy if one wishes: and the American mass shooter may thus tell us something about the United States.  Timothy McVeigh, the neo-Nazi ideologues who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma, or the jihadists who carried out the slaughter on 9/11, acted because they held the state and the capitalist order to be responsible for their situation. The mass shooter instead holds his fellow Americans, each as individuals, guilty for his existential crisis.

It still tells us nothing, though, about which people kill, and why they kill—a profoundly discomfiting prospect that arouses our deepest fears about the society around us. This fear, and our knowledge that each of us is complicit in the pain others experience, likely accounts for our fascination with the primal violence of the mass shooter.

The mass shooter is, perhaps, thus an agent of capitalism’s post-theist vengeful god.