st. valentine’s day massacre
A couple of posts ago I commented on how we, Homo sapiens, need attention to survive: it is the very air we breathe was a term I used. I noted how our sense of belonging is determined by the positive attention we receive from those we respect and befriend, and how, if we don’t receive it, we can become isolated and angry. Sadly, for some this perceived ostracism forces a railing against society, specifically against those they feel ignored by. In the extreme, these individuals commit crimes of attention.
Today, February 14th, Valentine’s Day, is not only the yearly return of the infamous 1929 mass murder of seven members of Chicago’s North Side Gang on orders from Al Capone, it also marks the first anniversary of the Parkland massacre, the deadliest high school shooting in US history, where seventeen pupils and staff were shot dead.
There was a time when school shootings, school killing sprees, did not exist. Weapons existed, guns, knives, bombs proliferated but schools, children as targets, remained strictly off-limits. 1999’s Columbine massacre put paid to that and spawned the situation America now finds itself horribly gripped by: Alberta (1999), Virginia Tech (2007), Jokela High School (2007), Sandy Hook (2012), Isla Vista (2014) and Moneta (2015). Incredibly, Columbine no longer even ranks in the ‘top 10’ of American mass murders.
However, there is a ray of hope in all this bloodshed. Dave Cullen, author of the definitive ‘Columbine’ and ‘Parkland’ books, has identified, in the aftermath of Parkland, the first signs of change, a potential reversal of the gun violence that continues to blight America’s school campuses. By removing the attention you remove the air the assassin needs. Filmed, uploaded and saved for posterity, you can, if you want it badly enough, dominate the world news and solidify your notoriety in a matter of minutes.
Cullen realised that the vast majority of recent mass murderers were emulating the Columbine killers. Access to their ‘manifesto’ was freely available, every explicit detail was to be found in the ether, chatrooms dedicated to the attack existed and online Columbine role-playing games can be easily obtained. In the wrong mind these details can all be glorified and, referring to these massacres as ‘spectacle murders’, the author believes they are essentially performances and the social media platform is their stage.
A central feature in the killings is that, contrary to initial belief, victims are seldom, if ever, targeted. Indiscriminate shooting is the nature of the beast here and when two propane bombs were subsequently discovered at Columbine it became clear the murderers were intent on killing a huge number of their peers, not a specific group. It’s not about the individual, it’s about the number. The body count is all-important and a further phrase has been coined to capture this, ‘performance violence’. Victims are collateral damage in the service of an ever-increasing body count. Hard though it is to countenance, these gunmen make no demands prior to their slaughter, accept they’re invariably going to be killed in the ensuing carnage and merely want to kill for the lifetime’s notoriety they anticipate will follow. And here’s the chink of light.
The dignified yet decisive reaction of Parkland’s students has turned the spotlight of attention on the victims and survivors not the perpetrator. Building on the No Notoriety movement, which requests media neither names or shows the killer, the students have truly done something more powerful than the assassin and he has been totally eclipsed, to such an extent that virtually no-one can even recall his name. Following the killings, over two million people marched in support of gun safety, the largest protest since Vietnam. Students Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, organisers of March For Our Lives, called out the BS on a national policy that saw gun-ownership flourish and for the first time in living memory, gun-safety, specifically gun-control legislation, is back on the nationwide political agenda. If American society can reverse this trend and place more restrictive controls around firearms then these students may not have died in vain.
